The Stud Book Read Online Free Page B

dead girl.
    So many ways to play the dead girl game. Drunk, it’s better. When you play it right, you’re wasted.
    The bartender surfed. He landed on VBTV, Vampire-Based TV, all hot chicks, dead and undead at the same time. That channel wasn’t even fair to bet on—it was too easy. Humble said, “Go,” and the bartending kid did, and Humble felt himself command the space.
    Another channel flashed the fat body of a monkey. Closed captioning read …  EXPECTING A BUNDLE OF JOY  … That knocked-up monkey looked right at Hum. It looked as though it knew him. Under the stern eyes of the monkey’s gaze he thought he ought to get up and go home to his wife and their new baby, their daughter. Then the channel changed. Any urgency he’d felt faded into the warmth of bourbon.
    Home?
    Home to Georgie, with her stitches in her gut and her bad back, her postpartum gas and grievances. Bella, that elfin thing, was red faced and scowling. He loved them both. He did. He loved them in a way that made him half-sick, to see them waiting at the door, Georgie smiling hello, Bella still wrinkled and squinting, everyone eager to be a family. His daughter was a sleepy pink kidney bean. Shewas as fresh as a car from the factory, everything new, no miles; no scars, no flaws, no resentments. All the world would do was mess that up. When he looked at her, Hum was reduced to the role of a gnarled tree in an enchanted forest waving old limbs and warning, “Go back! Go back! Danger ahead.”
    He loved them in ways beyond his practiced levels. He’d never envisioned himself getting married, but then they did and it’d been his idea, really. That was okay. They’d been married for ten years. He never thought they’d have kids, and now they had one. It made him feel myopic, like he couldn’t see past the next year, or maybe past what he’d already done. But the baby thing? It brought out, in Georgie, a new level of need. Their easy marriage had been a loose knot. Put a baby in the picture, and it pulled those bonds tight.
    Humble was self-employed in computer maintenance. This was supposed to be paternity leave, but Georgie and Bella both slept so much he hadn’t figured out why they needed him home. He itched to order another round, linger in this drinker’s limbo. When the bartender didn’t catch his eye, he almost got up to head home.
    Instead he laid a bet against himself: If the next dead girl showed up within two minutes, on any one of the three TVs, he’d stay. He’d have another bourbon. If the girl didn’t show, he’d pick up his keys and coat and close the tab. Two minutes. The answer to the question that was the rest of Humble Johnson’s evening, or the rest of his life, he laid in the dead girl’s stiff blue hands.
    A real woman, alive, reflected in the mirror, stepped in behind him. She was tall and thin, her hair streaked red and blond like cedar. She shook rain off her dark coat and hung it on a brass hook on the side of a booth. The woman was young, in one T-shirt layered over another, with sweet curves and a high, inviting ass. She turned toward the bartender, caught Humble’s glance in the mirror, and said, “Hey. I know you, don’t I? You fixed my old PC.” She twirled a barstool with one hand.
    Over her shoulder, a crew of men stumbled upon a dead woman near a river. That dead woman’s body gave Humble what he needed. It gave him a gambler’s permission to stay.

N yla stood on the white cement of Georgie’s driveway. Dulcet stomped her way out of the boxwood bushes that lined the house. She used one hand to balance a wobbling pink bakery box. With the other she brushed off dried leaves that clung to her skirt. They’d come to see the baby. They’d called, knocked, rang the doorbell, slapped the back window in case Georgie didn’t hear them at the door, and still nobody answered. She’d said she’d be home.
    A white curly-haired dog jumped against Dulcet’s shin. The sleeve of her satin coat flapped