Free The Ditto List by Stephen Greenleaf

financially for a while.”
    â€œThings have been tough for me before. I don’t need much.”
    â€œBut now you’ll have a baby.”
    Her eyes flashed. “I’ll take good care of my baby, Mr. Jones, don’t you think I won’t. Now, what else do you need to know?”
    He accepted the rebuke. “How about your house? Did you own or rent the trailer?”
    â€œOwn, if you can call it that. We put a thousand down. It was all Del’s money, so you leave it be.”
    â€œCars?”
    â€œJust Del’s. A fifty-one Ford he fixed up. I’d never take that.”
    â€œYou’re being foolish, Lucinda. I have to tell you that.”
    â€œI’ve been foolish before, Mr. Jones. Likely I will be again. You just do as I ask. I just want me and Del to be back where we was on the day we met.”
    D.T. shook his head. “That’s one place I can’t put you, Mrs. Finders.”
    She frowned. “Why not?”
    D.T. pointed at her. “One reason is that little tyke in your womb. Another is that every man you meet from now on is going to have to do one thing that men haven’t had to do for you before.”
    â€œWhat thing is that?”
    â€œProve he’s not Delbert Finders. Do you see what I mean, Lucinda? You’re not the same person you were when you first met Del, so don’t try too hard to pretend you are.”
    She nodded and thought about it. “We done now?” she asked after a minute.
    D.T. nodded. “Just sign these.” He pushed some papers to her and watched her laboriously execute them. Then she stood up and offered him her hand. He held it as long as he could without alarming her. Then he said what they all wanted him to say, that it was going to be all right. Then she left the room.
    D.T. listened for the door to tinkle, then went into the outer office and told Bobby E. Lee he’d been wrong about the tissues, that as far as D.T. could tell the girl had never shed a tear in her life over her own predicament.
    Bobby E. Lee shook his head. “I didn’t say they were for her ” he said.

FOUR
    After Lucinda Finders had disappeared down the long dark hall outside his office, D.T. returned to his desk and leaned back in his chair and put his heels on the file folder closest to the corner. Her fertility fixed in his mind, her history fresh in his gut, D.T. tried to imagine what the future would hold for her and the baby. Impoverished, unskilled, alone. The world, not kind to such, demanded fealty a proud person like Lucinda would refuse to pay. She reminded him of the statement he often made when drunk and holding forth—that the single greatest gift to mankind would be an inoculation against fecundity, effective for precisely twenty-five years, to be administered to all babies at birth, regardless of race or creed or color. Lucinda also reminded him of a statistic that haunted him: one-third of all murdered women are murdered by their mates.
    Bobby E. Lee would call Lucinda an Atomic Lover—one of those women who do everything right in a marriage yet still get burned, who love too hard, overlook too much, undertake a too-extensive rehabilitation of their mate, and in return receive brief minutes of pleasure isolated between long days of abuse and neglect. It loaded their men with guilt, that worshipful endurance, and the men often beat them bloody to evade or somehow to deserve it. Psychology 101. Bobby E. Lee thought Atomic Lovers were the saddest people on earth. And Bobby E. Lee claimed to be one of them himself.
    D.T. picked up the telephone and dialed his bookie Sol. Mama’s Buns had come from twelve lengths back to win at eight-to-one, which put D.T. almost a thousand to the good. He hoped Walter had followed his tip. Still, he was five hundred down for the month, many thousand down for the year. He should quit gambling. It had cost him a quarter of his income over the years, had provoked at