Read Online The Grievers by Marc Schuster - Free Book Online

and whenever anything larger than a bicycle whizzed by, the balloons tried to follow, tugging at my arm and yanking the phone away from my ear until I wrestled it back. As a result, I only caught about half of what Ennis said next, and even then, I could barely make sense of it.
    “We can still—situation—advantage,” he explained. “Letter—finesse. Classmates. Details. The key is—working. Noblac ideals—friendship—donkey—interested parties. You—Pogue. Rank—horn—Friday?”
    “Absolutely,” I said, switching hands again.
    “Then let’s plan for noon,” Ennis said.
    “Right,” I said. “Friday at noon.”
    “Pogue, too?”
    “Probably,” I said, though I didn’t know what I was agreeing to. “But I’ll have to run it by him first.”
    “Good,” Ennis said. “Unless I hear otherwise, we’ll see you then.”
    “We?” I said, but Ennis had already hung up.

    T HAT NIGHT , I paced our narrow hallway while Karen stripped more of the old, yellowing wallpaper from the walls. Given my brooding personality and general uselessness around the house, it was hard to say what she ever saw in me. To this day, the best answer I can give is that my life has been marked by short, random bursts of inspiration and activity, followed by extended periods of coasting, disenchantment, boredom, lethargy, and, eventually, surrender. Unfortunately for Karen, she happened to meet me while I was on the upswing. Two years out of college, I’d ditched three jobs and decided that the next mountain I wanted to climb would be graduate school. This time, I told myself, I’d give it my all. This time, I wouldn’t cut any corners. This time, I wouldn’t stop at simply buying the books—I’d actually read them and make notes and form study groups to make sure I got the most out of my education.
    As it turned out, Karen was the only person who joined my study group, and by the time we started dating, I had her convinced that I knew what I was doing. I wasn’t going to stop at the Master’s Degree, I told her. I was going to go on for my Doctorate. From there, I’d probably do some post-doc work (whatever that was), get some academic writing under my belt (it sounded plausible at the time), settle into a tenure-track position at a small liberal arts college (why not?), and spend the rest of my life discussing the significance of the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock in The Great Gatsby. But then came the Ph.D. program and all the books I had to read, and all the books about the books, and all the talk from all of the professors about how bad the job market was, and as my dreams started slipping further and further away, I stopped trying so hard to reach them, and soon I was marching back and forth in front of a bank and wondering whether the world might end before the next chapter of my dissertation came due.
    Somewhere between the dream and waking up, Karen and I got married.
    “He smells money,” I said, sucking in my gut to squeeze past her ladder on my fifth pass through the hallway. “Ennis, I mean. But for some reason, he can’t get to it without my help. Otherwise, why would he have called?”
    “You’re being paranoid,” Karen said. “Pick up a scraper and make yourself useful.”
    “Paranoid?” I said. “You obviously don’t know these people.”
    “I know enough,” Karen said. “And I know you, and I know that you have a tendency to blow things out of proportion.”
    “Is that what you think? That I’m blowing things out of proportion?”
    “I think you need to take a breath,” Karen said. “Pick up a scraper. Lose yourself in the work. It’ll give you some perspective.”
    I picked up a scraper from the pile of tools on the worn and faded carpet. I pressed the blade to the wallpaper and leaned into it. A three-inch gash appeared in front of me, and a wrinkled, yellow strip came away from the wall.
    “See?” Karen asked. “I’ll bet you’re feeling better