The Land of Steady Habits: A Novel Read Online Free

said. “Do you notice the people here?”
    The rest of the room seemed somehow very far away.
    “They’re too polite to say it, Anders, but they’re wondering why you’re here.”
    “I was invited,” he said.
    Her face fell into an expression of pity.
    “ Everyone’s invited.”
    Even though he suddenly knew that was absolutely true, and even though he felt his dike of composure beginning to give way to a tide of humiliation, he didn’t say anything.
    “What?” she said. “You think this is funny? ”
    He shook his head, but it was too late. He was laughing and wasn’t going to be able to stop.
    She leaned in very close. “You were the one who wanted space,” she whispered. He nodded vigorously, as if to say, I know, I know, but she was already off. “I am so through with this crap, Anders, I am done. It’s not my job to babysit you anymore.” She shook her head. “Why would you come here?” she said. “You’re not welcome. These people are not your friends. I mean, you were the one who wanted out, so for God fucking sake, get out. ”
    He knew it would hurt like hell tomorrow morning when he reconstructed her words as best he could in his head, listening to the exact way she’d enunciated welcome, as in, “You’re not wel-comb,” trying to figure out if what she was saying was that he had no right to be mad or that he had no right to be there at all—trying to determine if his desire to hold her squirming against his chest as he had the night her mother died was during or after their little talk—and he knew he looked like a crazy person, giggling as someone scolded him, his eyes red, his drink mostly gone, and there was nothing he could imagine that would sober him at this point, until Mitchell Ashby came through the living room dragging Charlie by his armpits across the hardwood floors, yelling angrily for an ambulance. Charlie’s face was gray, his neck slack beneath his bushy head. Within seconds some doctors had gathered and pulled him out of the room with most of the party following, and it seemed a few seconds later the living room was filled with the eerie flashes of emergency vehicles, the scratchy voices on their radios cutting through the house like the Morse code of an urgent message.
    The two other boys stood in the kitchen doorway on the opposite side of the room, watching with their mouths open. Helene got up and ran to see if she could help, and before long, as Charlie was being slid into the fat back of the ambulance, Helene had her hand on Sophie Ashby, who, with her broom-handle arms and blow-dried hair, looked to Anders more like a scarecrow than ever. After the ambulance had pulled away and the truck idling had disappeared, along with the party’s hosts, some grabbed their coats as if to leave and then milled around the foyer, suddenly uncomfortable with abandoning a house that had just been plunged into distress before their very eyes. A team of helpers had started cleaning up, making quick trips to the kitchen garbage with fists of soiled napkins and plastic cups bloodied with wine, and soon the foyer guests joined them, their own fur coats open and purses hanging off them as they cleaned and cleaned the room, until finally someone opened the stereo cabinet and politely killed the music.

2
    To hear her tell it, and she often did, it was a miracle that Anders and Helene had ever met in college, much less fallen in love, because, as a scholarship kid besieged with scholarship duties—dish scraping and book filing and towel folding—Anders spent every moment he wasn’t wearing an apron sequestered in a bubble of academic determination. Though he liked the halo of hard work her story put over him—especially later, when they would be, say, sitting with people around a wicker table at a beach home on the Cape and he could feel the others pause to consider, for the briefest moment, how much of any of this they had honestly earned—it wasn’t completely true. Not that