Flesh of My Flesh: Short Story Read Online Free Page B

revelation.
    Eventually they fall asleep, Marion in the bed, and Sam sitting in the chair. Near dawn, screeching tires wake them both up.
    Sam runs a hand over his face. “There’s no sense in staying here,” he says.
    Marion looks at him. His blue shirt holds its colour in the gloom. He has wide shoulders. You could draw his silhouette and pass it around and everyone would swear it was a man. Last night she believed she had no choice except to divorce him. Now she’s not sure she even has what it takes to send back all the gifts, let alone to come up with an explanation for themarriage ending on the honeymoon. “I guess we should just go home,” she says, swinging her legs onto the floor.
    “Okay,” he says carefully.
    “Glenda will think we don’t trust her with the dogs,” she says. Glenda is the retarded girl who works for her part-time.
    “She’ll be right,” Sam says, laughing.
    “Nothing is settled,” she says sharply.
    He gets up and goes into the bathroom. He’s in there a long time with the taps running. She feeds the kitten. When he comes out, she and the kitten go right in. She manages to coax the kitten into peeing, then she sits on the toilet and flushes to veil the sound. Sam calls out that he’s going to the office to pay the bill, so she decides to have a quick shower. Seeing her breasts in the mirror makes her cry. Everything about her from the neck down seems a waste now, and perverse, as if
she’s
the one with the wrong body.
    By the time he returns she is dressed and is packing the few things they unpacked. He says he thinks he’ll have a shower, too. She sits on a lawn chair outside their door and eats wedding cake until the thought of him washing his female genitals crosses her mind, and she has to spit out what’s in her mouth. A few minutes later he steps in it, coming out with the suitcases. “All set?” he asks.
    In the car, neither of them say a word. At one point he clears his throat, making what strikes her as a prissy sound, and for the first time since he told her she has the horrifying thought that people might be suspicious. She remembers Grace saying, “Does he ever have long eyelashes!” She looks over at him and he’s blinking hard. It means he’s nervous, but she used to think he had a tic.
    Her eyes fill. The “him” that she used to love isn’t there any more. It never was there, that’s the staggering part. And yet she still loves him. She wonders if she’s subconsciously bisexual. Or maybe it’s true that she loves blindly. When she keptprotesting that she loved John Bucci—years after the divorce—her friend Emma, who was always trying to fix her up with a date, told her about an experiment in which a newborn chimp was put into a cage with a felt-covered, formula-dispensing coat hanger, and the chimp became so attached to this lactating contraption that when its real mother was finally allowed into the cage, it wouldn’t go near her.
    On Valentine’s Day, John Bucci gave her chocolates in a black velvet case as big as a pizza box. Also a gigantic card with a photograph of a grandfather clock and the message “Time Will Never Change Our Love.” She dropped the chocolates off at the pet store for Mrs. Hodgson to offer to customers. The card she took home in a shopping bag and hid in her underwear drawer. The next night, during supper, her father asked if she was seeing the Italian fellow who sold shoes at the mall, and her first stunning thought was that he had gone through her drawers, but it turned out that Mr. Grit had spotted her in John’s car.
    “Oh, well, I have lunch with him sometimes,” she said, which was true. “He’s a friend of Cory’s,” she added, which was also true, or had been.
    “He sold me those maroon loafers,” her father said. “Must have been three years ago now. Crackerjack salesman, I’ll hand him that.”
    She didn’t know what to say.
    “Doesn’t he have something to do with that Esso station out on