Atticus Read Online Free Page A

Renata. I have followed her from town to town for more than fifteen years. She calls it stalking, I call it love. She throws me a bone now and then—a tryst, an oh-what-the-hell affair—but more often she stamps her foot and shoos me. I have been getting the go-aways lately and it’s beginning to feel done, over, finished. We talked when I got back and she told me she was, for the very first time, inlove—meaning no offense, of course, though it did add a caustic charge to the midnight cigar and too-many whiskeys that my friends put down in front of me.
    I know these two stories go together—less than forty-eight hours separate them—and in both I was the stooge. On the phone with Renata I tried not to say, “Try to get it right this time,” but that was there, and I think that I have lost something, and I lost it before Renata, lost it as far back as the accident. This is not a complaint; I just have no clue.
    Confessions like this are maybe not what older brothers like to hear, but I know you’ll be flattered by it. I hear the three favorite words are not “I love you” but “What’s your opinion?” A guy I know here chides me for being softheaded. We’re playing pool at the American Bar. And I am sailing on Coronas and shots of tequila. The Warriors and Chicago are on cable and the furthest gone exiles are hooting at some nifty moves in the paint. Who’s that singing on the jukebox? Whitney Houston? I love that song. I hold out my heart for dissection and see this guy Reinhardt looking at me like I’m a mark, like I’ve got “Kick me” pinned on the back of my shirt. Renata’s walking all over you, that sort of thing.
    Long meaningless strolls, holding hands, chips and salsa by the pool, skin against skin, how about a back rub? — it’s full of intimacy and self-revelation, and I feel lost without it. Love in my shoes. Love in the hand on my thigh. Love hanging around like a good waiter when we dine by candlelight. Want it, need it, gotta have it. I’m forty years old and the clock’s still running.
    All I can do now is paint. There are feelings then, big andtroublesome. But with the other stuff, I have no idea. I’m trying my hand at patience. I try your patience, too, I know. Try to remember that every President has a flake in the family.
    Scott
    Late that night, Atticus got a phone call from Frank. “Dad? I got a letter to you from Scott by mistake.”
    â€œOh?” Atticus said. “What’s it say?”
    â€œHe thanks you for the Radiola. Says he’s working hard and he’s off the sauce. Half page is all. Seems fine.”
    â€œWell, that’s good to hear.”
    On a Wednesday in February, Atticus listened to the public radio station for company as he cooked up an onion stew and poured it over rye bread, slowly eating it in the dining room with The Denver Post propped up on his milk glass. Marilyn would be stopping by at noon with her own philosophies of good housekeeping, so Atticus only rinsed off the pan, the plate, the milk glass and spoon, then completed some government accounting forms at his rolltop desk and went upstairs at nine. Howling winds rattled the windowpanes and piped like a hot teapot at every wooden gap in the house. His upstairs radio was tuned to opera, La Bohème , and his wife was still not there. He slanted into heaped pillows in his pajamas in order to read petroleum reports and then woke up with the side lamp on and loose pages sloppily pitched to the floor. He couldn’t get back to sleep, so he put on his Black Watch tartan robe and slippers and walked through all the upstairs rooms, stopping especially in Scott’s. His paintbrusheswere in a red coffee can just as they’d been for over twenty years and his childhood sketches and watercolors overlapped on the walls, but Atticus could no longer smell the linseed oil and turpentine and paints that