Earthquake I.D. Read Online Free

longer; she’d torn through to the end of everything. This morning she’d at last found the guts to admit how bad things had gotten back in Bridgeport.
    If he’d asked her something, Barbara had forgotten the question. She’d lost the feeling below her knees.
    â€œBarb?” he called. “Hey, where is it? What happened, anyway? Why is everyone staring at me?”
    Wrong, Jay. Barb granted that she was staring at him, and the kids too. But otherwise he was woefully wrong, this man she needed to speak with in private, just as soon as possible. Everyone else in that close-packed block, both the gang down on the stones that smelled of manure and the stay-at-homes up in the windows flung open amid the morning laundry—everyone else, including the lucky one with the camera and the now-empty-handed doctor and a tall woman in too much jewelry who may have been Barbara’s whispery love-angel (the mother caught glimpses of them all, in her antsy paralysis)—everyone else was looking at Paul.

Chapter Two
    Whenever Barbara had imagined the end of her marriage—and today she was coming to realize how often she’d done it—she’d pictured it happening anywhere but Italy. Americans in Italy, that was a different story. A story with a happy ending, in which some tightly-wound Anglo arrives in this sultry country, more than halfway to Africa, and rediscovers the joy of sultry, of a steaming meal and an eventful bedtime. Barb had seen the movie a hundred times. The refinement of the French horns as the branches of the fig tree ripple before the Renaissance tower…the rekindling of an Iowan’s kisses as the setting sun winks between the Roman brickwork…Often the romance blossomed in some high-collared era a few earthquakes previous, Henry James, whatever. Or the chilly figure in need of a snuggler’s renewal might be British, made no difference. Once they undid that first button, Italy was the opposite of divorce. It was a country, Barbara came to think, for someone like Jay’s mother.
    For Grandma Aurora, the love-tomato never lost its juice. The old bohemian had gone so far as to promise, as the family prepared for the journey, that she would “jet over soon.” She wanted “a taste of that dolce vita.”
    Today as Barb cooled her heels in some sort of downtown health clinic, repeatedly failing to wangle so little as five minutes alone with her husband-for-now, she had time to understand his mother. Should Aurora Lulucita sashay into the examination rooms this very minute, she wouldn’t even need to touch up her eyeliner and lipstick in order to vamp for someone like Dottore DiPio, here. DiPio was the one who’d put Jay though those hurried examinations out on the dusty cobblestone, and after that the old medico had taken over. He’d overridden any suggestions from the police who’d arrived on the scene, and cowed the ambulance drivers as well, showing such an eagerness for the case that Barb recalled her mother-in-law. Aurora too was seventy-something, yet still fired by a craving that blew past any notion of embarrassment.
    The grandmother however was all about man-chasing; this doctor on the other hand wanted to track down a miracle. He’d had the Lulucitas brought to this—what would you call it? A palazzo put up a good two hundred years ago, converted now to slapdash cubicles and unexpected staircases. Here DiPio had proprietary rights. He made sure to get the family’s local phone and address, by hand rather than on computer, using the long, whip-crack L of formal European penmanship. He asked again and again about the head wound, the exposed cerebral membrane. At times it seemed like the questions arose directly from the doctor’s goatee, if not from a cluster of neckwear beneath that unruly salted bush. DiPio wore not only a crucifix, but also a medallion of the former saint Christopher. Whenever he wasn’t