Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read Online Free

love you, I know that. And …” He blinks and looks down. “I can still give you pleasure.”
    She buries her face in the pillow. The hand that knew exactly what to do was a woman’s hand. “Let’s wait until we’re married,” he said every time her hand drifted down his body, down to what she flattered herself was an erection.
    She starts crying again. “I thought it was something spiritual in you,” she says. “A vow to be pure or something.”
    He taps one nail, a steady, agitating sound, like a dripping tap.
    “I feel so stupid,” she says.
    “I’ll never hit you,” he says quietly. “I’ll never shout at you. I’ll always love you. I’ll always listen to you. I’ll never leave you. I’ll never fool around on you.”
    She has to laugh. “One thing for sure,” she says, “you’ll never get Cory Bates pregnant.”
    She began to see John Bucci two or three afternoons a week plus Tuesday nights, when her father was at the Legion Hall. Because John lived with his aunt they couldn’t make love at his house, so they did it in his car. John wanted to marry her, or at least to see her more often, at nights especially, but he didn’t push her, not at first.
    “I admire you for putting your father’s feelings above your own,” he said.
    Which made her feel dishonest. All she was doing, really, was trying to keep everything on an even keel. Over the summer she had stopped sticking so faithfully to her mother’s routine, but she was still the woman of the house, and having a boyfriend felt like having an affair. “Maybe you can come for a visit in a couple of months,” she told John, thinking that by then her mother would have been gone a year.
    His family she had met many times—his aunt, his two sisters, his four nieces and three nephews, his brothers-in-law—because on Tuesday evenings, after they’d made love, he took her to his place for something to eat, and there was always a gang in the kitchen. The sisters raved about her the way he did. They told her she had the skin of a baby, and they said they hoped her and John’s children came out with her blue eyes and dimples. They just assumed that she and John would get married and build a house on their aunt’s property, as they themselves had done. They urged her to make John hire somebody named Marcel to dig the foundation. They affectionately counselled her to hit John if he didn’t get the ball rolling. “Hit him with a stick!” they cried. “Hit him you know where!” With them she talked about her mother, since they talked so readily about their own. She knew from John that their mother had died in a car accident, but they told her how she had flown through the windshield and how in the casket her face lookedlike Dracula’s, it was so stitched up. They cried, and she cried. “You are our sister,” they said, which more than anything John said, or did, had her dreaming of marriage.
    The aunt that John lived with, Aunt Lucia, wasn’t so friendly. She couldn’t speak English, for one thing. She glared from the stove and pointed at the chair that Marion was to sit in. She furiously circled her fist in front of her mouth if Marion ate too slowly. As Marion was on her way out the door Aunt Lucia usually thrust a jar of something at her—relish, spaghetti sauce—as if challenging her to take it, as if she knew that Marion would lie to her father about where it had come from.
    “From Cory’s mother,” was what Marion told him. Her father had never met Mr. or Mrs. Bates and he probably never would, given their waking hours, so it was a safe white lie. Marion had phoned them three or four times to find out about Cory, but there was never any answer. She had finally gone to the apartment and rung the bell and knocked on the door. Still no answer.
    “They’re there, all right,” said Mrs. Hodgson, the old lady who managed the pet store downstairs. “Every once in a while you hear a thump.” She said that Cory left one morning on