Walking on Broken Glass Read Online Free Page A

silence. The manna of quiet sustained us until we opened the back door. The brochures from the Brookforest Center interrupted, screaming for attention from where I’d left them, held down to anchored to the top of the washing machine by my keys.
     
    “Is this the information you picked up today?” Carl handed me my keys with a dash of eyebrow admonition, slight lift accompanied by equally slight eye-widening.
     
    I locked the door; he grabbed the papers.
     
    “Can we talk about this tomorrow? It's late, remember?”
     
    I dropped my purse on the cypress dining room table. Solid, unassuming, a natural scrubbed-clean-face beauty, aged and flawed, a table with character and style. We had found it in a Magazine Street antique shop in New Orleans when we visited my parents a few months before Alyssa was born. When we imagined Hallmark holiday and Rockwell painting reenactments at the Thornton home.
     
    Sometimes, between the early evening beers and the after-dinner liqueur-laced lattes, I’d relax with a glass or two or three or four of wine in the dining room. Settled in a chair, I’d stretch my legs until my bare feet were propped on the edge of the table and feel a wee bit sad the table had more going for it than I did. But, as my mother always reminded me, “You have to suffer to be beautiful.” That cypress beauty spent untold years in a swamp before it was dredged up, hauled away, milled, and created.
     
    There’d be no table talk tonight.
     
    “What's this?” Carl held up a paper as I walked past the sofa where he sat. Paperwork from Brookforest littered the coffee table.
     
    I didn’t have to look. I knew he’d found the admission form. My brain triggered an emergency alert system that must have included a tiny pyromaniac who darted around my insides and started little fires.
     
    I wished real life took commercial breaks. We interrupt this pending marital eruption to provide the wife time to delay, defer, distract—or will she signal defeat?
     
    “I’m not sure. I’ll look at it in just a minute.” My dishonesty and I turned around and headed to the kitchen.
     
    “Where are you going?” I didn’t know if he looked as confused as he sounded because my face was, once again, buried in a refrigerator. This time I pushed aside Coke Zero cans on the shelf and prayed I’d find a Miller Lite lurking behind one of them. A prayer for beer. I’m a spiritual reprobate.
     
    Success. I’d drown my little internal fire starter and fuel my courage at the same time. I grabbed a beer, kicked off my sandals, and barefooted myself to the battlefront in my den.
     
    Uh-oh. Once again, that Wild West look held Carl's face hostage. “What are you doing? Drinking a beer? Didn’t you just tell me you’re an alcoholic?”
     
    “That's exactly why I’m drinking the beer.” I sat on the sofa, set the can on the coffee table, tucked my hair behind my ears, and looked at Carl. “Okay, here's—”
     
    “Get a coaster. You’ll leave a ring on the table.” He lifted the can and grabbed a tissue to wipe the faint sweaty circle.
     
    I pulled the shiniest of the brochures over and pretended my tongue was numb for a nanosecond so I’d not blurt out a scathing comment. Carl hated my sarcasm when it was aimed at him.
     
    “This’ll work.” I reached for the beer, drank more, tried again. “Carl, I talked to someone at the center. I need to do this. Maybe tonight my thinking I drink too much sounds like high drama to you. I just know I can’t control my drinking. The admissions counselor—”
     
    “Who gives a rip what some stranger told you? I don’t. What made you think you could go off and do this—” he shook the paper at me “—without talking to me first?”
     
    I curled my legs underneath me, stretched my denim skirt over my knees, and wondered if Carl realized two small bubbles of maple syrup had hitched a ride on his lightly starched, white cotton button-down shirt. He hated shopping. Had