Read Online We Live in Water by Jess Walter - Free Book Online

a leg to diabetes. It took him a while to get his prosthetic on.
    When he finally answered, I said: “Tanya threw me out. She’s seeing her old boyfriend. She said living with me was like living with a stalker.”
    “You always did make people nervous,” my father said.
    Dad was a big sloppy man, awful at giving advice. Since my mother’s death, he’d been even less helpful in these father/son moments. He sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”
    “No,” I said.
    “Christ, Trent.” And he invited me inside. “Why the hell not?”
    BEFORE ALL of this, I loved my job. And I’m not talking about the job as portrayed in my five-year-old performance evaluation, the low point of which (one flimsy charge of harassment stemming from an honest misunderstanding involving the women’s restroom) the newspaper found a way to dredge up in its apology to readers. No. What I loved was the work.
    As a features copy editor, I pulled national stories off the wire, proofread local copy, and wrote headlines for as many as five pages a day. My favorite, because it was Tanya’s favorite, was “Inside Living”—page two of the features section, the best-read page in the O —with syndicated features like the crossword puzzle, the word jumble, celebrity birthdays, and Tanya’s favorite, the daily horoscope. That’s how we’d met, in fact, four months earlier, in a coffee shop where I saw her reading her horoscope. I launched our romance with a simple statement: “I edit that page.” Within a week we were dating, and a month later, in late July, when I was asked to leave my apartment because the paranoid woman across the courtyard objected to my having a telescope, Tanya said I could move in with her until I found a place.
    Now, to some, I may indeed be—as the newspaper’s one-sided apology to readers characterized me— strangely quiet and intense, practically a nonpresence , but to loyal readers like Tanya, I was something of an unsung hero.
    Each morning during those three glorious months, she would pour herself a cup of coffee, toast a bagel, and browse the newspaper, spending mere seconds on each page, until she arrived at “Inside Living,” her newspaper home. I couldn’t wait for her to get there. She’d make a careful fold and crease, set the page down, and study it as if it contained holy secrets.
    And only then would she speak to me. “Eleven down: ‘Film’s blank Peak’?”
    “Dante’s.”
    “Are you sure you don’t see the answers the day before?”
    “I told you, no.” Of course, I did see the answers the day before. But who could blame me for a little dishonesty? I was courting.
    “Hey, it’s Kirk Cameron’s birthday. Guess how old he is.”
    “Twelve? Six hundred? Who’s Kirk Cameron?”
    “Come on. You edited this page yesterday. Now you’re going to pretend you don’t know who Kirk Cameron is?”
    “That celebrity stuff comes in over the wire. I just shovel it in without reading it. You know I hate celebrities.”
    “I think you pretend not to like celebrities to make yourself appear smarter.”
    This was true. I do love celebrities.
    “Hey, look,” she’d say finally. “I’m having a five-star day. If I relax, the answers will all come to me.”
    It’s painful now to recall those sweet mornings, the two of us bantering over our page of the newspaper, with no hint that it was about to end. And this is the strange part, the mystical part, some might say: on those days Tanya read that she was to have a five-star day . . . she actually had five-star days. Now, I don’t believe in such mumbo-jumbo; it was likely just the power of suggestion. But I did begin to notice (in the journals in which I record such things) that Tanya was more open to my amorous advances when she got five stars. In fact, after our first month together, I began to notice that the only time Tanya seemed at all interested in being intimate, the only time she wanted to . . . you know, get busy . . . was when