Thief of Dreams Read Online Free Page B

the twisting mountain roads to Cedar Hill and the same amount of time going back Sunday night, and so, start work on Monday exhausted. When he left that job for another in Tullahoma, Tennessee, they did not see each other for months at a time.
    Of course she hadn’t felt she was very important to him. Who could blame her? And of course she’d complained. Who wouldn’t? People married because they wanted and needed to live together. If you loved someone, you wanted to be with them; it was as plain as day to her, and she told him so. But who would have expected him to show up with an ugly purple house trailer, as though that would solve everything? As though that didn’t involve leaving her home, her friends, and everyone she’d ever known. As though it didn’t involve taking James out of school and away from everything he loved. Edward Tally was an inconsiderate man to the marrow of his bones, and you could teach a cat to sing quicker than you could show him that and make him see it.
    She hated living in a trailer. Hated having to put on a house-coat and slippers and sometimes a raincoat to walk to the bath-house in the middle of the night to use the toilet, or to go all that way to take a shower or wash her hair or do the laundry. The trailer wasn’t the least bit snug, as he often claimed with a twinkle in his eye and a grin on his face when the rain was lashing it with a sound like gravel being thrown against its side and the wind was fairly making it rock. And who could make love with any joy and peace when James was only a few feet away and nothing but a thin plywood partition like the bellows of a concertina between them? Oh, but she’d been unhappy. And unhappier still when he’d finally had his way and sold their home in Cedar Hill, which they’d been renting out and which he’d allowed them to believe they’d return to. And he hadn’t put the money back toward the better house they’d buy someday, as he’d promised, but had bought himself a fancy 1941 Packard—and would have bought a new one, no doubt, if there had been any new cars to buy. And he’d taken to coming home one or two nights a week definitely tipsy, with no regard for her and the dinner she’d made. And he could see no harm in it, as though it were only a boyish prank or a working man’s innocent due. What did he care that she’d been worried out of her mind that he was dead on the highway or that the supper she’d cooked him had been kept warm until it wasn’t anything more than a drab mess in her pots and pans? Earlier in their marriage he’d only rarely done that sort of thing, but toward the end she never knew when to count on him. And likely as not he’d try to tell her he’d only just had a couple of beers and the time had just slipped past him. As if she hadn’t lived with him long enough to know how much alcohol it took to put that glazed look in his eye.
    And there were nights when he didn’t come home at all. At midnight or maybe one or two in the morning she’d get a call from one of his construction buddies she’d hardly met or never met, and this strange voice would tell her he’d had a little too much to drive, but they’d see to it that he got to work the next day, and he’d be just fine. Sure, she’d see him the next afternoon shuffling up with his hat in his hand, they would say, as though they, too, were telling her about a schoolboy prank, as though it were funny and innocent or even, somehow, endearing.
    She’d got so sick of it that sometimes she really didn’t mind so much when he’d quit one job for another and leave her and James for months in one strange city while he went off to the next. They’d fought until, at last, they didn’t fight anymore, or make love anymore, or even talk, so that when he said he was going to Pittsburgh, she’d said that was fine, because she and