Quick Study - By Gretchen Galway Page 0,29
sister's devotion to her husband and their baby-making was to create the fantasy family life they'd never had. Always looked good on the outside, but not so real on the inside.
Who was he to think he could do any better?
And didn’t Bonnie deserve better than him?
He had to think, and not here at his grandmother's old daybed with the curtain ropes still dangling on the headboard.
Relieved to have a plan, Paul fled the room to get his backpack together.
After two weeks of silence, Bonnie went into action.
She formally dropped out of school.
She pursued the incarceration of Starbucks creep, which luckily and unluckily, was proceeding easily without her since they had another case on him.
And ignoring the pity and sympathetic indignation of her elderly roommates, she swept Paul and their brief time together out of her mind and into the same Rubbermaid plastic box where she'd stored her unfinished thesis, intending to think about neither one ever again.
How could he?
The third week after their last night together, Bonnie began painting again. Not easy, since she used oils and the fumes in a small apartment were toxic even to the young and oblivious. To the old and sensitive, the linseed oil and turpentine was like Chernobyl. They didn't complain, which made Bonnie ache with gratitude and affection, and then anger, since anytime her emotions swelled she thought of him.
How could he? At first she feared he'd been in an accident. Family emergency. Hell, even a work crisis would satisfy her she was so smitten. But spying through her neighbor and Paul's sister had revealed the truth, that he'd seemed just fine before leaving the country for a sudden backpacking vacation in Costa Rica.
If Bonnie weren't afraid of flying, she would have chased him down and shoved him into a volcano. Backpacking!
So she painted the image instead, using vacation photos of strangers posted online and nursed her broken heart.
Costa Rica!
“Good riddance,” Marilyn said from her recliner, feet propped motionless on the stair-stepper.
“Hush, Mary-bellie,” Lorraine said. “You never know about people. He's probably a very nice boy who just got the jitters.”
“Rabid dogs get the jitters,” Marilyn said. “Then you put 'em down.”
Seeing another therapy session looming, Bonnie screwed the cap on the vermilion and began to rinse off her brush.
Lorraine shook her head sadly. “You haven't called him again, have you?”
“Of course not.” The first day after, she'd called him six times, never suspecting the truth. She capped the jar of solvent and left the room to wash her hands—and escape their loving but painful concern.
Scrubbing her hands in the bathroom, she told herself she was fine, then looked up to the mirror to see her stricken face.
A scream shot up from the other room, jolting her out of her wallowing. She flung open the door and ran into the living room, where Lorraine was screeching from the couch with two thin white arms raised into the air.
“Your phone! Your phone!”
Taking a deep, frustrated breath, Bonnie turned to go back to the bathroom. Her hands were dripping. “It's just spam. Warning me the factory warranty on my car is about to expire.”
“You don't know that,” Lorraine said.
Marilyn snorted. “Warranties never cover anything anyway.”
The phone continued to chirp from the coffee table. Remembering she had promised Prof. Alice a coffee date, Bonnie sighed and went over to see if it was her.
His name flashed on the tiny screen. She squeezed the plastic phone in her hand and felt her heart stop. “You bastard,” she muttered.
“It's him!” Lorraine cried in a stage whisper.
Teeth clenched, Bonnie answered the call. “What do you want?”
All she heard was his exhalation into the receiver. “I didn't know if you'd pick up. I thought about using my sister's phone.”
She didn't say anything. Let him swing.
He cleared his throat. “I'd like to explain. Can I see you?”
That got her. “See me? Why, so you can have another great fuck and then fly off to fucking South America? Why not make it Australia this time? Hell, how about fucking Pluto, you selfish, asshole bastard!”
Then she hung up.
Marilyn was scowling and smiling at the same time, looking like a gargoyle in a grape-colored sweatsuit. “Good job. If he comes by here I'll kick him in the balls.”
Bonnie's heart was pounding in her ears and she was afraid she might keel over. Closing her eyes, she leaned against the couch and dropped her phone on the cushions. “'Can I see you?'” she mimicked. “That's what it was to him. Seeing me. That's how we