Read Online Up Island by Anne Rivers Siddons - Free Book Online

don’t think anybody over there likes that bitch; did you know they call her the Eel Woman? Caleb says she’s as slick and cold as a lamprey. But it ain’t Tee who’ll be cut out of the herd, oh no. Testosterone is thicker than blood or water.”
    I smiled at her passion, painfully but gratefully.
    “You sound like you might have had a few words with Caleb about it.”
    “Only about five hours’ worth,” she said.
    “Oh, Liv. I’m sorry…”
    “Don’t apologize! Don’t you ever apologize for any of this,” she said fiercely. “Don’t you dare buy into that crap, that ‘Somehow it must have been my fault, 54 / Anne Rivers Siddons
    how did I fail him’ shit. This is Tee’s fault. This is Tee’s shit.
    As it is, you’ll end up paying the freight on it…”
    “How? Why? Why should I pay for…whatever it is?”
    “Oh, Molly,” she said in exasperation. “You know as well as I do what happens in our crowd when a guy leaves his wife for a new toy. Haven’t you seen it? For a little while it’s all, ‘Oh, poor thing, we must rally around her, what are friends for,’ and then, after a while, after everybody gets used to him being part of a new couple, they’ll begin to ask them back for dinner and little parties. You know, ‘Well, of course she’s awful, but after all, it’s Tee!’ And then it’s like they don’t remember who you are. Two or three times a year they’ll maybe have you for the big Christmas open house—different hours from them, of course—maybe take you to the club with another of their divorced girlfriends…but for the big stuff, the fabric of their little lives, you’re out of the loop. And she’s in. They may never like her, and they’ll probably despise the Eel Woman, but she’ll be part of them because Tee is. This is his crowd, just like it’s Caleb’s now.
    This is guy stuff. This is the South. This is the Coke family.
    You think Coke is going to give a happy rat’s ass about you?
    They’re not even going to remember your name.”
    “They ought to fire her…”
    “Fire her! Oh, right! What they did was promote her. Took her off Tee’s team, of course; can’t seem to outright condone the stuff, you know, but they transferred her to community outreach and gave her a raise. And as for Tee, I hear he’s in line for Paris or London in a year or two, if he wants it. Real hardship duty.”
    Paris or London…we had talked about it. How UP ISLAND / 55
    many times? It had been something Tee was working toward, but we thought it would be much farther along, perhaps the last significant thing he did for Coke. I had loved the thought of the two of us in the blue hour, sitting on some gargoyled city terrace while the lights of Paris came on at our feet, or gardening in the long green twilight at a country house somewhere a few miles and hundreds of years out of London.
    Maybe, I thought, an insane giggle beginning to bubble up in my chest, they could bike in together every day in their matching latex shorts.
    I snorted and Livvy looked at me.
    “You don’t think it’s going to happen, do you?” she said slowly.
    “Well, of course not,” I said. “All that’s if there should be a divorce, and there’s not going to be any divorce. How can there be? He’s…Livvy, we…Teddy and Caroline and I…we’re what he has. We’re what all those years have added up to for him. He can play around with having something else for a while; I mean, I hate it, of course, but in the end it’s not going to matter because we’re what he has. His whole life has been spent making what we add up to. And he’s what we have. What would we have if…well, he’s what we have, that’s all. He’s the sum of all those years and all that talk and all that laughter and all the trouble and the hard times and the…the…ordinary times, the thousands of times we brushed our teeth and…and rented a video, and talked on the phone to each other. All the things we’ve done together and