Read Online You Don't Love This Man by Dan Deweese - Free Book Online Page B

sound.”
    â€œWhat I’m trying to tell you is that I am going to find my daughter, and I will be in charge of doing that. Not you. Not Sandra.”
    â€œAnd if I don’t help you, you won’t sign my transfer form,” she said. Her tone was one of exhaustion. Did she believe I had invented the situation I was in solely to frustrate her attempts to complete paperwork?
    â€œThat’s not true,” I said. “The thing is two pages of small type and blank spaces that I don’t have time to sit down and study right now is all. I promise you, Catherine, that when I have a moment at some point later today, I will take out your form and carefully fill it out and sign it. And then you will not have to work here anymore.”
    â€œIt just means I’m allowed to apply for open positions,” she said quietly. “It doesn’t mean I’ll get one.”
    â€œWe both know you’ll get one. Notice how I am having confidence in and supporting you, while you are busy questioning and doubting me.”
    â€œYou are blowing this out of proportion on purpose,” she said. “And I think you know that.”
    During the first few years Catherine worked for me, I sometimes worried whether she found me likable. Eventually, however,that concern faded—but not due to any evidence. It just seemed unlikely she would have continued working with me over the years if I were truly intolerable.
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    O N THE AFTERNOON I was to be discharged from the hospital, an older gentleman stepped into my room and asked Sandra if he could have what he called “another bit of time” with me. Shrugging, she said she would go out to get a sandwich. When she stepped out the door, I heard the man tell me his name was “Detective Buckle,” and that we had spoken before. Sandra had told me a detective visited the day of the robbery, but I had no memory of it, and in my narcotic punchiness that afternoon a few days later, I heard myself tell the detective he had a funny name.
    â€œI do?” he said.
    â€œAn interesting one, I mean.”
    â€œI suppose,” he said, offering me his rough right hand while with his left he removed his badge from his shirt pocket, showed it to me, replaced it, and then from the same pocket extracted a loose cigarette. My eyes must have widened at the sight of the cigarette, because he laughed. “Don’t worry,” he said. “I won’t smoke in the hospital. It’s just the holding it that calms me.”
    He possessed a tremendous shock of white hair that stood straight out from his head, and the heavy fabrics he wore further enhanced his dramatic appearance: buttoned nearly to his chin, his flannel shirt was a shade of green so deep as to be almost black, and his dun-colored corduroy pants were fuzzed with age—a broken belt loop rose from one hip like an unruly cowlick. The clothes appeared to be a size too large, and this, in combination with the fact that he couldn’t have stood more than five and a halffeet tall, lent him a shrunken quality, as if life had at some point drowned and then roasted him, and though he had survived, it was in this reduced state. He stood near the bed at a point almost even with my head, and I had to crane my neck to look up at him when he asked how long I’d been working at the bank, what the routines were, who I’d been working with the day of the robbery—standard stuff—until he frowned down into his little notebook as if he’d just discovered an obscenity scrawled there in someone else’s hand. “You mentioned the other day that just before the robbery you’d seen an old girlfriend for the first time in a couple years,” he said. “I was wondering if you could tell me a bit more about that.”
    â€œAbout my girlfriend?”
    â€œYou said she was your former girlfriend.”
    â€œSure,” I said. “But why do you want to know about