Angels Read Online Free Page B

fairly reliable and productive.
    “You want me to go?” I asked faintly.
    “Yes.”
    “When?”
    “Now would be good.”
    Oddly enough, it was losing my job that finally made me decide to leave Garv. I don't really understand why. Because, you know, it's not easy to leave someone. Not in real life. In fiction it's all so cut and dried and clear: if you can see no future together, then of course you'd leave. Simple. Or if he's having an affair, then you'd be a total idiot to stay, right?
    But in real life it's amazing the things that conspire to keep you together. You might think, okay, so we can't seem to make each other happy anymore, but I get along so well with his sister and my friends are so fond of him that our lives are too interwoven for us to be able to extricate ourselves. And this is our house, and see those lupines in our little back garden? I planted them. (Well, not planted planted , I didn't actually put them in the ground with my own hands, it was a weird old man we hired named Michael who did, but I masterminded the whole thing.) Leaving someone is a big deal. I was walking away from a lot more than a person; it was an entire life I was saying good-bye to.
    But the shock of losing my job had triggered the conviction that everything was falling apart. Once the door to one disaster had opened, the possibilities for catastrophe seemed open-ended and I felt I'd no choice but to go along with my ANGELS / 23
    life as it unraveled. Losing a job? Why not go for broke and lose a marriage as well? Ours had suffered so many body blows during the past months, it was over in all but name anyway.
    By the time Garv came home from work, I was in the bedroom, waist-high in a pathetic attempt at packing. How anyone manages to do a midnight flit is beyond me. Most people (if they're anything like me) accumulate so much stuff .
    He stood and looked at me and it was like I was dreaming the whole thing.
    He seemed surprised. Or maybe not. “What's going on?”
    This was my cue for the dramatic exit lines people always deliver in fiction. I'm leaving you! It's OVER.
    Instead I hung my head and mumbled, “I think I'd better go.
    We've tried our best with this and…”
    “Right.” He swallowed. “Right.” Then he nodded, and the nod was the worst part. Such resignation in it. He agreed with me, it seemed.
    “I lost my job today.”
    “Christ. What happened?”
    “I've been distracted, and I've also taken too much sick leave.”
    “Bastards.”
    “Yeah, well.” I sighed. “The thing is, I mightn't make this month's mortgage, so I'll give it to you from my Ladies' Nice Things account.”
    “Forget it, forget it. I'll take care of it.”
    Then we lapsed into silence and it became clear that the mortgage was all he was planning to take care of.
    Maybe I should have been angry with him and truffle woman.
    Perhaps I should have despised him for not jumping into the breach and promising me passionately that he wouldn't let me go, and that we could work it out.
    But the truth was, right then, I wanted to go.

CHAPTER THREE
    MAINTENANCE-LEVEL DYSFUNCTIONAL . That's how I'd like to describe my family, the Walshes. Well, actually, that's not how I'd like to describe my family. I'd like to describe my family as the prototype for the Brady Bunch. I'd like to describe my family as the Waltons of Walton's Mountain. But alas, maintenance-level dysfunctional is as good as it gets.
    I have four sisters and the credo that each of them seems to live her life by is The More Dramas the Better. (Sample thereof. Claire's husband left her the day she'd given birth to their first child; Rachel is a [recovered] addict; Anna doesn't really do reality; and Helen, the youngest, well, it's kind of hard for me to describe…) But I've never been fond of chaos and I couldn't figure out why I was so different. In my lonelier moments, I used to entertain a fantasy that I was adopted. Which I could never truly relax into because it was obvious from