YOU HAVE REACHED YOUR DESTINATION by Louise Marburg

Author:Louise Marburg
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: EastOver Press LLC
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

LOVE IS NOT ENOUGH

My sister’s boyfriend’s name was Robin, which struck me as a girlish name for a guy, but he was as big as a yeti and had a forest of dark hair on his arms. When she brought him home to Connecticut to meet our mother and me, he seemed to dwarf the house: he was a grown-up, fully a man, and Jeannie was obviously besotted. She was twenty-two, a year out of college; he was in his thirties. He sat on the loveseat in the living room holding Jeannie’s comparatively tiny hand and talked for a long time. Then they got up and went out to dinner somewhere in Darien, or maybe they drove back to the city. I stared at the depression in the sofa where he’d sat and tried to remember what he’d said, but mostly recalled the flashes of his too-white teeth, and the bluish tint of his five o’clock shadow. I’d felt shy around him for a reason I couldn’t have named.

“He’s handsome, I’ll give him that,” my mother said after they left. “But that’s all I’ll give him. Jeannie is too easy, always has been. She’d go out with the mailman if he asked her.”

It was six o’clock on the dot and she was pouring herself a glass of vodka, the only type of alcohol her latest diet allowed. I had to take Jeannie’s word for it that our mother had once been kind. When I was five, and Jeannie was fifteen, our father went into the woods in back of our house and shot himself in the head. According to Jeannie, our mother had been a different person before then. I took that literally for a long time, imagining a woman I’d never met, but when I finally understood, I felt sorry for her and blamed her a little bit less for the way she was now.

First thing the next morning, Jeannie called.

“So what do you think?” she said. “He’s amazing, isn’t he?”

“Amazing,” I said. For all I knew, Robin was amazing. I didn’t want to be disagreeable.

“He was impressed by you, Katie,” she said.

“By me? Why?”

“He thinks you’re very mature for your age.”

“I hardly said anything.” In fact, I hadn’t said anything at all. I seemed older than twelve because I was tall and quiet. I knew that some people thought the reason for my maturity was the circumstances of my father’s death. I didn’t know anyone who hadn’t heard how he died, because my mother had told, and continued to tell, everyone connected to us. Jeannie also talked openly about it and had certainly told Robin by now.

“I’m in love,” she said. “This is it. He’s the one.”

“How can you tell?”

“I can tell because I think about him all the time. I can’t wait to see him, and when I’m with him I feel so turned on I can hardly stand it.” She lowered her voice. “He’s great in bed.”

Jeannie had been telling me about her sex life since she began to have one at the age of seventeen.

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