Free The Wife's Tale by Lori Lansens

written their autobiographies in the months before their deaths, which all of Baldoon County had read, and to
     which everyone had taken some kind of exception. There were those who protested the geography in parts; others objected to
     the use of real names; some disagreed with the characterizations; and at least a few refuted the events, some of which must
     have been fictional, for what Rose Darlen wrote about a glimpsed sexual act between her Uncle Stash and Catherine Merkel could
     not have been true.
    Mary had consumed the book in one sitting, fretting the while that she would find herself on the next page, described in pitiful
     terms by one girl or the other as the large, childless woman in the house behind, who watched life from the frame of a window.
     When she was not even mentioned, by either girl, she wondered how such a large woman as herself could be so incidental.
    Remembering Rose and Ruby served as an excellent distraction, until replaced by another random force. The furnace began to
     roar, and after throwing a series of short tantrums, died in a snit. Mary felt vindicated, and hoped it had suffered. Encouraged
     by the symbolism, she closed the bedroom window and started toward the hall, straining to stay off her wounded heel.
    Dawn lit the hallway like a morning-after murder scene, walls smeared with blood from the cuts on her hand, exclamatory stains
     on the new silver broadloom. It was shocking, but there was precision in the imagery. Something
had
died there in the night.
    Finally reaching the kitchen, relieved to see that the wound on her foot didn’t appear to be bleeding, or at least not badly,
     she opened the freezer and snatched a package of corn, cramming a fistful of niblets into her mouth, sucking them to defrost,
     surrendering to her hunger and the dark disgust that she could even think of eating at a time like this. She wondered if she
     would be betraying Gooch or rescuing him in making a call to The Greek.
    Gooch had been trucking and delivering for Theo Fotopolis, whom everyone called The Greek the way everyone called Jimmy Gooch
Gooch
, for nearly as long as Mary’d worked at Raymond Russell’s. The Greek had hired Gooch to work in the sales office after high
     school, and then underwritten the cost of his trucking license when his injured leg had healed.
    The clock on the wall read seven a.m. The question of whether to call The Greek or not call The Greek depended on which truth
     Mary was prepared to confront, that Gooch’s absence was not accidental, or that it was. There was also the pressing matter
     of the Laura Secord chocolate order due at the drugstore. Mary had ordered a carton of her favorites, nut clusters and milk
     chocolate almond bark, minis, assorted soft centers, assorted hard centers, which the supplier gave her on a deep discount.
     If she was not there to receive the order, Ray would discover her transgression. At best he would be annoyed. At worst he’d
     find it so hilarious he’d have to tell the whole staff. Besides, there was always a box or two of silky chocolate damaged
     in transit, or intentionally, to open and share among the staff. Mary took erotic pleasure in the ecstatic mastication of
     her colleagues, though she demurred when the damaged boxes were passed her way.
    Gooch had his own relationship with damaged goods. Their small home in rural Leaford was furnished with pieces from the store
     that had been broken in transit. A coffee table with a hairline fracture. The burnt umber Kenmore refrigerator whose tone
     had not precisely matched its stove mate. A sleeper sofa with broken gears. The first of the damaged pieces had been, in that
     first difficult year of their marriage, the red vinyl chairs with the thick aluminum legs.
    Mary had settled into one of their hand-me-down wooden chairs one morning and popped a rickety joint. Gooch didn’t fret aloud
     that his young wife, expanding rapidly in the first trimester of her second pregnancy,