Free The Adjustment by Scott Phillips

bulbous and two or three degrees off-true to the left; her teeth were a little too prominent, her lower incisors an ivory jumble, and with her hair up her ears looked like saucers. There was no denying, though, that she got me going in a way few others ever had.
    “Jesus, it’s still freezing in here,” she said.
    She jumped out of bed stark naked and ran in short quick steps to the hall closet. After a moment’s clattering and the sound of something heavy tumbling to the hardwood she came back into the room with an electric space heater. Crouched down on the bedroom carpet, tits aquiver, she plugged it into the wall and closed the door to the hallway. Then she took a flying leap back onto the bed and dug under the covers, pulling herself close to me, shivering so hard I wondered if she was playacting.
    “Holy shit it’s cold. Something’s wrong with that radiator.”
    “You know those space heaters are a fire hazard.”
    “I know.”
    “You ever see what’s left of a human body after a housefire?” I said.
    “I’m a nurse, Wayne. I’ve seen stuff that’d curl the hair on your balls. Wouldn’t it be romantic, though, going out together like that.” Her breasts were pressed against my chest, warm as buns from the oven.
    “Sure, burned to a crisp, just bone and ash and suet. Just like in the movies.”
    “Our skulls’d crack open from the heat,” she said, a note of real excitement entering her voice. “And they’d find us in the ruins, locked in an embrace, still smoldering. It’d take them a long time to figure out who you used to be, I bet,” she said.
    “My wife’s having a baby,” I said without really planning to.
    She nodded. “You didn’t tell me that before.”
    “Thought you might not let me stay.”
    “You’re right about that, but you’re forgiven this time,” she yawned, and she turned out the light and kissed me, and though we stayed quiet after that it was a long time before I managed to get to sleep.

SEVEN
     
    TWO CAN LIVE AS CHEAPLY AS ONE
     
    T HE WHOLE TIME I knew her, which is to say the last ten years of her life, Sally’s mother had an awful odor that clung to her like a shroud, as though she’d never learned to wash properly, or had stopped caring at some point. I didn’t see how Sally’s father stood it, in fact had trouble picturing how Sally had ever been conceived. If Mr. Tate had endured some sort of brain injury that had removed his olfactory sense I hadn’t heard about it.
    Neither she nor her husband displayed much affect at all, even when provoked. I could remember one night in high school when Sally and I got drunk and stayed out until four-thirty in the morning. We got home to find them waiting in the parlor, fully dressed, as though they were always up and Sally always out at that hour.
    Sally, on the other hand, was a model of personal hygiene, especially after I introduced her to the thrill of muff diving. She was never shy about displaying her emotions, either; many’s the time she threw me out of her house for some slight I didn’t even know I’d committed. I taught her salty language and how to tell a dirty joke, and though I never made a reader or a scholar out of her she seemed an otherwise perfect mate when I married her at twenty-three, shortly after my graduation from Wichita U.
    Something had changed while I was off to war. Her parents were dead, of course, but I sensed there was relief in that, at least inasmuch as she’d never again have to watch a friend pretending not to notice the old girl’s piquant ichthyological bouquet. My own mother’s homey qualities may have leached into her over the duration, but one of my first acts on returning was to treat my no longer blushing bride to four years’ worth of the filthiest jokes the Army could drill into a man, and she laughed so hard she had to change her underwear. And for those first months she was right along with me the way she used to be. I was out with her as many nights for fun