Free Call If You Need Me by Raymond Carver Page B

a few days. When he asked her about the visit, she said it had been fine and that they’d sat up late after dinner talking. Nick knew they must have talked about Bill Daly; he was certain they had, and he found himself irritated for a few weeks. But so what if they’d talked about Daly? Joanne was Nick’s now. Once he would have killed for her. He loved her still, and she loved him, but he didn’t feel that obsessive now. No, he wouldn’t kill for her now, and he had a hard time understanding how he’d ever felt that way in the first place. He didn’t think that she—or anybody, for that matter—could ever be worth killing somebody else for.
    Joanne stood up and began clearing the plates from the table.
    “Let me help,” Carol said.
    Nick put his arm around Joanne’s waist and squeezed her, as if vaguely ashamed of what he’d been thinking. Joanne stood still, close to Nick’s chair. She let him hold her. Then her face reddened slightly and she moved a little, and Nick let go of her.
    The children, Jenny and Megan, opened the door and rushed into the kitchen carrying their skateboards. “There’s a fire down the street,” Jenny said.
    “Somebody’s house is burning,” Megan said.
    “A fire?” Carol said. “If it’s a real fire, stay away from it.”
    “I didn’t hear any fire trucks,” Joanne said. “Did you guys hear fire trucks?”
    “I didn’t either,” Robert said. “You kids go play now. We don’t have much longer.”
    Nick stepped to the bay window and looked out, but nothing out of the ordinary seemed to be happening. The idea of a house fire on the block in clear, sunny weather at eleven in the morning was incomprehensible. Besides, there had been no alarms, no carloads of rubberneckers or clang of bells, or wail of sirens and hiss of air brakes. It seemed to Nick it had to be a part of a game the children were playing.
    “This was a wonderful breakfast,” Carol said. “I loved it. I feel like I could roll over and go to sleep.”
    “Why don’t you?” Joanne said. “We have that extra room upstairs. Let the kids play, and you guys take yourselves a nap before starting off.”
    “Go ahead,” Nick said. “Sure.”
    “Carol’s just kidding, of course,” Robert said. “We couldn’t do anything like that. Could we, Carol?” Robert looked at her.
    “Oh, no, not really,” Carol said and laughed. “But everything was so good, as always. A champagne brunch without the champagne.”
    “The best kind,” Nick said. Nick had quit drinking six years ago after being arrested for driving under the influence. He’dgone with someone to an AA meeting, decided that was the place for him, and then went every night, sometimes twice in one night, for two months, until the desire to drink left him, as he put it, almost as if it’d never been there. But even now, though he didn’t drink, he still went to a meeting every once in a while.
    “Speaking of drinking,” Robert said. “Jo, do you remember Harry Schuster—
Dr
. Harry Schuster, a bone-marrow-transplant man now, don’t ask me how—but do you remember the Christmas party that time when he got into the fight with his wife?”
    “Marilyn,” Joanne said. “Marilyn Schuster. I haven’t thought of her in a long time.”
    “Marilyn, that’s right,” Robert said. “Because he thought she’d had too much to drink and was making eyes at—”
    He paused just long enough for Joanne to say, “Bill.”
    “Bill, that’s right,” Robert said. “Anyway, first they had words, and then she threw her car keys on the living-room floor and said, ‘You drive, then, if you’re so goddamn safe, sane, and sober.’ And so Harry—they’d come in two cars, mind, he’d been interning at the hospital—Harry went out and drove her car two blocks, parked it, and then came back for
his
car, and drove that about two blocks, parked, walked back to her car, drove it two blocks, walked to his own car and drove it a little farther, and parked