A Regular Guy Read Online Free

love: she’d become more Owens than he was. Passing wishes he’d mentioned were her life. She really had lived on an apple farm.
    There was another man now, Mack Soto, who had two boys of his own and a fat short wife who had once been petite. He gave Mary white-bordered photographs of his sons, and from then on, Mary made sure to have Jane’s picture taken in a machine booth every season, and she sent these to Owens, with Jane’s age penciled on the border.
    Mack drove to the wintercamp one night a week, while his wife had her book club. His coming made a party. They lit candles and drank long ribbons of brandy, which tangled in Jane’s stomach, her arms and legs loosely knotted, like a doll she’d once seen, held together with rubber bands.
    In the deep middle of one night, they sent her outside to walk. She put on her jacket, jammed her hands in the pockets.
    “It’s safe out there, isn’t it?” she heard her mother say, behind the door.
    Mack’s voice slowed, stony and arrested, in a permanent state of nostalgia. “I used to walk with my grandfather here when I was a boy.”He told them what he’d already told his sons, but his sons never listened fully because while he talked their mother rolled her eyes.
    There was noise that was branches swaying, pine.
    “We’re lucky he has no girl,” Mary had said. “He always wanted a girl. She did too, I suppose.” The fat short wife who had once been petite took to bed when her second son was born. She got up again two months later wanting no more children and refused to let him touch her, except to rub her head.
    Jane and Mary were always like this, knowing intricate stories about other people while the other people knew nothing about them, not even that they were alive. Jane wondered if her father understood how they ran out of money and worried what they would eat. The time he came in the middle of the night and they played checkers on the dusty floor, she asked for his phone number. He shrugged and said, “You already have it.” She made him write it again, with his finger on the floor, but it was only the number of a phone at an office and other people answered; they sometimes left five messages and still didn’t hear.
    Jane walked the long road, her shoes so soft the bottoms of her feet felt pine needles. Stars touched the tops of her hands like bites, and trees on both sides drew up tall, tilting. She pulled the caps off acorns with her fingernail and chewed the bitter green meal.
    She was drunk too. Her mother didn’t like to leave her out and Jane craved the taste of liquor, like harsh dissolved candy. She fingered uncurled pine cones in her jacket pocket to steady herself under the close stinging stars.
    Beneath trees taller than any cathedral, Mack had walked with his grandfather quietly.
    She ended up shivering and vomited, heaved out like an animal, then, cold, curled up by the side of the dirt road. Her mother came later, scratching the ground with a flashlight, her slippers whispering and the red wool plaid robe itchy when she gathered Jane in her arms.
    “Look,” she said, turning Jane to the millions of small stars, which seemed to fleck the sky with chalk. “Do you believe in God?”
    “Yes,” Jane said cautiously, as if she’d guessed the right answer but didn’t know why.
    Mack’s feet hung blunt off the edge of the bed, pointed stiff, like a butcher animal’s. She had touched the hoof of a hanging cow once—it was dry like that.
    The next morning, the liquor woke them hard and early. Mack was gone and there was no money on the table, only white cinching rings where glasses ate the wood near drops of candle wax.
    Jane could tell from the rhythm of Mary’s heels on the floor, her steps wound tighter than what usually meant mother. Her orbit went smaller and smaller, cranked erratic wishes, steps of a carousel, the bed exhaling a final puff of hate.
    She lay down for a long time without anything, looking into the repeating wood of