Weep for Me Read Online Free Page A

her blue eyes. Not with the two horizontal wrinkles across her throat. Not with the look of the veins on the backs of her hands.
    “Now you’re looking at me that way again,” she said, smiling.
    “That’s my bank-teller expression. Always size up the customer.”
    She leaned toward me, her eyes wide. “Oh, Kyle. I love you so!”
    “You’re going to prove that in a New York hotel.”
    The blush moved up her throat and across her cheeks. “I was thinking about that, Kyle. Won’t two weeks like that be dreadfully expensive?”
    “We’ve been planning on it a long time. Since before the war.”
    “But babies are so expensive. And they won’t let me work in the office after the fifth month. I was talking to Alice Rand the other day. She says you can rent a wonderful camp on Blue Mountain Lake for only—”
    “We’re going to New York the way we planned it!” I said, and it came out louder than I had expected.
    Her lips compressed tightly. “All right, Kyle. Whatever you say.”
    “Don’t be sore.”
    “Am I supposed to like it when you shout at me?”
    “I wasn’t aware of shouting.”
    Her face softened. She leaned toward me again. “Oh, Kyle, darling! We shouldn’t quarrel. Not over a thing like a honeymoon. Should we?”
    “It is sort of silly, isn’t it?” Her blue eyes smiled. Open, honest blue eyes. Quite different from eyes of a brown so dark that it was difficult to see where iris stopped and pupil started.
    We walked slowly back through the night, away from the neon of the shopping center. Big evening. Forty cents total investment. Twenty for bus fare, a dime for the ice cream, a dime for the Cokes. Real riotous living. Kids raced across the shadowed lawns, leaping the hedges. “You’re out!” “I am not!” “You are so!” “I’m not!” “You are!” “Mamma! Tommy’s not being
fair!
” “You children play nicely, or you’re going to have to come to bed.”
    We went up onto the porch. Through a gap between shade and window frame I could see the glaring white of the TV screen. We sat on the canvas cushions of the swing.
    “I suppose,” Jo Anne said, “that it’s natural for us to get a little irritable with each other. The time left is so short. And we’ve waited so long. Just nervousness, I guess.”
    “Probably it,” I said.
    The TV comedian, knocking himself out in the living room, was an explosive counterpoint to our low-toned conversation.
    “It will be a good marriage, Kyle. We like the same things, think the same way.”
    “Trying to talk me into it, honey?” I asked her teasingly.
    She sneezed so hard that she shook the couch. “Damn!” she said, and blew her nose on a wad of Kleenex.
    “Better stay home tomorrow and get rid of that cold.”
    “I’ll see how I feel in the morning.”
    I slid my arm around her shoulders, tilted her chin up with my free hand. “Don’t, Kyle! You’ll catch my bugs.”
    But it was important for me to kiss her. It was important that I make her stir me up. Emily Rudolph stood, quiet and amused, in the back of my mind, and she was watching me. She was looking down at my drab little life and promising an exciting tangent, a special deviation from the pattern I had set myself. And the thought of such a tangent excited me. Excitement had to be smothered by excitement of another kind. And my Jo Anne was there on the dark porch beside me.
    “I’ll risk it,” I said, and pressed my mouth down hard on hers. We had grown into the cautious habit of keeping our kisses casual. I had no intention of keeping this one casual. Emily Rudolph still watched me. I was aware of her watching me. She seemed to be telling me that her victory over me was an astonishingly easy one because I knew this girl I was kissing far too well. There was no mystery left in Jo Anne. I knew her so well and had waited so long that when at last I had her, it would be something so long anticipated as to become boring before the accomplishment.
    With a strange