Read Online Treasure Island!!! by Sara Levine - Free Book Online Page A

thought.” Rena grew quiet and began to pick at the callus on her thumb. “Do you remember when your
Treasure Island
thing started, and you kept calling in sick so you could shop for a blouse with a lace jabot?”
    “A few times I blew it off, but I hardly think—”
    “That’s when I first subbed for you. It’s not like I
tried
to move in on the job. And I want you to know, when Nancy called and asked for help, I said, ‘I wouldn’t dream of it, what if she’s thinking of coming back?’ I only changed my mind when Nancy goes, ‘Never in a million years—’”
    How dare they? Like girls gossiping behind their hands.
    “Rena, it’s a dead bush.”
    “What?”
    “A dead horse. Quit beating around the bush. I said I don’t mind it.”
    “All right.” She flinched. “Beating a dead horse. What a cruel expression!” After a pause she said, “How’s Lars?”
    “He’s fine.”
    As we drank our coffee I studied the lithograph above the table as if I had never really seen it before, which in a way I hadn’t. It was a boat and a sunset, but the wrong kind of boat—two lovers drifting in a canoe.
    Rena reached into her enormous filthy Turkish Kilim hand-woven expandable purse.
    “Well, here,” she said. “I got the pills you wanted.”
    A photograph of schnauzers was stuck to the prescription bottle. “Eddie and Neddie and Nod!” Rena’s eyes rested on the dogs for a moment with deep affection; then her face went blank and she threw the dogs back into that dark hairy pit of a purse. She slid the bottle across the table.
    “You’re welcome to these. It’s interesting how animals can relax a person. I haven’t touched Xanax since I began at the Library. I’ll be rearranging the gravel in the fish tank, or combing out the dogs, and I get this extraordinary sense of calm. The feeling can stay with me all day long.” Rena gripped the table stiff-armed as a zombie. “Oh my god! I just remembered! I promised to check on Mrs. Minnelli’s box turtle.”
    I slid the check across the table.
     

CHAPTER 12

     
    T he letter arrived, looking innocuous enough, in a small floral envelope. Lars had picked up the mail as we came in, and began to read the letter in the doorway. He froze in the hall like a flamingo. I had to maneuver around him just to put away my coat.
    “I’ve . . . ”
    Long pause; he continued to read.
    “I’ve . . . ”
    “
What
?” I said.
    “I’ve just gotten the strangest letter from my mother. It’s bizarre, but I can’t figure out . . . what on earth could have . . . why is she so upset?”
    “Let me see it.”
    The letter was written in a crazy hand, cursive loping across the page like antelope across the plain; and from what unseen predator?
    “I’m baffled,” Lars said. “She’s demanding an apology, and yet I don’t know what for . . . Who do you think—I can’t believe—oh no. Do you think my sister—?”
    “Look here, Lars,” I said, guiding his distressed person gently to the sofa. “Your mother called the other day when you weren’t home, and I took the occasion to have a bit of a talk. I’ve never felt drawn to your mother, but some intimacy was long overdue. We had a bout of it.”
    When Lars sunk back against the cushions, I explained what I’d long observed as his extremely fucked-up relationship with his mother, citing among other weirdnesses his habit of calling her every single Saturday at one in the afternoon, and speaking to her for precisely an hour, always about the most superficial things, unless for some reason he was unable to get her on the phone, in which case he insisted on calling her at the same time on Sunday and plodding through his dreary conversational routine then. This mode of communication, which he stubbornly preferred to anything more natural and spontaneous, not only disrupted the easy artless flow of my weekend life, but perpetuated the false relations he’d always had with his mother, a weak-headed but controlling woman