The Other Widow Read Online Free

when she falls into a fitful, dreamless sleep, waking later to her husband tugging at the blanket. She opens one eye, surveys the room through the ribboned edges of the quilt. The sun tilts in at the window. In the kitchen, Purrl stares pointedly at her empty dish.
    â€œWhere’s Lily?”
    â€œSpent the night at Mia’s,” Samuel says, and Dorrie feels a small surge of relief that Lily’s at her best friend’s house. Samuel’s voice is gruff, impatient. His hair sticks up in tufts. “So where were you?” He plunges his hands in his jeans pockets and looks around until his eyes light on a pack of cigarettes on the dining room table.
    He’s angry. She can see it in the way he walks across the room, his short sharp strides. She gets up, wraps the quilt around her in the cold house, and slides behind him in her stocking feet. “I guess it was a lot later than I thought.”
    She reaches out to touch him, but he takes a step away, leaving her hand stuck in the air like a small chapped flag. She pumps up the thermostat and tucks her hands back inside the quilt. “It’s freezing in here,” she says, but Samuel doesn’t answer. He sits down at the dining room table with a coffee cup that used to say One Great Dad, but, after all these years of heavy coffee drinking, it says, O eat Dad. Smoke from his cigarette drifts out a window he’s cracked open to the bleakness of the yard, and Latin music from next door flies in on the wind. “I called you all night.”
    â€œOh,” Dorrie says. “I guess my phone was off. Sorry. Jeananne was upset,” she tells him, “so I took her out for a drink. I left you a note. Didn’t you see it? On the door?” She’s babbling, nervous. She wills herself to stop before she says too much. Dorrie’s often thought that restlessness and Catholicism are a dangerous mix, that she’s always been a little too forthcoming, a little too contrite for her own good.
    In the glass on the cupboard door, she watches Samuel staring at her back. His lips are tight over his teeth. He still looks furious and she doesn’t really blame him. He shakes his head, glances away from her to the backyard. He’s actually something of a mystery to her lately, this man she’s been with over twenty years. She pries her thoughts away from the night before, from Joe, from the car driving straight at her. She tries to concentrate on this one minute of this one morning in her living room with an angry husband, a failing marriage she has no idea how to save.
    As far as she knows, her husband’s never been truly unfaithful to her, at least not with another woman. She doesn’t count the bottle, but sometimes she thinks she should. Other times she looks at him and wonders why she couldn’t just be satisfied with what she had, even if Samuel is unquestionably an alcoholic like his father, dead at sixty three from cirrhosis, never mind the euphemistic “liver troubles.” You’re the love of my life, Dorrie, Samuel always says. Why couldn’t that just be enough?
    Certainly her husband is no saint, with his riveting gray eyes, his tousled good looks. And there was all that flirting with a neighbor right around the time he and Dorrie had a row. He’d packed a bag and vanished for the next few days, insisting later that he’d moved himself into a cheap hotel, but Dorrie always wondered if that was true. She thought the flirtatious neighbor looked at Samuel differently after his three nights away, as if they shared a secret, and once she caught the woman smirking at her in the grocery store. “You have trust issues,” Samuel said when she mentioned the encounter at the market, and Dorrie couldn’t argue with him there.
    Men are just really stupid, her best friend, Viv, said when Dorrie told her about Samuel disappearing at a dinner party given by friends— She wanted me to help her