"Hoffman-ForRicher" - читать интересную книгу автора (Hoffman Abbie)

NINA KIRIKI HOFFMAN

FOR RICHER, FOR STRANGER

I've never been certain it was death that parted us. I used the term as grounds
in the divorce proceedings, and they thought I was crazy, because Rich attended.
He didn't protest it, though, so maybe he knew he was dead too. My lawyer wanted
me to go with my first choice, incompatibility, but I held out for death.

"I think you should change your mind, Penny," Rich said to me during recess.
"You stick with this death line and we may never get asundered." He looked so
dapper and kind; I had a secret desire to faint in his arms in hopes that he
would carry me away. I think I had that desire the first time I saw him, when he
was still Rich, but it faded when I got to know him. Today he was wearing a blue
suit, gray shirt, and powder-blue tie; his dark hair curled nicely, and the suit
made his eyes look more intensely blue.

He put some quarters in the vending machine and bought me a coffee with cream
and sugar, just the way I liked it.

That's how I knew the man I roamed was dead. Rich never bought me anything just
the way I liked it. He bought me things just the way he liked them, which
inevitably meant coffee, black. I looked at this stranger in Rich's clothes --
in Rich's face and hands and feet -- and smiled at him, thinking maybe not
getting asundered was just the way I liked it too, a thought I wouldn't have
dared to entertain two weeks before. "Think I'll stick, Rich," I said, accepting
the coffee.

He made that click sound between his tongue and the roof of his mouth that meant
"this is inevitable, and I approve." He used to use it: for calling horses on
our weekend walks in the country -- two or three quick clicks, and the nags
would come to him. His whole vocabulary had changed since he died. "Okay, Pix,"
he said, to reinforce the click.

I took my coffee and went away, then, because nobody had called me Pix since my
high school sweetheart, Alan, died -- two years before I met the first Rich and
married him, and six years before I met the imposter Rich who had just bought me
coffee.

How had he known? How did he know anything? The man I married wouldn't have been
able to recognize me if I was with two other brunettes,and this man knew my
secret childhood nickname. I went into the ladies room, threw out the coffee,
and sat on a toilet (the only handy piece of furniture), clutching my stomach,
which had shooting pains in it by that time.

Gretchen, my lawyer, found me there a few minutes later when she came in to
sweep all the escaping strands of blonde-brown hair back into her chignon. I had
left the stall door open; she saw me in the minor. She stooped in front of me,