So Much for That Read Online Free Page B

Although she’d lately developed a subtle paunch, the rest of her body was if anything thinner; such reapportionment of weight was normal in middle age, and he was too much of a gentleman to pass comment on it.
    Their both indulging in hard liquor at barely past seven fostered a warm collusion that he was reluctant to undermine. Yet his innocuous “Where have you been?” came out like an accusation.
    She could be evasive, but it was rare for her not to answer at all. He let it go.
    Curling protectively around the highball in her usual armchair, Glynis pulled her knees up and tucked her heels. She always seemed enclosed, balled up in another sense, but tonight she seemed uncommonly so. Maybe she intuited his purpose, so long in coming. When he reached into his inside pocket and laid three sheaves of e-ticket printouts silently on the glass table beside the Wedding Fountain, she arched her eyebrows. “Show and tell?”
    Glynis was an elegant woman, and he was interested in her—in that way that simple people were so often captivated by the fucked-up. He paused to consider whether, without Glynis, as partner or opponent, The Afterlife might prove desolate.
    “Three tickets to Pemba,” he said. “Me, you, and Zach.”
    “Another ‘research trip’? You might have thought of that before the Christmas holidays. Zach’s back in school.”
    Though she never used to couch the term in quotes, the sour twist she now gave to “research trip” recalled Pogatchnik’s sneering pronunciation of “escape fantasy.” He noted how readily she concocted a reason that his caprice was impossible, nimbly dismissing even the brief getaway she mistook it for. In his work, Shep applied his intelligence to solving problems; Glynis applied hers to inventing them, to constructing obstacles to throw in her own path. He wouldn’t mind the eccentricity if her path weren’t his own as well.
    “These tickets are one-way.”
    He would have expected that when she got it, when she registered the true nature of the gauntlet he’d thrown on the coffee table, her face would cloud, sink into solemnity, or constrict with the wary rigidity of preparing for combat. Instead she looked mildly amused. He was accustomed to ridicule at Handy Randy (“Yeah, sure you’re moving to Africa, any day now, you and Meryl Streep”), and sometimes, though it filled him with self-hatred, he’d joined in the fun himself. But from Glynis any suggestion of the same blithe, pitying cynicism slew him. He knew she wasn’t into it anymore, but he hadn’t thought her attitude had got as bad as that.
    “Wasteful,” she said calmly, with a thin smile. “Not like you.”
    She’d correctly intuited that the one-ways had cost more than round-trips. “A gesture,” he said. “is isn’t about money.”
    “I can’t imagine your doing anything unrelated to money. Your whole life, Shepherd,” she announced, “has been about money.”
    “Not for its own sake. I’ve never been greedy like that, as you know—wanting money to be rich. I want to buy something with it.”
    “I used to believe that,” she said sadly. “Now I wonder if you’ve any idea what it is that you really want to purchase. You don’t even know what you want out of, much less what you want in on.”
    “I do,” he countered. “I want to buy myself. I’m sorry to sound like Jackson, but he’s right, in a way. I’m an indentured servant. This isn’t a free country, in any sense of the word. If you want your own liberty, you have to buy it.”
    “But liberty isn’t any different from money, is it? It’s meaningless unless you know what you want to spend it on.” The observation sounded hollow, even bored.
    “We’ve talked about what I want to spend it on.”
    “Yes,” she said wearily. “Endlessly.”
    He swallowed the insult. “Part of going is finding out.”
    Shep could not have contrived a conversation that should have riveted his wife more than this one, but he could swear that