Olive Branches Don't Grow on Trees Read Online Free Page A

once whined to Cosmo about a boyfriend with whom
she wanted to break up.
    “How
bad?” asked Cosmo.
    “He
likes jam bands!”
    “Oh,
that is bad,” agreed Cosmo with complete seriousness, “you should break up with
him.”

 
 
     
    **********

 
 
     
    When
Silvia and Vince returned to the house, Frank was sleeping in the den in front
of a blaring television set, snoring loud and rhythmic.  Even when he
slept, he was loud.  He snored and squirmed and tossed and rattled.
 He slept in the den probably more than he slept in his own bed,
especially since Donna had left.  The room was dark and cozy, and had a
long red plaid couch that stretched from one side of the room to the
other.  The built-in shelves were filled with his books from college and
law school, with a smattering of Plato and Dickens and legal codes.  These
reminded Frank of his accomplishments and of who he was.
    “He’s
passed out for the count,” said Vince, as he always said when Frank was passed
out.
    “I
think he has court tonight,” said Silvia, semi-worried.  Frank worked as a
judge in a local courthouse, and despite the fact that his family life was a wreck, his professional life was quite together.  He
shined as a judge just as he had shined as a lawyer.  Silvia had gone to
court with him on occasion and was almost unable to recognize the distinguished
man who sat before the courtroom. 
    “Don’t
worry.  He’ll be up in time.  He always is.  He’s never late.”
    “Oh
yeah,” said Silvia, as she recalled that Frank never needed an alarm clock.
This was not true of herself.  Waking up was always difficult for Silvia,
even with an alarm clock.  She was inclined to push the snooze button
several times after the buzz went off.  She had tried moving the clock
across the room from her so that she would be forced to get up out of bed to
turn it off.  But this never quite worked out.  She would get up and
go over to the clock to push the snooze button and then drag the clock closer
to her bed so that she could proceed to push the snooze several more times.
 It was no wonder that she was perpetually late for everything.
     
She and Vince went into their respective rooms and closed the doors, which was
another thing that Frank hated and did not understand.  “Why are people
always closing doors in this God Damn house?” he would say.  He liked open
doors.  He thought that there was nothing to hide.  He figured that
his children closed doors because they had inherited a bad gene from Donna’s
side of the family that caused them to be introverted.  Silvia thought
that Frank often confused things, and that in this case, he confused
independence with introversion.  She thought that her mother and siblings
enjoyed being alone for the same reason that cats like being
alone-- because they were independent.  She also thought that Frank was
sorely mistaken in thinking that any of her mother’s family members were
introverted, and Donna, herself, least of all.  On occasion, she could
even be gregarious.
    Frank
possibly mistook his wife’s seriousness for introversion.  She was a
serious person, too serious to be bothered with incidental things like small
talk or the conventions of conversation.  And tonight, when she called
Silvia, she wasted no time getting right to the point.
    “Hi Silvie , dear,” she said in a low voice. “I’m worried
about Vince.”  Silvia could see her mother sitting in her very tiny studio
apartment that overlooked Rittenhouse Square.  It was in a high rise with a neat , clean and simple, blandly colored beige and off
white interior.  She moved into the place, after leaving Frank, at the
suggestion of a colleague who lived in the very same building.  When
Silvia had last seen it, she was struck by its complete lack of decorations.
 It looked more like a hotel room than a place where a person lived.
 Silvia wondered if her mother had not made any attempts to decorate
because she was