Any Bitter Thing by Monica Wood

Author:Monica Wood
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Chronicle Books LLC
Published: 2005-08-16T04:00:00+00:00

SIXTEEN

This is how marriages end, I thought, parking my car on the slope of Hanover Street. It had begun to occur to me that I was having the equivalent of an affair, but here I was anyway, back on Harry Griggs’s doorstep. Same three flights, same dark hallway, same badly fitted door, same hollow sound when I knocked.

Harry opened the door, cheerier than usual. “Hey,” he said. “Hey, hey!” Boomy and expansive—energized, I thought, by his weeks of restitution. He ushered me inside and offered me a Gatorade. “It’s been a hell of a day,” he said. “You picked a hell of a day.”

“What happened?”

“I deboned my last goddamn chicken. It was one of those take-this-job-and-shove-it kinda moments.” He laughed, loud and wide-mouthed. A back tooth was missing, I noticed, and the other teeth looked flattened by old fillings.

“What are you going to do for money?”

“Man, it felt good,” he said, missing my question entirely. “No more Cambodians clackety-clacking at me all day. I got a bellyful of them in the war.”

“You were stateside,” I reminded him, accepting my drink.

He pointed at me. “You listen too close. Bad habit.” He stretched out in the tweed chair. “Free at last, free at last, free at last.”

“Well,” I said. “Congratulations, I guess.”

“You said it!” He laughed again—a new laugh, not the pleasant, rueful chuckle I was used to. This was a big, loud, horsey, vaguely libidinous chortle. His face got very red. Drinking, I figured—but not much, I hoped.

“I missed you last week,” he said, pulling his chair close to mine. “This place was a goddamn tomb.”

“How was your Thanksgiving?”

“I sat here and ate a chicken that was still half froze. You?”

“We ate at Mariette and Charlie’s. Mrs. Blanchard made mince pies,” I said, extracting a package from my bag. “Here. I saved you a piece.”

It disappeared in two bites. “She’s good,” he said.

“The boys were both home, too, Buddy and Bernard? We played cards for about six hours.” I took a languid sip of my drink. “It’s kind of amazing how easy it is to pretend to be living a normal life.”

“You said it!” Sipping from Loreen’s prissy cups, Harry resembled a bear at a tea party. “What’ve you got for me today?”

I had few stories left, and we both seemed to know it.

He lifted the cup to me. “You must have something. Give me the ending.”

“A house full of strangers,” I said. Or near-strangers. Father Mike was gone and in his place appeared some men I knew a little—Father Jack and Monsignor Frank—and a woman with a big, frightening smile. She asked me questions I didn’t get and showed me dolls with no clothes on and urged me to tell the truth, which, when spoken aloud, sounded like the exact opposite of the truth. In the end I fled to the back of the house and hid in our coat closet, cowering in the muffling dark, listening to them look for me and hoping to hear his voice lancing through the noise.

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