Free The Renewable Virgin by Barbara Paul Page A

something at her. She was right, of course. I just didn’t want her to be right, not just then; I wasn’t in the mood for it. I went over to the United Parcel carton and thought about kicking it again.
    â€˜Why don’t you open it?’ Marian asked. Then, when I hesitated: ‘Would you like me to open it for you?’
    â€˜No, I’ll do it.’ I couldn’t spend the rest of my life being afraid of boxes . The carton was taped shut and I had to get a knife from the kitchen to cut it open.
    â€˜You’d think the crown jewels were in there,’ Marian said as I sawed away at the tape. But it wasn’t the crown jewels inside.
    It was toilet paper. Seventy-two rolls of White Cloud toilet paper, three hundred double-ply sheets to the roll.

CHAPTER 4
    FIONA BENEDICT
    When I got back to Washburn, Ohio, I ‘confided’ in a few people that Rudy had died of an allergic reaction to a new medicine he was taking for high blood pressure. Some of my high-minded colleagues immediately assumed overdose , I’m sure, but I couldn’t help that. It was better than putting up with the kind of stares that were bound to come my way if it were known I was even remotely connected with a murder. Washburn, Ohio, was where I intended to live out my retirement, starting in three years’ time. I did not intend to live there as an object of curiosity.
    Poor Rudy. How hard he’d tried, how much boasting he’d done. He was too bright for that world of flash and glitter he’d moved in, but not really inventive enough for any enduring work. In the beginning I’d thought television would be good for him, mature him a little. By constant exposure to the perfectly horrible example television offered, he’d learn how not to write, I’d hoped. Eventually, I thought, he’d move on to better things.
    But no, he never did. At first I’d assumed Rudy had been seduced by the easy success he’d found, but later I came to understand it was fear that kept him from venturing farther afield. He never took any real risks in his life, and for that I blame his father. All of Rudy’s confidence in himself evaporated the day that cowardly man left us to cope on our own. Rudy was supposed to have been planning a play when he died, and there’s always the possibility that he would actually have gone ahead and written it. But I didn’t think so; it was all talk. Rudy was a big talker. That New York police detective, the doughfaced woman named Larch—she’d brought up the subject of Rudy’s play every time she could. I suppose she was trying to give me a good final memory of him: the serious writer embarking on a major work. But it was a false picture; I knew my son.
    Rudy had started rebelling against me soon after his father left us and never quite grew out of it. He blamed me for his father’s going; and by the time he was old enough to understand what had happened, it was too late. The pattern was set—he needed to blame me. In the last letter I had from him, he was still telling me (in a disguised manner, of course) how important he was in the world he had chosen—as distinguished from the one I inhabited. His father had also been a historian, but in college Rudy had taken courses exclusively in the soft disciplines, art and literature and music appreciation, the sort of thing in which the student’s opinions of works of art are treated as more important than the works themselves. And then midway through his senior year, he quit. One semester away from graduation, and he walked out. Rudy had taken a perverse pleasure in leaving school before getting a degree; it was his way of thumbing his nose at the academic life that he identified with me.
    At least, that’s what I was supposed to believe. On the surface Rudy and I were always on good terms; the rebelling was more in the nature of needles in the side. And I did believe his walking out of