The Stories of Richard Bausch Read Online Free

enough to throw over a rhinoceros and keep it dry in the rain.
    The night she kicked me out, she came home with a new friend. A new lover, she told me. She made her lover wait out on the front lawn while she broke the news. “Do you understand me, Ignatius? I want you out. I’ve decided I don’t need a man to tell me who I am. You can stay until you find a place. Sleep on the sofa. But Grace is moving in with us.”
    Grace had walked into the hospital cafeteria several weeks before, after having been bandaged up in the emergency room. She’d been in a traffic accident, and her nose and upper lip were cut. Hildie and she got to talking, and pretty soon they were meeting for drinks after Hildie’s shifts. It was just like Hildie and me, in a way, except that now she was deciding that she wanted a woman and not a man. I never thought much of myself, but this hurt me. “She’s the most interesting person I’ve ever been around,” Hildie said, “and you and I haven’t been anything to each other for a long time.” This was true. Grace walked up to the door, and Hildie opened it and stepped back for her to come in, acting like this was the grand entrance of her happiness. Grace had a big white bandage over her nose, but we weren’t in the same room more than fifteen minutes before I recognized Samantha. Blond this time. A few pounds heavier, a little fuller in the face. But unmistakably her.
    “Hello, Grace.”
    She looked at me with those little black eyes, and then sat on the couch next to Hildie. I went into the bedroom and started packing, throwing shirts in a suitcase, and some slacks and socks and underwear. I wasn’t sure what I should take with me. I could hear Samantha/Grace in the next room. She had built her own house, she was saying, and had learned how to play several musical instruments but then forgot how. She had spent the night with Sting during a thunderstorm and power outage in Atlanta. By the time I gotback to the living room, she was talking about Mount Saint Helens. She was there when it blew. She almost died.
    “Ever been on the reservation?” I asked. I was putting a few of my books into my suitcase.
    They both looked at me as though I had trees growing out of my head.
    “Reservation?” Samantha/Grace asked.
    I couldn’t tell if she recognized me. She stared, and then she smiled. So I smiled back, then resumed packing.
    She said, “I’ve done so much wandering around. I’ve been in almost every state of the union, and made love in each one of them, too.”
    “I always wanted to go to Hawaii,” Hildie said, laughing.
    “Oh, absolutely. I’ve been there. I was married and lived there, but I got divorced.”
    “Must’ve been a tough week,” I put in. It was a nasty thing to say. And it was the wrong time to say it. It made me look bad. I said, “Little joke, girls.”
    “Oh,” Samantha/Grace said. “Haw.”
    Hildie shook her head. “Men.”
    “Haw, haw,” Samantha/Grace said.
    “Ever been to Montana?” I asked her.
    “I worked in the emergency ward at the hospital in Dutton,” Hildie said. “A terrible lonely job. That’s where I had the misfortune of meeting Ignatius.”
    And Samantha/Grace smiled and leaned back in her chair. My name is not one that a person forgets easily. And you remember somebody as small as I am, too. She stared at me with those little wolverine’s eyes, and kept smiling.
    Clasping her hands behind her blond head, Samantha/Grace said, “Well, you know, I guess to be truthful I’d have to say I never was actually in Montana. That’s one of the few places I’ve never been.”
    I couldn’t help it.
    A laugh came up out of me like a sneeze. I laughed and laughed and went on laughing—so hard that Hildie got mad, and the madder she got the more I laughed. Before I had stopped laughing, she’d thrown all my things out on the lawn. This was the last night of my marriage, I knew that, and that was all right with me. I wouldn’t want anyone to