Read Online The Things We Do for Love by Margot Early - Free Book Online Page B

was dark—as dark as Clare’s must have been when she was young.
    “One tooth!” said the Mohawk. “Just one!”
    Baby hair sank a small hand into a pile of pumpkin slime.
    “Let’s sort out the seeds, Merrill,” Bridget told the younger, who instead dropped pumpkin guts on the floor.
    Clare looked pointedly at her daughter, who rose in a leisurely way to clean up and move the baby’s high chair.
    Squalling ensued, and minutes later Bridget was nursing the child and telling her brother, “It’s cross-eyed.”
    “So are some of your neighbors,” he answered. “In fact, it looks a little like…”
    “That is not nice,” Bridget replied.
    Paul touched the knife to the jack-o’-lantern’s face. “One tooth, it is,” he said.
    Mary Anne could not for the life of her see why Cameron should find Graham Corbett interesting when Paul Cureux was her best friend. He worked at the zoo at Chief Logan State Park. Kids loved him. He was smart. He was a talented musician and a performer audiences loved. And he was extremely handsome.
    To forestall Clare saying something like, “This is Mary Anne Drew. She purchased one of my love potions,” Mary Anne greeted Paul, reintroduced herself to Bridget, whom she’d met once years before, admired the children and used them to lead the conversation into the subject of childbirth.
    To Mary Anne’s relief, Clare did not mention the love potion, though her heart faltered when the phone rang and it turned out to be someone calling long-distance—from Woodstock, New York—seeking to buy one.
    As Clare spoke to the person on the phone, Paul said, “Jake wants to make a documentary about Mom and her potions.”
    Jake was apparently a friend.
    He added, “Sometime, I’m going to write a song about them.” Among his other talents, Paul was able to create songs in front of an audience, sometimes at their request. He’d say, “Anyone have a topic for a song?” and hands would shoot into the air. Someone would say, “Buying a house,” and Paul would come out with a hilarious song that covered everything from disclosures to competing offers to a spouse changing her mind.
    At the moment, Mary Anne just wanted to get the Cureuxs, the second generation, off this subject of love potions.
    But Bridget said, “You’d probably be happier if you drank one and got married and had children.”
    “You’re scary sometimes, you are,” he said.
    “Mom has shown me how to do it,” Bridget told him.
    To Mary Anne’s surprise, he looked less scornful than horrified. “I think I’ll start drinking from a private water bottle.”
    Mary Anne swiftly steered the subject back to birth. “Bridget, have you helped your mother at any births?”
    And by the time Clare got off the phone, Bridget and Paul had lost interest in the subject of love potions.
     
    O N T UESDAY AFTERNOON , Graham put a stack of library books on the passenger seat of his four-wheel-drive Lexus and loaded the back with two weeks’ recycling. There was not a lot of it. Bottles, newspapers, magazines, always neatly collected in the basement.
    Graham did not like to go into his basement. This was why he put the recycling there. This was why he left the washer and dryer there. It was his basement, and he wasgoing to make himself use it. So what if three out of four West Virginia snake stories involved vicious black snakes cornered in basements?
    In any case, this was October. In October, it was safe to go into the basement without looking under the stairs and over by the hot-water heater.
    They like hot-water heaters, a neighbor had told him. Not David Cureux, but the neighbor who’d told him about the baby copperheads in the jar. This neighbor had confronted a black snake in his basement and dispatched it with a shovel. It had taken Graham some time to pick up the fact that this event had occurred twenty-five years earlier.
    Everyone also agreed that there were “snake years.” Two years ago, when he’d seen the black