Dear Digby Read Online Free

drowning dolphin’s shriek, still haunted her dreams. After an appropriate period of mourning, Minnie married Amiri Goldfarb, the Arab-Jewish owner of the electronics parts store where she took the fatal answering machine to be fixed. They divorced a year later, but I’d heard rumors that a new name was about to be attached like an invisible Leggo to the series, the little arms of Goldfarb reached out for closure.
    “This is an extremely happy time for me, Willis,” she said. She looked alert but sad, as if a bad boy had put ice down her back. She began to cry.
    I handed her a tissue. “Why?” I asked. I put Iris aside.
    She cleared her throat. “I’m getting married. I’m marrying a wonderful guy. Salt of the earth. Get this: a Unitarian minister who plays mah-jongg and loves salsa!” She fumbled with a wad of Kleenex and blew her nose with a great beep.
    She gave me a baleful look. “Gerard Biskell Rutgers-Oblonski.” She waited for a reaction.
    “Jesus,” I said.
    She cried softly for a while, then added: “Names are so easy for other people. They give up their history so readily, just sign a marriage license and all those years as somebody else are gone. I can’t do that.” She looked at me as if I headed the name-erasing conspiracy. “My fiancé’s mother is English, his father is Polish. They wanted to preserve both strains.”
    She put the tissue back in her pocket. The six phone lines at the front desk, where she was supposed to be sitting, were lit up and squawking.
    “God, I’m sick of names,” she bellowed suddenly, and pulled her rubber sole, screeching, from my desk top. “I think I’m just going to call myself Number 208 or something.”
    “Why don’t you just use your own name?”
    “My own name? No woman owns her name! Anyway, my name was and is White, the same as my first husband. What good does that do me? I don’t want to go back to that name, but I don’t want a three-page driver’s license either.”
    I pointed to the stack of letters on my desk, Iris’s included.
    “Here are some people with real problems.”
    Minnie shrugged and turned back to her phones.
    “Yeah—but they’re all crazy.”
    I sighed. The door to the Situation Room was opening and closing, editors wandered in, carrying notepads and flowered plastic coffee cups. I hurried in, late. Holly Partz, our editor in chief, had already begun to talk. I stumbled into a chair; I coughed loudly. Holly looked at me with exaggerated patience. I looked back at her. She was beautiful and brilliant, and she had invented SIS, then shared it with everyone. I hated her.
    “Yes, Willis,” she said. “What is it?”
    “I think I’m going crazy.”
    There were boos and groans. Someone threw a crumpled napkin at me.
    “C’mon, Willis, let’s not start this again!”
    “I’m going out of my mind,” I said. “I cannot go on reading this stuff”—I waved some letters—“every day and stay sane.”
    “Willis. Take off your rabbit ears and the tux,” said Marge Taggart. “You’ll stay sane.”
    I looked at Marge. She was six feet tall and handsome. She smiled at me and winked.
    “Marge, I think this job is for you. You’ve got the temperament.”
    “Willis.” It was Holly—she was tapping her ballpoint against her big, square-faced watch. “Every issue your Letters section gets better. The letters you print are perfect, and your responses are funny and informative. What do you—”
    “It’s the ones we don’t print I’m talking about. There are so many, I think we ought to publish some of them. I have a letter from a woman in Skyhigh, Utah, who thinks she’s a Female Savior of the world. I’d just as soon pray to her as the Pope, wouldn’t you? I’d like to say that in print.”
    Holly sighed. “Willis, what is your point? You know we can’t print those letters.”
    “Why not?”
    “You know why. The people who write those letters aren’t well. Why would we make fun of them, humiliate them in