Read Online Wild Roses by Deb Caletti - Free Book Online

couldn't make out their actual words, and
though a part of me wanted to hear, a bigger part didn't. The uneasiness I felt
that afternoon was appearing again, adding a new piece, and I wanted it away.
But I could tell that my mother's voice was calm, a little pleading, and that
Dino's was insistent.
    The next morning I went down to get breakfast.
I was exhausted from the night, feeling like shit and wondering
    60
    how to define all the oddities of the day
before. Mom sat at the kitchen table, drinking coffee. She looked tired too. She
looked more than tired. She looked like someone had crumpled her up into a ball,
thrown her in the trash, removed her, and tried to smooth her out again. I
confess I had a Child of Divorce Reunion Fantasy Number One Thousand, where I
for a moment imagined my father finding out that Dino really was a killer woman
and that my parents would have to get back together. I saw them running through
a meadow, hand in hand. Okay, maybe not a meadow. But I saw me having only one
Christmas and one phone number and only my own father's shaved bristles in the
bathroom sink. Having both of my own sane, well-rested parents in the kitchen in
the morning. I didn't have these moments often, but the only time Mom ever
seemed even mildly tired with Dad was when he had a bad bout of marathon
snoring. Why she had brought Dino into our lives I'd never understand. I'd give
her some excuse, but three years was a little long for temporary
insanity.
    "Well, that was fun," I said.
    "You heard," she said. Mom pushed her bangs
from her forehead, rubbed her temples. The gesture made me pissed off at Dino,
at what he caused.
    "I heard yelling. I didn't hear actual words.
What was going on?"
    "Dino was trying to write last night, and he
swore he could hear the Powelson's television. It was bugging him. His ears--you
know he can hear a leaf drop off a tree."
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    "I heard the door slam. I saw him
outside."
    "He went over there. To their house. He cut
their cable wire with a pair of hedge clippers."
    I almost laughed. I did. I mean, think of
it--Dino creeping down the street in his bathrobe, aiming toward the glow of
light in Courtney and gang's living room window. I could just picture him
hunting around in the junipers for the cable, his gleeful discovery of the thick
wire, the satisfactory snap. Then, the sudden extinguishing of the light to a
pinpoint. The whole Powelson house with its television IV yanked. "It's almost
kind of funny," I said.
    "It's not funny, Cassie. Okay, it's a little
funny. Oh, shit." She chuckled to herself. She shook her head, held her coffee
mug in both hands.
    I wanted to crack up, but the joke felt like a
sick one, slightly morbid. If it had just been this, another Dino tantrum, I
could have laughed. But there was also his shoeless display of weirdness
yesterday This wire cutting--it was more than excessive frustration. I knew
that. "Something strange happened yesterday," I said.
    "Oh?"
    I told Mom about Dino. The shoes. His paranoia
that someone always knew where he was. The way he played that violin. She just
looked at me for a while. "He's off his medicine," she said finally.
    "What do you mean, 'He's off his
medicine'?"
    "He's trying to write. He says it makes him too
foggy That he can't create when he takes it."
    "I didn't even know he had
medicine."
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    "For his depression."
    Mom had first explained to me about Dino's
depression early on in their marriage. No one I knew before had ever tromped off
to see a psychiatrist every week. This seemed more than a tad over-dramatic, and
I said so to Mom. She went into this big discussion about what clinical
depression was, as if I'd never heard those ads on the radio ("Do you have any
of these symptoms? Change in eating or sleeping habits? Loss of interest in
things that used to give you pleasure? Being critical and nasty to the people
you live with?"). It apparently was not
    I'm-having-a bad-day but