Where I'm Calling From - Selected Stories by Raymond Carver

Author:Raymond Carver [Carver, Raymond]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Literature, Stories
ISBN: 9780871137210
Google: TXJRQgAACAAJ
Publisher: Unknown
Published: 1988-01-01T16:00:00+00:00

Chefs House

That summer Wes rented a furnished house north of Eureka from a recovered alcoholic named Chef.

Then he called to ask me to forget what I had going and to move up there and live with him. He said he was on the wagon. I knew about that wagon. But he wouldn’t take no for an answer. He called again and said, Edna, you can see the ocean from the front window. You can smell salt in the air. I listened to him talk. He didn’t slur his words. I said, I’ll think about it. And I did. A week later he called again and said, Are you coming? I said I was still thinking. He said, We’ll start over. I said, If I come up there, I want you to do something for me. Name it, Wes said. I said, I want you to try and be the Wes I used to know.

The old Wes. The Wes I married. Wes began to cry, but I took it as a sign of his good intentions. So I said, All right, I’ll come up.

Wes had quit his girlfriend, or she’d quit him—I didn’t know, didn’t care. When I made up my mind to go with Wes, I had to say goodbye to my friend. My friend said, You’re making a mistake. He said, Don’t do this to me. What about us? he said. I said, I have to do it for Wes’s sake. He’s trying to stay sober.

You remember what that’s like. I remember, my friend said, but I don’t want you to go. I said, I’ll go for the summer. Then I’ll see. I’ll come back, I said. He said, What about me? What about my sake? Don’t come back, he said.

We drank coffee, pop, and all kinds of fruit juice that summer. The whole summer, that’s what we had to drink. I found myself wishing the summer wouldn’t end. I knew better, but after a month of being with Wes in Chefs house, I put my wedding ring back on. I hadn’t worn the ring in two years. Not since the night Wes was drunk and threw his ring into a peach orchard.

Wes had a little money, so I didn’t have to work. And it turned out Chef was letting us have the house for almost nothing. We didn’t have a telephone. We paid the gas and light and shopped for specials at the Safeway. One Sunday afternoon Wes went out to get a sprinkler and came back with something for me.

He came back with a nice bunch of daisies and a straw hat. Tuesday evenings we’d go to a movie. Other nights Wes would go to what he called his Don’t Drink meetings. Chef would pick him up in his car at the door and drive him home again afterward. Some days Wes and I would go fishing for trout in one of the freshwater lagoons nearby. We’d fish off the bank and take all day to catch a few little ones.

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