A Ship Made of Paper by Scott Spencer

Author:Scott Spencer [Spencer, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub, azw3, pdf
Published: 2011-05-11T12:20:09+00:00

“Oh God, they have the best names. Hampton what?”

“Welles. He’s Ivy League,Wall Street, so bourgeois he makes Martha Stewart seem like Karen Finley.”

“And does he think O. J. is innocent, too? It would be interesting to find out.”

“I don’t know. O. J. may be a little dark for Hampton’s taste.”

Just then, Kate hears wracking coughs coming from Ruby’s bedroom. She has been in and out of respiratory sickness ever since the storm—the ride home on the snowmobile did her in.

“Can you hold on for a minute?” Kate asks.

“Did you get another call? Don’t take it.”

“No, Ruby’s coughing her brains out. I better look in on her.”

“Where’s Danny boy?”

[ 185 ]

“Out. I’m not actually sure where.” As soon as Kate says this, two things occur: Ruby’s coughing stops, and a heavy, soggy sense of emotional panic settles over Kate. “Oh good,” she says, “false alarm,” while in fact she is just now feeling her first intimations of real alarm.

“He’s out and you have no idea where?” Lorraine says. “That’s not like him.”

“Well, lately it has been.”

“There’s nothing to do up there, nowhere to go. Where does he go?”

“There’s this place in town, a bar. Lately he’s been going there.”

“A bar?” Lorraine’s voice is full of the kind of scorn that tries to masquerade as incredulity.

“It’s not that extraordinary, is it?” Kate tries to sound bemused, but her blood has begun to race. She has an impulse to simply slam the phone down and get in the car, surprise the little fucker right in his new nighttime haunt.Yet just as she is about to hang up, she realizes the reason she has called Lorraine in the first place. “We had this monster snowstorm,”

she says.

“I know, I saw it on Fox. Weird.”

“We didn’t have electricity for four days, no heat, no water, nothing.

And we were trapped here, no cars were moving, every road was closed.”

“You should really move back to New York.”

“Last year a water main exploded under your street and your entire apartment was filled with mud.”

“True, but at least I had heat. I had lights, I could read. And I could leave, I could go to my health club, I could have a watercress-and-goat-cheese salad at Cafe Luxembourg.”

“It was sort of fun, getting back to basics, the three of us camping out.

And when the snow stopped the sun came out and it was sort of mild.”

“I don’t ever want to be in a position where I’m glad the sun came out.”

“But for the first day I was here alone, and that was a little weird.”

“Where were Daniel and Ruby?”

a s h i p m a d e o f pa p e r

“At Iris’s.”

“You’re fucking kidding.”

“And while I was here alone, some boys broke into the house.”

“What are you talking about?”

“There’s a home for delinquent boys, mostly black kids from the city.

Some escaped during the power outage and they ended up here.”

“Oh my God. Are you all right?”

“Yes, I’m fine. They never even saw me. They came in to use the facilities.

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