Shelter Me Read Online Free

with his box of day-olds from the bakery. Thank God for a six o’clock that doesn’t completely suck.

2
    M ONDAY MORNING J ANIE WOKE to the sound of torrential rain. And something else. A kind of splatting sound. She unwound herself from the stranglehold she had on Robby’s pillow and sat up. “What is that?” she said to the pillow. “Weird house sounds—that’s your job.”
    But they were all her jobs now. The hunting, the gathering, repair and maintenance of the shelter. The division of labor, discussed and renegotiated countless times over seven years of marriage, had become meaningless in one blown stop sign.
    Janie lay back down and tried to reclaim unconsciousness, but the odd sound jabbed at her until she sat up again and flung the covers off the bed. Marshaling her self-control, she reined in the temptation to stomp her feet, and tiptoed to the landing at the top of the stairs. She peeked into the kids’ room. Dylan was on his side, his face buried in his stuffed bunny’s floppy gray ears. The baby slept on her back, her arms thrown back by the sides of her head, as if she were preparing to dive.
    Downstairs, Janie opened the front door to find tiny waterfalls leaping from the roof above her and splattering onto the front step. Clogged gutters. It was April, after all, and the gutters had waited patiently for Robby to clear the dead sticks and leaves that winter storms had thrown into them, as he did every spring. Except this one. Janie closed the door and made a pot of coffee.
    M ONDAY , A PRIL 30
    Fucking gutters. Fucking rain.
    O N T HURSDAY THE RAIN stopped and the yard glistened radioactive green, a color so strong and loud Janie thought she might fall in and never be found. She gave the grass a good hard cut, wielding the mower like a small cannon. The baby rode in a backpack slung across Janie’s shoulders, squawking at squirrels, clapping at cars, and finally falling asleep to the little engine’s grinding drone.
    The contractor had not shown up on Monday, or any other day that week, nor had he called to say he wasn’t coming. It wasn’t until Thursday morning that Janie had remembered he was supposed to come at all, and the thought instantly infuriated her. The nerve, after all. She had weathered his surprise attack, with all those papers, asking for her dead husband. And she had honored the deal they had cut behind her back, though it would have been easy to say, Sorry, little change of plans. Your deal’s with a dead guy, not with me .
    She had kept up her side of the bargain, though it wasn’t even her bargain, and he had left her at the altar of her porchless house, the egotistical son of a bitch. She fed her fury as she laid waste to the ankle-high grass, imagining a confrontation so full of threats and recriminations that it might actually have come to blows, had the yard not unexpectedly surrendered, fully mown.
    Hopped up on her own anger, Janie was in no mood to stop. She wasn’t finished with him yet, and since she was, of course, winning the imaginary fight, she was anxious for the final showdown. She put the sleeping baby in her crib and cranked up the volume on the baby monitor. Then she hauled a ladder out from the garage and climbed up onto the roof to attack the gutters.
    Sliding her hands into Robby’s sweat-stiff work gloves threw cold water on the hypothetical skirmish. She thought of Robby’s long, gentle fingers, the way they stroked a keyboard the same way they stroked her skin. She realized with horror that therewas no record of him at the piano, no video footage that she could show the children of how beautifully their father had played. Dylan would soon forget, and the baby would have no memory of it at all.
    She crawled over the peak of the roof onto the back side to hide from passing cars. She sat on the hot gray shingles and wrapped her arms around herself, the work gloves resting gently on her sides. Sorry I never thought to videotape you at the piano, she