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The Pedestal Magazine > Archives > Issue 56 > Fiction >Steve MacKinnon - Read Me One

Read Me One

 

          Across from me in the rear booth Bill drums his fingers to the soft beat coursing from the fry cook’s radio. I look at his hands, then mine: we have touched the same woman.

          He pushes the boxes of letters across the table. “Read me one.” He wants to know everything: where, when, how often we did it. He can reassemble a diesel engine blindfolded, but love baffles him.

          Fishing around the bottom of the stack buys me enough time for the waitress to interrupt us. “Hope you boys are hungry.”

          “Lumberjack special,” I say.

          “Now there’s a man with an appetite.” She turns toward Bill. “Anything, hon?”

          “Some peace of mind,” he whispers, not looking up.

          “What’s that?”

          “Just coffee,” he goes.

          He’s pushed aside the boxes of letters, and is arranging and rearranging toothpicks, maybe wondering how he could have prevented what happened.

          “This had nothing to do with you, Bill.”

          “Bullshit.”

          “Believe me.”

          Turns out what he wants to hear about is skin, sweat, lips, fervent gasps—the side of his wife he’s furious he never knew. I want to tell him how it was her sweaters I first fell in love with—solid, striped, loose, tight, cardigan, Irish wool, but there’s no reason I should.

          He traces his finger along the Formica faux grain. “Mind telling me what it was?”

          “What do you mean?”

          “What she couldn’t stand about me.” He leans in, then says loud enough so everyone can hear: “It was like living with someone who pretends to like cats. Everyone knows—the person pretending, everyone around them—even the cat. Try that one on for size.”

          I glance at the ceiling, then back at him.

          “Hell, it doesn’t matter any more.” He rolls back the sleeves of his crisp white dress shirt—all full of pious judgment. “Her birthday two years ago—what’d you give her?”

          “Pottery wheel.”

          “Christ.”

          Gave her that, plus some. Made her feel good—cherished, worshipped. We used to meet in the pottery shed behind their house, and that’s what he wants to hear about.

          The arrival of my food makes me wonder if he knows a thing about the many faces of hunger. He acts like he’s the only who’s ever known emptiness.

          I reach for the box. He slides it away. I try again for the box, he brushes my hand away. There’s an elderly couple opposite who haven’t spoken since they ordered. He’s probably wondering whose side of this they’re on. I realize they’re sharing an omelet. I see she has to spoon it into his mouth. I want to tell Bill that’s togetherness. I also want to say I can’t help him grieve the loss of something he never had to begin with.

          I reach across, dig through the box of letters, hoping for just the right words.









Steve MacKinnon’s work has appeared in Carve Magazine, Fiction Attic, Other Voices, The Ontario Review, and The Southeast Review, and is forthcoming in a collaborative chapbook entitled Authors Anonymous. He is currently at work on a novel, Mercy’s Wake, set on Cape Cod, Massachusetts. He thanks his esteemed writers group for helping to shepherd "Read Me One" along.
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