When the Saints Read Online Free

soon as he sees me. We screw for a while on his reclining chair before he goes to work. A couple of things I learned about him overnight are that hedoesn’t have a last name and he doesn’t drink coffee. I don’t think I can trust anyone who doesn’t drink coffee.
    The door slams and for fun I yell, “Have a good day at work, honey!”
    His house is all right even though it hasn’t got an upstairs. It’s damp and the ceilings are low, but he has some houseplants and you can tell he pushes a mop around now and then. I pour myself a glass of water and read all the magnets on his fridge.
Tim’s Autobody. 2-4-1 Pizza.
There’s one shaped like a fish that says,
Do Unto Others.
I survey the kitchen and try to imagine it with a nice tablecloth and curtains on the windows. The walls are bare except for a calendar and a small wooden shelf holding a cookbook and a framed picture of an auburn-haired woman with nice tanned legs and her arms around West. I wonder how he messed that up.
    I open the cookbook and read the inscription:
Merry Christmas, West! Now learn how to cook and stop mooching scraps at our house.
    In the bathroom, I wipe down the mirror. It’s been a while since I’ve had a good hard look at myself. After I got off the bus in Halifax, I hitchhiked up the 101 and met a nice family from Paradise who offered to let me crash in their teepee while I decided where to go next. The “teepee” was a homemade contraption draped in My Little Pony comforters and tarps. Instead of a firepit, they stuck an electric space heater in there and ran extension cords up to the house. The whole thing was a fire trap and smelled like nail polish remover, but the droopy mattresses piled on top of each other made for the best sleep of my life.
    I had high hopes for Paradise based on the name and hung around a couple of weeks to see if anything was going on. Nothing was. Unless you count glow-in-the-dark karaoke in a church basement. The microphone shone electric pink and a heavy-set woman sang “The Rose” into it with such passion that sweat soaked through the underarms of her caftan. She seemed to think I was a secret talent scout from New York City, kept looking over during the solo break to gauge my reaction. Eventually I just admitted to myself that I was inching my way back home, walked to the side of the highway and stuck my thumb out.
    I look more like my mother now that I’m finally here. We’ve got the same stringy hair and that caged-animal look in our eyes. She creeps into my mind more than usual these days. Quick snapshots of her. She used to paint tiny hearts and things on my fingernails before that was popular. She hardly ever laughed, but when she did, it sounded like a rusty motorbike starting up. We’d start imitating it and she’d clam up again.
    I poke around in his cabinets. I figure if there’s a chance of that redhead coming back and catching me here, finding makeup in a drawer would be a good sign. Women leave behind pots and pans, sometimes clothes, but never makeup. Once you find that shade of lipstick that subtly distracts attention away from the rest of your face, you’d crawl down an outhouse to retrieve it. There’s no trace of her.
    I fish my purse out from under the bed for my own crusty makeup tubes and use them to freshen up a little, but then I figure I could do with a shower, so I wipe it all off again. The stall is tiny and the walls are wood panelled instead of waterproofso the wood’s gone all grey and soft and there’s mould in between the slats. The shower head just gives a trickle and the water smells rank. It takes me half the time I’m in there to figure out how to make it run hot, and when I get out, the phone is ringing and ringing.
    “Hello?”
    “You find the towels?”
    “You watching me on a surveillance camera?”
    “What?”
    “I just got out of your shower. I’m standing here dripping.”
    “There’s a clean towel in the hall closet.”
    “It’s the only thing