Free The Broken Teaglass by Emily Arsenault Page B

of cits.
    “So this is it for the evening?” I asked. “Just plowing through these cits as fast as we can?”
    Mona looked up. “We’ll take a break for pizza. I’ll call the pizza place after we get through a few piles.”
    “You don’t want to even … put on some tunes or something?”
    “That’s a good idea. Get through a couple more piles and I’ll bring my CD player in here.”
    We didn’t find anything in the first half hour. When Mona decided we’d earned it, she went into the kitchen to order the pizza. I took the liberty of making her another drink.
    “Thank you,” she said as she sat back down. She took a big gulp of her cocktail. If she noticed that it was significantly stronger than her last one, she didn’t mention it.
    We worked silently until her buzzer rang. She ran downstairs for the pizza, and I got up from the couch and wandered over to her bookcase. The top shelf was full of Norton literature anthologies and classics. Propped in front of these books was a picture of Mona at her graduation, surrounded by what had to be her family—an attractive woman, tallerthan Mona, but with her hair pulled back in a style similar to Mona’s, a shorter man with gray hair and glasses, a little girl, and two young men who looked a little older than Mona. On the second shelf was another photograph. This one was of Mona looking a little younger and sitting on a picnic table with a man with an overgrown mustache. Mona was wearing cutoff shorts whose length almost qualified them as Daisy Dukes. I wondered if Mona’s legs were still that skinny under all the gray and black clothing.
    Behind the photographs was a flat hardcover book:
The Hindenburg
. Next to that was a paperback titled
When We Were All in Bed
. There was kind of a kinky ring to that title, so I pulled the book out of the shelf and looked at the cover.
When We Were All in Bed: Accounts of the Chicago Fire of 1871
. Maybe not so kinky. Next to that was
A Night to Remember
by Walter Lord, which I remembered reading in high school. It was about the
Titanic
.
    Mona came creaking back up the stairs. The large pizza box in her arms dwarfed her.
    “Let’s eat,” she said. “I’m hungry.”
    “You want something to drink with your pizza?” I asked her.
    “Yes. That’d be great, thanks.”
    Mona sipped away at another rum and Coke as we ate our pizza at the kitchen table. I drank another beer.
    “Is that your family with you in that graduation picture on your bookcase?” I asked.
    “Yeah. That’s my mom and my stepdad. With my stepbrothers and my half sister. The guy in the other picture is my father. In case you were wondering.”
    “Yeah, I kind of was,” I said.
    “It doesn’t ever seem right to put up a picture of one side of my family where I’m not going to put up another.”
    “Shouldn’t it be enough just to have an equal
total
number of pictures of each side in the house?”
    “No.” She shook her head. “The people you put in your living room are the ones you’re proud of. The people you put in your bedroom are the ones you have the most intimate, emotional relationships with. I don’t want to compartmentalize my family like that.”
    I decided to change the subject. “Gotten any good letters at work lately?” I asked.
    “Oh. Yeah.” She slammed down her glass and laughed. “Didn’t I tell you about the ‘poon’ letter?”
    “No, I think I would have remembered that if you did.”
    “Yeah, so I get this letter. Dan apparently read it and had it sent straight to me. I don’t know what the hell goes through his mind sometimes.
Genitally fixated correspondent? I’ll put Minot right on it!
Anyway. The writer wants to know all about the word ‘poon.’ And ‘poontang,’ too. Guy wants to know if it has an Asian origin. He says he figures it does since it sounds sort of Chinese. You know, ‘tang’?”
    “So what did you write?”
    “Nothing. I decided to try and squeeze a little chivalry out of old Dan. I