Free The Man With No Time by Timothy Hallinan

venison.”
    Eleanor nodded at Horace and smiled. Their mother looked suspiciously from son to daughter and back again, and Eleanor held up her plate like a good little daughter. A couple of minutes later, we all dug into Bambi. When we finished, I was a member of the family.
    Months later Mrs. Chan clarified matters by admitting over yet another meal that she'd consulted a fortune-teller on the morning of the Bambi Banquet, and that the soothsayer had peered into my future and seen a golden shower. Horace, who was translating, stopped suddenly, looked down, and scratched his nose, and Eleanor remarked that it was a good thing her mother didn't understand American slang.
    “If she did,” she'd said, “God only knows what you'd be eating.”
    And I'd been a guest of honor at Horace and Pansy's wedding and at the twins' hundred-day party, and welcome always in the cramped apartment that Mrs. Chan ruled. I'd seen Husband Number Three abandon ship in haste after his wife, having already gone to all the nearby barber shops to pick up hair clippings for her backyard compost heap, dragged a comb through his brush and found several long blond hairs. There had been a scene. There was always a scene.
    I wasn't used to scenes. My family didn't have them. We loved each other politely and fought with silence. No one in my family ever threatened a relative with a meat cleaver or kicked a hole in a door. We touched each other's clothing, not each other's skin. I found that I liked scenes. I liked getting the anger out and over with, the spontaneous upwellings of love, the unpredictable eddies from some deep, lovingly familial current.
    Horace's roomful of broken computers and applications for jobs he never intended to take. The encyclopedic, uncataloged knowledge of wholly unrelated facts that he unveiled in long, rambling lists. Pansy's cameras and quiet wit and shy, blinding smile. The big round heads and sweet, unblinking eyes of the twins. The sheer variety of Mrs. Chan's husbands. Everything about Eleanor. I'd isolated myself in years of study, wondering where I was going and who I was going there with. I woke up next to Eleanor one morning, sometime after the death of Jennie Chu, and thought I'd figured it out at last.
    Bravo sat bolt upright in the backseat, indulging the conceit that he was in a limo and I was the chauffeur. I reached back to pet him, and he dodged my hand, discouraging familiarity from a mere driver, and I pointed the car south toward Wilshire.
    It had all held together until Topanga. As long as Eleanor and I moved from temporary dwelling to temporary dwelling, a couple of nomads setting up and striking our tents, we were inseparable.
    Maybe it was something about the idea of a house. I said I wanted it, and I thought I did. I said I looked forward to the prospect of more time together without friends and acquaintances to bother us. After months in the house, after she'd finished her first book and sent it off and I'd earned some money as an investigator, we began to talk, loosely and theoretically but earnestly, about marriage. I immediately had an affair.
    And then another and another. They were meaningless, joyless, mechanical, purely technical violations of faith. She found out about one and forgave me. Later she forgave me again. Then she received simultaneously an advance for book number two and the news of affair number three, and she stopped forgiving me and moved out, into the little house in Venice in which she still lived.
    Once separated we became close again and remained close, closer to each other than we were to anyone else in the world, and then the twins came along. We both loved the twins and they drew us closer, until her publisher, a New Age entrepreneur named Burt, took her to bed. Or maybe Eleanor took him to bed. It didn't help matters that I thought he was a vulgar, pretentious clown. Even then, though, I still had the family to love. I could still share in their lives.
    But now they'd