The Animal Girl Read Online Free

she’d set down. She turned the lights on, and they looked at her, squinting in the brightness. “Mark has to leave now.” Her anger was too pronounced, too obviously out of proportion. Their response to it was to remain frozen in each other’s arms. Kate wanted to throw something at them—a shoe, a book, even her purse wouldhave worked. “I said now,” Kate said. Mark finally sat up and rushed to put his shoes on.
    â€œDid something happen on your date?” Melissa asked.
    â€œI didn’t have a date.”
    She expected a fight from Melissa. But instead her daughter sat up slowly and kept her eyes cautiously on Kate.
    Charles called all week and left pleas on the answering machine that Kate tried her best to ignore. He was blunt. He stuttered and repeated himself. He admitted that he’d been thinking of her. He regretted the words he’d spoken that night. “I’m calling from the back of the store,” he said in one message. “From the warehouse phone. You were right. It is lonely back here.” In another, he became almost desperate. “I guess I just miss you. I hope I’m not saying too much. I realize this is just an answering machine. I realize that I’m begging.” He sounded as hurt and alone as she had felt in the car that night. Nonetheless, she was done with him, until he made what was obviously his final call, the sad bass-tone of resignation in his voice. “I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” he said. When she picked up the phone, he began once again to express his regrets, and because she couldn’t listen to one more simultaneously rambling and halting apology, she said, “OK, Charles. Apology accepted.”
    He wanted to see her as soon as possible. That afternoon he and his son, Ryan, had planned to shoot skeet at the gun club. And so Kate ended up on the edge of town, shouldering a shotgun for the first time in her life and wearing wax earplugs as she blasted away at a “clay pigeon,” a little black disk, and tried to follow the instructions Charles shouted out at her to lead the pigeon by at least a foot. The gun club was in the center of an abandoned field, which looked dead, yellow, and already ravaged by winter. It was a gray day, the air like white smoke, and Kate was surprised by the pleasing and substantial weight of the weapon in her hands, the delicious, earthy odors of cordite and gunpowder after each blast, the sense—there was no mistaking it—of power and control the weapon gave her when she finally obliterated her target. She did so twice, then three times, awed as the disk disintegrated in the air. Behind her, a small boy of aboutten,who wore a camouflage baseball cap and chewed a huge wad of pink bubble gum, pressed a button that released the pigeon every time she shouted the word “Pull!” She handed the shotgun, its barrel hot as a stovetop, to Charles and stood behind him—“Always stand behind the shooter,” he’d told her earlier in a grave voice—and watched now as he meticulously hit pigeon after pigeon. She hadn’t anticipated her excitement at seeing Charles’s skill, the quickness with which he trained the barrel on the target and destroyed it. His arms seemed thicker, more powerful, his shoulders broader. There was no sign of weakness, of hesitancy or doubt, and she was awed to see this unexpected competence in a man who, as she was seeing that afternoon, could barely keep his son in check.
    Ryan was a tall kid with deep-set eyes that seemed on the edge of rage every time he looked at Kate. His mohawk, high and stiff and died salmon pink, and his multiply-pierced ears, lined with studs and hoops, made him seem menacing, especially when he took the shotgun in hand. On the way out to the club, when Charles had stopped for gas and left Kate and Ryan in the car alone, the boy resisted her every attempt at conversation, and then, after