On the Ropes: A Duffy Dombrowski Mystery Read Online Free Page B

it would be neat fun to learn how to box usually rethink it after someone punches them in the head. People come and people go and there’s no point in making friends with guys until they earn their stripes.
    Smitty acted as my default manager. A promoter from Kentucky had a fight offer for me as a main event on a card he was having in Lexington. Kentucky is famous for lousy boxing and lousy pay, and though it would be cool to be in a main event and actually have a chance to win, I didn’t feel like driving all that way for what would probably amount to seven hundred bucks in my pocket. With gas, tolls, motels along the way, and all the little expenses that get taken up with travel, the two-thousand-dollar purse would be gone in no time. It’s the sort of stuff that Oscar de la Hoya doesn’t have to spend a lot of time thinking about. I wanted to think about it before I made any decisions.
    The second call was from Lisa, the woman I had been dating. We’d been seeing each other for about seven months, and for about the last three weeks she’d been acting weird. There were nights when she seemed pretty normal, happy to be with me, and, frankly, interested in the things that people who date are interested in, namely sex. Then there’d be times when she was distant and seemed to take everything I said as an offense. Though I would never say it out loud in front of her or, for that matter, anyone else carrying two X chromosomes, I might think it was PMS. Actually, if it wasn’t PMS, it could be “the time right before” or “right after” or any of a number of those coded expressions women use to explain why they’re being weird. The way I had it figured, women could excuse their mood and behavior about twenty-seven out of every thirty days in the month if they tried hard enough.
    This seemed more than that. I’ve stayed unmarried but have had enough relationships of varying lengths to recognize the signs. It hasn’t been a particularly pretty love history for me—my relationships usually follow the same arc. First, the woman gets charmed with the fact that she’s met an adult male who is physically fit and able to speak using words with more than one syllable. During this phase, sex occurs freely and often and googly eyes are made during tender moments in which the woman usually voices her joy of just spending time with me.
    That phase, which can last from several hours to almost a month, but seldom more than that, is replaced with the second phase. In the second phase, the object of my affection begins to exhibit tendencies that make me believe that she may not be quite as enamored as I thought she might be. This stage manifests itself in symptomatology such as a tendency to find fault in my hobbies, especially my devotion to boxing, a dislike for my choice of restaurants, and then, most telling, the postponement of any coital activity.
    My reaction, which has been tested over more trials than I care to admit, is to deny that such symptomatology exists. Then I try to convince myself that the said object of my affection is just going through a phase.
    The third and usually final phase is when my partner returns to the psychotic diagnosis that she somehow had been able to mask during our brief love affair. The psychosis can manifest itself in schizophrenic thinking, rage disorders, or complex paranoia. During this time all sexual activity ceases and the relationship ultimately implodes, followed by the request of the now psychotic partner that the two of us remain friends.
    Lisa had begun to enter the second phase or was indeed battling an extended period of pre-, active-, or post-menstrual difficulty. On one of our evenings out having drinks after attending the movies, I made the mistake of asking her if she was “puffy,” my special code for menstrual-cycle-induced dysphoria. That may have been my first mistake, but it certainly wasn’t going to be my last.
    “Duffy,” Lisa had addressed me with the tone you