The Doctor's Tale Read Online Free

them fallen angels.
    Well now, he said, don’t read him wrong. He didn’t mean to say that Starr was a fallen angel. Not exactly. But, in a funny kind of way, he guessed that, yeah, that is exactly what he meant to say. Starr fell for him and she was his angel. He fell—and hard—for her too, the day he and Starr first met, he said, oh about four, maybe five months ago now…
    The first time Eddie noticed Starr’s legs, she was picking tomatoes in her garden next door. He leaned on the painted white fence and asked her if she needed anything from the grocery store. Starr said she wanted some new brand of detergent she saw on television, the kind that worked in cold water. Eddie said he needed some Turtle Wax for the Pontiac. “We might as well go together,” he said. Starr said she thought that made good sense.
    The smells of smoky barbecue, chlorine, and freshly mowed grass wafted on the summer breeze. Cicadas chirped to the shrieks of giggling girls, and pop tunes blared through open car windows. Eddie thought a lot about barbecues and swimming pools these days—those were the good times, baby—but he never went to any no more. Not the way they used to, him and Lori.
    While he drove, Eddie thought about those long, tanned legs beside him. Ever since Lori up and got sick, sometime last year, he stopped thinking about such things. At least he thought he did. He barely recognized this surge of desire bubbling inside of him, like steaming lava in a dormant volcano. A spicy smell, reminiscent of cinnamon, tickled his nose. The last time he felt like this was about eight years ago, when he fell so hard for Lori and—
    “Eddie,” Starr said, “it’s just so nice of you to give me a lift like this. Why don’t we stop and get us a little something to eat?” Starr pointed at a rambling motel in the distance. “I hear they make good fried okra in there. I like mine deep-fried.” Starr smacked her bright pink lips,lined in a darker shade of temptation. “How ‘bout you, Eddie? How do you like it?”
    Despite the sun’s glare, Eddie could see her lips, all full and glossy. He focused on the road. Lori must be on her way home from the doctor’s office about now. He knew he should keep on driving and reading the signs.
    “Starr,” he said, “I got to be honest with you. I ain’t never tried okra, so I wouldn’t know nothing ‘bout the deep-fried part.”
    There it was, that girly giggle of hers, the one that made him feel so young, so alive, so…
    “Well, Eddie Raines, if you haven’t tried fried okra, you haven’t lived. Now, boy, you just listen to me. Pull off this highway.” She crossed her long, tanned legs and turned to face him. “And I’ll show you what life’s about.”
    Eddie felt flushed and hot. He took a deep breath. Until today, he didn’t believe in magic. Now, he decided it might feel like whatever it was that he was feeling right about now. While the lazy afternoon breeze wafted through the open window, Starr’s chatter and the throbbing music resurrected some latent appetites Eddie forgot he had. A sudden and ravenous hunger pulsed through his body.
    “You know something, Starr?” he said. “Fried okra might be just what I need.”
    Starr giggled like a teenager. “I believe you’re right. Here we go, Eddie, there’s the exit. Just turn at the top of the ramp over there, honey.”
    “Honey?” Exactly how the Pontiac rolled up the ramp and onto the gravel parking lot, well, Eddie never quite understood how or when that happened. Every time he thought about that first time with Starr, the details eluded him.
    And he thought about it, well…a lot, and every day.
    “That’s all I got to say,” Eddie said. “I just wish things could be the way they used to be, you know, before Lori up and got so sick. I just can’t forget those times. And, I don’t want to neither.”
    I knew what Eddie was trying to say, but unlike him, I did want to forget his story.
    I simply