The Girls of Tonsil Lake Read Online Free

butt-hugging jeans and a faded blue shirt that pulled tight over his shoulders when he moved.
    I remembered there had been a little three-corner tear in the sleeve of that shirt I’d wanted to mend. That should have told me something right there, since I’ve never purposefully mended a goddamned thing.
    Though he’d lived in Lewis Point most of his life, I had never seen him before. But after that night I saw him every time I turned around. He coached young Jake’s Little League team, drove in Miranda’s carpool, and, that Labor Day weekend, held out his firefighter’s boot to collect money for the muscular dystrophy telethon. I put in a ten-dollar bill I couldn’t afford.
    When his wife died, I sent a card. And every time I saw him after that, my heart would do weird things and I’d get so damned horny it felt like a hot flash.
    A year later, when he asked me for a date, I said no.
    Because I knew I would love Paul Lindquist, and I wasn’t going to do that again. Ever.
    And I never did.
    But every couple of weeks while I was sick, he sent me a card—never anything sentimental or familiar, just funny or mildly obscene. The first ones, he’d signed “Take care, Paul Lindquist,” but by the time the cards slowed to a stop, he was scrawling, “Best, Paul,” across the bottom. I’d missed those cards when I got better.
    All this retrospection makes me restless. I called Jean to invite her to lunch, and she said no, sounding frazzled.
    “I have to send this book in by Monday and I’ve still got fifty pages to write. I always make my deadlines, and I don’t want that to change because every other forny thing in my life has.”
    “Okay, go back to work. I won’t bother you.”
    I hung up quickly, but then I got to thinking about all the time Jean had spent with me over the past year. I was probably the reason she only had three days to write fifty pages. Oh, Christ, more guilt. I don’t like guilt in the first place, and Miranda had already given me my dose for the day. Even though it was hers instead of mine, I’d felt it.
    At noon, I went through a drive-through and got two burgers, two orders of fries, and two vanilla shakes and drove out to Jean’s house in Willow Wood Estates.
    She was in her dining room at her computer, wearing a nightshirt. She hadn’t put on her makeup or combed her hair and she looked like shit. It was like seeing the American flag lying on the ground, incongruous and probably illegal. Jean was always neat. She didn’t wear a lot of makeup, but she wore it right, and her soft brown hair was always in this smooth curve with the sides tucked behind her ears.
    One of the things I love about her is that she’s always the same. She doesn’t look as young as Suzanne or as elegant as Vin, though she could still pass for an attractive forty-five. But today she looked every minute of her fifty-one—even her gray roots were showing. I’d never seen this before. Root concealment is like a religion with her and Suzanne.
    “Shut it down,” I said. I thought about bellowing it, since I’d rediscovered my bellow, but Jean looked too fragile to be yelled at.
    I thought for a minute she was going to cry, but she didn’t. She stuck her chin out and got up. “I’m sorry for the mess.”
    There wasn’t a thing out of place in her house—there never was—and no dust mote had dared to land on any of the shining surfaces. The only mess was her. God, I hated that.
    When we were sitting at the bar in the kitchen sucking down sloppy, artery-clogging cheeseburgers and fries, I said, “Call your editor. Ask for an extension,” just like I knew what I was talking about.
    “You don’t understand. My editor’s about twelve years old. She inherited me. She’d much rather develop her own stable of writers than nurse along an over-the-hill veteran.”
    “Then tell her to forny off. Ask for a new editor, one that is at least of legal drinking age.”
    “I can’t do that.”
    As soon as we’d