Unkiss Me Read Online Free Page B

utterance and the act, many months pass. Couples’ counseling with two different therapists. Many, many books—even those codependent no more books with the Jonathan Livingston Seagull jewelry-wearing authors. You spend time now in bed with your dead husband; you have become close again. Your dead husband would never have bought an RV park out in the desert. Your dead husband didn’t spend his days meandering, always choosing the longest distance between two points. He didn’t construct his workday around getting stoned. That’s true, says your dead husband. But not because I wouldn’t have wanted to.
    You sink into metaphor. Metaphor has always been your best friend, hasn’t it? You begin to think of people as trees. The dead husband was a birch. One of those striking-but-fragile trees, with lots of good, serviceable seed. Birches often splinter into kindling before maturity. The carpenter is a cottonwood. Yes, definitely a cottonwood. Biggest tree in the neighborhood, rooting near water, and getting fluff all over everything at least once a year. You, well, you’re obviously a willow, just look at how you bend. A weeping willow, of course, also a creek dweller, hence your association with the cottonwood.
    But, along comes the drought. Money has dried up. You wake up, and you’re forty years old and you don’t have a pot to piss in. Except the hot springs. The carpenter wants to move out there. He woos you with the kind of house you know he could build. “C’mon,” he says, “just imagine what a great life it would be!”
    “You need to go to rehab,” is your response. In fact, it’s your response to everything. You are absolutely convinced that if the carpenter just stopped smoking weed, everything would be perfect. Okay, maybe not perfect, but less screwed up. So you decide to stop being a weeping willow, and see what life would be like as a giant redwood, the most “don’t fuck with me” of all the trees. As a redwood, you now feel confident giving the carpenter an ultimatum: your family or your herb.
    25.
    Spine Twisting Pose
    The carpenter moves to a project house, and then an apartment. “The hovel,” he calls both these places, as a way to smother you in guilt as you lay on your new queen mattress in the family dwelling. You are on the phone with him an average of four hours each day. You have never spoken with him this much. He’s joined a twelve step program, and, he tells you, he goes back and forth between thinking these guys have a point and these guys are full of shit. You vacillate between wanting him back and drawing up divorce papers. You look at your little son, the blond hair, the blue eyes, the innate mechanical aptitude. There he is, hammering the pegs down in his workbench facsimile. Sawing your pillow with his little plastic saw.
    The older children are teenagers now. How did that happen? Your daughter tells you to stick to your guns. “He’s had his chances, Mom,” she says. But you know she loves the carpenter with all her heart. The man who taught her how to swim. The man who once carried her on his shoulders up the Snake River Canyon, when she was too tired to walk.
    Your teenage son tells you he misses the carpenter. He sees his side of things. You look at this boy, who will be shaving in a year or so, and you want to throttle your dead husband. Suddenly, your anger about his death—the unfairness, the grotesque way he died when a Delta 88 slammed head-on into his Mustang, four days before his daughter’s birth—swells from the depths of your gut. And now, now especially, with your first-born approaching manhood, you begin to see DNA working its mysterious weave: the toe-out gait, the tenor of his voice, the analytical shyness when he’s forced into conversation with someone new. His sense of irony. His sense of decency. The way he never gets stains on his clothing. And here comes the unwelcome intrusion that this same revelation will visit when your youngest boy