A Life in Men: A Novel Read Online Free Page A

that bears all his worldly goods and shaking it for good measure so the loose coins inside clink. “Some of us ain’t in the prime of our lives anymore. Maybe time for some coin-swap action so I can switch to bills and lighten my load.”
    Nicole starts bouncing up and down on her knees. “Oooh, I love coin swap!” she cries. “Can I come?”
    Yank has to stop himself from barking at her to shut up. He’s assumed the fact that she helps him out sometimes with his schemes to be an unspoken secret between them, not something she mentions to Joshua, though he cannot say why, and obviously he was mistaken.
    Joshua, though, chuckles. “How’d
this
happen, mate? My old lady’s become your protégé for a life of crime.” Before Yank can even answer, the kid has crushed out his hash cigarette and gulped the last of his tea and is kissing Nicole good-bye, quipping, “Have fun, you two outlaws.” Then he’s down the stairs. Everything else around here moves in slow-mo, but Joshua is so fast he could leave a trail of light behind him.
    Nicole continues picking at her cereal, taking dainty sips of tea, like she’s barely noticed his departure. Joshua is always running out of doors these days. He’s got a real salary now, long hours of training. Not that swinging around on a flying trapeze is much of a proper job (though in travelers’ London, it barely registers on the Richter scale of weird), and with the circus full of foreigners, who knows if it’s even strictly legal? But it’s not exactly
illegal,
which is more than Yank can say for anything he’s done to make money since the mideighties.
    “You’re not leaving this minute, are you?” Nicole asks, eyes darting to the door of the common room. “I have some things I need to take care of first. I could go in about an hour—forty-five minutes if you’re in a hurry.”
    Some things I need to take care of.
Like the girl’s got an appointment with the goddamn Queen. “Cool your jets, darlin’,” Yank says. “I’m gonna crash a few more hours. We’ll go when we go.”
    When he gets to their shared room, he closes the door hard. If the rickety old thing had a lock, he’d use it.
    After my diagnosis (A.D., my parents have taken to calling it), sure, I was still encouraged on the surface to do the things a normal middle-class girl should do. Finish college, get a job, even date. But the unpredictable, wilder possibilities of life instantly disappeared, got shoved to another side of a wall and categorized as “too risky” for me. I was to follow the simple, linear trajectory of the terminally ill. No wasted time, nothing that would tax me too much
(ah, the mantra of the education major: “Short days, summers off!”). Maybe, if any man would have me, knowing I
was damaged goods, I could someday leave my parents’ house for my husband’s. But that was as big as any of us
dared to dream for me. The safest route, the life not quite lived.
    The one time I got anywhere close to real adventure, in Greece, you aborted our mission, sent me home like a child who had lost her way in a dangerous woods. But look, Nix,
look
—here I still am.
    M ARY’S F LUTTER DEVICE is in the bedroom. Yank’s slammed the door, and even though Mary lives in there, too—Yank and Joshua have crammed their scant clothing into the dresser drawers and given her the entire wardrobe—Mary pauses at the threshold, intimidated, an intruder in her own home. An intruder in their home. She stands in the hallway, near the foot of the staircase across from the pay phone, waiting.
    In a little while, when Yank has fallen asleep, maybe she can sneak in and get her giant purple rucksack without looking like she is
following
him or something. Already she’s embarrassed about having invited herself on his outing. She should have held her tongue; then he might have asked her, as he sometimes has lately. She hears jazz playing on the other side of the door, and she knows there’s no reason she