Advertisement
He took his place on the ottoman and looked at her. Better now? she said. He let the sarcasm go, if it was sarcasm. Most of the time he couldn't tell. Sure, he said. I guess. He asked her where she was going, where she'd live. Asking was a way of finding out if there was someone else. She was moving in with a friend, she told him. He knew this friend, sort of. He had met her. She lived down the street in another apartment complex. More like town houses. Probably expensive, he thought. He didn't like her friend much. She liked commercials was the thing. She'd always just seen some commercial on TV and wanted to talk about how hilarious it was, or cute, and had you seen it too? So your friend, he said, she knew we were breaking up before I did? He thought this was proof of something. Deceit perhaps. His girlfriend shrugged. She had to arrange to live somewhere, didn't she? What was she supposed to do, just show up with a suitcase? He said he was just asking. She didn't have to be defensive. He was going to mention the knives then. Putting them away like that, it really made him burn. It was just so insulting. What did she think he was? Was he supposed to go berserk and pull a knife on her? Was that the thinking? Maybe her friend had suggested it. Maybe she'd seen something on television in between commercials. Or her parents, it could have been her parents. Not that they weren't good people. He didn't mean that. He loved her parents. Or maybe her sister had given her the idea. Her sister was dating a cop. The cop could have said, Make sure you tell your sister to put all the knives away before she breaks up with him. Seems like a nice guy and all, but you never know. Can't be too sure. He could hear them saying these things, talking about him, strategizing. Was everyone in on the planning? That was the other thing that bothered him: He didn't know when she had packed the knives. Had she gotten out of bed in the night, last night, and quietly stowed them somewhere? Or had she woken up early, before he did, and done it then? And where were the knives anyway? Pushed to the back of a cupboard? Hidden behind the cereal? Or had she taken that extra step and removed them from the premises? Maybe she carried them down to her car.He thought of her too of course, and sometimes he called and she didn't answer, or she did answer but after asking how he was doing and how their friend was, she said she was sorry but she couldn't really talk. It was the knives he kept coming back to though.
Advertisement