Lizards: Short Story Read Online Free Page A

wasn’t your fault,” Emma said, but she figured it probably was, and she was suddenly so enraged that she had to leave the room. She washed her hands in the kitchen sink, then put the bag beside the front door.
    “It was alive when I picked it up,” he said. “It was alive, you know? It was alive right up until it died.”
    She sat in the chair facing him. His hands were small enough. On his fingers were silver rings and blood. His red curly hair was combed back and wet. He must have just had a shower. He was lean, the black leather slicked the long muscles of his thighs. “I’ll tell her if you want,” she offered.
    He looked up, surprised. She expected him to say, “No, that’s okay,” but he said, “Would you? Hey, that’d be great. Thanks a lot.”
    So she went down to apartment 104, just in case the woman was home early from school. The bag weighed down, extraordinarily heavy. If the woman cried, she knew that she would, too, but nobody answered the door. When she came back into the apartment, the guy was checking out his reflection in the tv screen. She left the cat in the hallway and sat down across from him again.
    “You’re married,” he said. “Right?”
    “Right.”
    “Okay, I won’t come on to you,” he said seriously.
    “Don’t let that stop you,” she said.
    He lived two floors below her, on unemployment insurance.He came up whenever she phoned. They’d been sleeping together about a month when he said he loved her.
    “You love yourself,” she said.
    He didn’t argue with that. “I mean I really
love
you,” he said.
    “What you love is me making love to you,” she said.
    “Yeah,” he said, nodding. “That’s right,” he said, as if he could rest his case.
    “I’ve been thinking of stopping this anyway,” she said. “I’m too pregnant. I can’t bend over to pick up all the little red hairs you shed.”
4
    Nicky is fifteen months old. Ed, the black giant, shows up one day without White Thing. He’s in uniform. When Emma pushes his hand off her ass, he laughs and says, “I guess you’ve got a baby crawling all over you, you don’t need a man.”
    “As I remember, it was me crawling all over you,” Emma says.
    He offers to take her and Nicky out for lunch, a restaurant that features a roving clown blowing bubbles and dispensing prizes for clean plates. Emma has no clients until four, so she says sure, why not? “Aren’t you on duty?” she asks.
    “My partner’s tied up and I’ve got some time to kill,” he says, and she suspects that what he came here to do, his partner is doing somewhere nearby. Maybe not, though. Maybe his partner is conducting a drug bust or something. Or maybe this is just Ed trying to get himself suspended with pay. She doesn’t ask. Since Nicky came along, anything dicey or unsavoury she’d rather not hear about. She is glad that she will be able to tell Gerry the whole truth—a former client dropped by and invited her and Nicky out for a bite to eat.
    “We’re going in a police car,” she tells Nicky.
    “Please car,” Nicky says demurely.
    Emma changes into a clean white blouse and a long white peasant skirt. She and Nicky sit in the back because Nicky’s car seat is in Gerry’s car. Nicky stands on Emma’s lap and slaps the window. She is wearing a white crocheted sun bonnet, and at stoplights people notice her and look worried. “Funny if Daddy saw us,” Emma says.
    Ed is talking to his police radio, but he laughs and says over his shoulder, “It would teach him not to jump to conclusions.”
    At the restaurant the people ahead of them make way for Ed to pass through. “Hey,” he says, staying at the back of the line. “I don’t take bribes.” There are bubbles rising from behind a high rattan screen, and Ed lifts Nicky onto his shoulders so that she can see the clown on the other side. When it’s their turn to be shown to their seats, Nicky doesn’t want to get down. “It’s okay,” Ed says. He follows the