Other Words for Love Read Online Free

glass of water across the table. Then he reached over and pressed his palm against my forehead. “Are you sure it’s only a headache? You ain’t got no fever?”
    Fev-ah , he said. No, Patrick, I thought, shaking my head. I don’t have a fever. You could use a few lessons in Mom’s class, but I won’t tell you that. I can’t hurt your feelings because you’re so gorgeous and your hand feels nice on my face, hard and soft at the same time.
    “So what brought this on? Are you still devastated about the corpse?” he asked, and I gave him a disapproving look that made him laugh. “Oh, come on, Ari. The man was almost ninety years old.”
    I shrugged, studying the ice in my glass. Then I told him what I’d been thinking, about how sad it was that Uncle Eddie had died in that gloomy apartment, that he didn’t have a wife or children and his neighbors in the cemetery were strangers.
    “I’m afraid of that,” I said. “Dying alone.”
    He laughed again. “How do you come up with this morbid shit? You shouldn’t worry about dying. You’re a young kid.”
    But I do worry about it, I thought. I’m not Evelyn. Boys don’t ring the doorbell for me and they don’t call on the phone. I might never have a husband like you or a son like Kieran, and it’s really confusing because I’m not even sure if I’d want to be like Evelyn. I wouldn’t want to get in trouble and disappoint Mom so much that she’d laugh when I was gone.
    “Come on,” Patrick said, standing up. “You need some sleep.”
    I stayed where I was, watching the ice melt. I didn’t want to sleep. I just wanted to sit there and think. Then he clamped his hand around my elbow and marched me to the guest bedroom. I wouldn’t have let anyone except Patrick do that. I was sure he meant well.
    Dad picked me up two days later. It was a humid morning and my legs stuck to the leather seats in his car.
    “How was your weekend?” I asked, and repeated myself when he didn’t answer. Some sports program was on the radio and he lowered the volume.
    “I worked,” he said, and turned it up again.
    Dad’s eyes were blue like mine and his hair used to be just as dark but now it was totally gray. He was tall and he didn’t talk much. Not to me, anyway. He was a distant father, in Mom’s opinion. But she said that he was also a good father because he kept a roof over our heads and food on the table. And he worked hard, all the time; he could have retired a decade ago but he didn’t because retirement would drive him crazy. He wasn’t interested in traveling or golf or anything except solving homicides, so he had to keep working. At least, that was what Mom told me. I never knew what Dad was thinking.
    He sped back to work after I got out of the car in front of our house. Mom was inside, slicing bagels at the kitchen counter. She turned around and rested her hands on her hips.
    “You look very thin, Ariadne. Didn’t Evelyn feed you this weekend?”
    I should have expected that; Mom always said critical things about Evelyn. Didn’t Evelyn feed you? Evelyn lets Kieran eat too much junk. Evelyn’s house is a pigsty . I wished she wouldn’t. Evelyn might not have been perfect, but she wasn’t so bad. Whenever she got cantankerous and snapped at me, I tried to remember the sweet things she did—like choosing me to be the maid of honor at her wedding and letting me tag along with her and her friends to the bowling alley, even though I was only eight at the time and nobody wanted me there.
    “Of course she did,” I said, but Mom looked skeptical. She toasted a bagel, slathered it with cream cheese, and watched while I ate it.
    I went upstairs afterward, where I closed the door and opened the window in my studio. It was a sunny day, and our next-door neighbors—the annoying ones who constantly blocked our driveway—were having a party. Balloons bounced from their mailbox at the curb and guests were double-parking their cars, carrying cases of beer to the