The Man in 3B Read Online Free Page A

anytime.”
    I couldn’t wait to get my hands on some of Daryl’s stuff.

Avery
3
    It was a good thing I wasn’t driving, I thought as I walked home from Jiggles strip club, drunker than I’d been in a very long time. “Happy fuckin’ birthday to me,” I muttered as I stumbled down the sidewalk toward home.
    Yes, it was my birthday—my fiftieth, to be exact—and I had spent it alone at Jiggles, ogling the tits and ass of some of the best-looking women I’d seen in a while. Most men would leave a place like that and head home to their wives, where they would make love in the dark, fantasizing that it was a stripper underneath them. Me, I couldn’t stomach the thought of touching my wife, not with the way she had let herself go. It was more than the fact that I was turned off by fat women. Her weight gain pissed me off because her ever-expanding waistline was a symbol for how much everything in my life had gone to shit. Every time I looked at her I was reminded of how far I’d fallen.
    See, five years ago I was on top of my game, well on my way to becoming a millionaire as the top-selling mortgage broker for Option One right here in Queens; but when the bottom fell out of the housing market, I became a casualty of my own success. One day I’m the darling of the company, making six figures, newly married to one of the finest women you’d ever wanna see, rocking his and hers Mercedes, and living in a big-ass house out on Long Island. Then the next day, the housing market is in the toilet and they’re letting me go without notice. I think that was the first time, other than when my kid was born, that I actually shed tears as a grown man, but trust me, it wasn’t my last.
    With the economy the way it was, the job market was so tight that I couldn’t get a job at McDonald’s, let alone another mortgage company or bank. By the time my unemployment ran out, both of our cars had been repossessed. I can’t begin to tell you how much of a loser I felt like, standing there with my wife, watching those bastards tow away our cars. By that time, I was four months behind on an upside-down mortgage, and like half of America, I just gave up and stopped making payments altogether. Six months later the bank foreclosed on our house and sold it on the courthouse steps for half of what I paid for it. Things were so bad that I ended up filing for bankruptcy. It was an awful time in my life, one I don’t think I could have ever prepared for. I mean, who prepares to be a goddamn loser?
    My wife, Connie, tried to be supportive. She’d say things like, “You’ll find another job. Things will get better. You just wait and see.”
    She was trying to remain upbeat, but by that time, I was so damn depressed I could barely even look at her, let alone listen to her perky, Susie Sunshine encouragement. It got to the point where I was basically ignoring my wife, and she started drowning her sorrows in junk food.
    While I was losing all the material things in my life, my once sexy, superfine, curvy spouse was packing on the pounds—lots of them. She said she’d only put on fifty pounds since I married her five years ago, but I was willing to wager it was more like seventy-five to a hundred. Once upon a time I couldn’t wait to get home just to look at her, and now I was embarrassed to walk down the street with her fat ass.
    Yeah, I know I sound insensitive, but I don’t do fat. Never have. That’s why I left my first wife, and Connie, as supportive as she was about our financial situation, knew that. Sometimes I wondered if the real reason she wanted me to find a new job was so I could support her Dunkin’ Donuts habit.
    Connie was right about one thing, though. I did eventually find another job about eight months after my unemployment ran out. Now instead of closing deals on million-dollar homes, I was selling furniture at Cheap Sam’s for ten dollars an hour. Oh, I got commissiontoo, which this past week brought my check to a