The Collected Stories of Amy Hempel by Amy Hempel

Author:Amy Hempel [Hempel, Amy]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-02-12T16:00:00+00:00

Jack woke to the sound of his car alarm. He went to the kitchen to look out onto the driveway and found Vicki leaning on a counter, laughing.

“You missed it,” she said. “Boss went over to pee on your tire? He lifted his leg and set off the alarm and toppled right over.”

Jack disconnected the alarm—Boss had hidden in shame—and went back inside the house for coffee.

Vicki was running a roll of masking tape up and down an arm of her cardigan, picking up fur. She handed it to Jack to do her back. She said, “Breakfast?”

“What’ve we got?”

“If we had some ham we could have ham and eggs—” Vicki said, and waited for Jack to join her on “if we had some eggs.”

Jack looked at her samples of countertop materials—a kitchen renovation was next—and watched her chop a pepper for an eggless omelet.

“There are appliances that do that for you.”

“But I hate to move into the twentieth or twenty-first century, whichever this is,” Vicki said, and reached to turn up a song of busted romance that was on the kitchen radio. Jack listened until an ad for some lame kind of career came on. He had a small graphics business that ran itself; every ad he saw or heard made him think: Is this what I’m supposed to do next?

Vicki worked three days a week at the hospital as a physical therapist, sometimes carrying out her husband’s instructions. She taught people how to walk again, helped them recover a grip. She gave a surpassing deep-heat massage, the doctor told Jack, and Vicki herself had several times offered this to him. Jack had been afraid he might respond and embarrass them both, so had always begged off. But this morning, when she saw him straining to look over his shoulder at the dogs, he let her work on the back of his neck.

When she finished, he said, “I’ve got something for you.”

He opened his gym bag and took a tiny box out of a zippered nylon pocket. Inside, under a layer of cotton, were gold earrings that each framed a piece of round onyx in the center.

“You have pierced ears, right?” he said.

“I love them,” Vicki said, putting them on. She moved to a hallway mirror and pulled her tangled hair away from her face.

“They came with blue stones or red ones, too,” Jack said. “The salesgirl kept pushing me to get a color, but I’m a big black man.” He snorted and said, “Yeah, I’m Denzel Washington.”

Vicki touched her ears and turned from side to side for Jack to see. “Trina’s coming at two,” she told him. “I’ll be out of the way.”

“What do I do with her?” Jack said.

“She’ll tell you,” Vicki said, and left for the hospital.

Jack was wearing a T-shirt Alex had brought him from last year’s sales conference. It said across the front: THE DAN TEL GROUP COMMITMENT TO EXCELLENCE 1993. His gym bag said: the DAN TEL GROUP THE LEADERSHIP ADVANTAGE 1992, and—no telling

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