Read Online The Terror of Living by Urban Waite - Free Book Online

truck as they drove.
        It rained that day, which was somehow more appropriate, the two of them parked near the grass, the spot they'd picked just a hundred yards away beneath a walnut tree. Rain falling from the sky, a carton of orange juice taken from the picnic basket and poured into plastic cups on the bench seat of the truck. Heavy rain striking the windshield. She had realized then that there was a little part of her that feared him, that wanted to understand that fear, why she felt the way she did. Rain pattering on the metal roof of the truck, their own breath on the windows like the steam of a shower on a mirror. It was what came foremost to her mind when she thought of their history together, this dangerous man, a man who'd murdered, who'd been to prison, turned gentle, turned into something else, someone only she could see.
        When she got out of the shower, Hunt was waiting for her on the bed. He still hadn't taken off his boots, and he sat there on the edge of the bed with his arms at his sides and his boots on the floor. "What time will you wake up?" she asked.
        "Eight at the latest. I need to pull the boat out and give it fuel."
        "That's the plan?" she said.
        "That's the plan."
        She walked around the bed and sat down opposite him. She didn't turn to look at him, but instead settled for feeling the way the bed gave with him sitting there. "You ever think things could have been different if we had kids?"
        "We have the horses, don't we?"
        "I'm asking a serious question, Phil"
        Hunt looked out the window, toward the tops of the birch trees. "I can't say anything about that."
        "Yes, you can," she said. "You just won't."
        "Nora-"
        "Don't start," she said. "We both know it was always me and it doesn't make a difference these days anyway. Even if I could, it would be too late now."
        Hunt didn't say anything. He moved to touch her back but then thought better of it and didn't. She'd thought-only that one time, sitting in the car outside their house with the engine on and the lights playing out along the gravel drive-of a life without him, thinking about what it would be like if she left, if she just left him behind. She thought about it now; she thought about it because she could see some need in him to protect her from the trouble he'd gotten himself into. She could see it, like some distant dust storm, gathering black and full along the horizon. She thought about how it would be, waking in a bed without him, sitting at a table, going day to day alone, knowing the whole while that he was out there doing the same.
        "Do you think it's true," Nora said, "what they say about having kids: it makes you selfless?"
        "I think it makes you something," Hunt said. "I don't know what, though."
        "Are you calling us selfish?"
        "No, but I think you're calling us something."
        "Maybe I am, and maybe we are."
        "I can't do anything about that," Hunt said. "It is and we are, and here we are right now with all of it behind us."
        "You think it was coming all this while."
        "I don't want to think of it like that. I just don't. It's been a gift to have a life like ours, and I wouldn't have changed it one bit."
        "I want you to promise."
        "What do you want me to promise?"
        "If it all goes wrong tomorrow, I want you to promise you won't keep going. You won't. You'll just turn around and come right back here. Do you understand?"
        "I don't go through with it, there is no tomorrow, there is no here.'
        Nora began to cry. Hunt stayed where he was, motionless, listening to his wife. "When I saw you this morning, I said, Maybe it's gone already, maybe it's been gone a long time already. I don't like feeling like that, Phil. I don't like it at all. I want you to promise me now."
        "I'm fifty-four years old. It's too late for