Free The Caretaker of Lorne Field by Dave Zeltserman

Field, he stumbled through the doorway, sniffed, then yelled out whether that was pot roast he was smelling.
    “Take your work boots off!” Lydia yelled back from the kitchen. “I don’t want you tracking dirt everywhere!”
    “I’ll damn well do what I want in my own home!” he yelled back to her, but he did a couple of one-legged jigs while he pulled off his work boots. With only a slight hobble to his gait he made his way to the kitchen. Lydia stood by the stove stirring something in a pot. She frowned at him. He ignored it and breathed in deeply.
    “You are making pot roast,” he exclaimed. “What’s gotten into you, woman?”
    “Shut up, you old fool,” she muttered under her breath.
    Durkin walked over to the stove, reached to lift the lid from a large pot that had been put on simmer. His wife slapped his hand with a sharp crack. “It’ll be ready soon enough. Don’t get in the way!”
    Durkin brought the knuckle of his slapped hand to his mouth and sucked on it. He was in too good a mood, though, to let her usual cantankerous behavior upset him. Craning his neck so he could look over her shoulder, he saw that she had mashed potatoes in the pot she was stirring. “Yankee pot roast and mashed potatoes, huh? You find out I’m dying or something?”
    “Don’t let it get to your head. Lester and Bert both been asking for it.”
    Durkin stepped back from his wife. Her thin body was stiff as she stirred the potatoes, almost stony, but there was something close to tenderness softening the corners of her mouth. Something like that in her eyes, too.
    “Hot as hell out there today,” he told her. “But I was able to get off my feet a few times. It helped. I ain’t feeling so much like a cripple right now.”
    “So you napped on the job, huh?”
    Red flashed for a moment deep in his skull—almost like a firecracker had gone off—but he swallowed back the insult he had ready for her. Something about the softness around her eyes and mouth made him.
    Gotta give the old battle-axe credit , he thought, she knows how to push my buttons better than anyone.
    “Nothing like that,” he said. “Had an extra spring in my step, that’s all. It must’ve been all that good food you served up for breakfast. Anyway, I finished all my weeding early and got to rest as much as twenty minutes at a time.”
    “You gonna stand there jabberin’ all night?”
    He shook his head. “Nope. Just had a good day, that’s all.”
    “Why don’t you make yourself useful and set the table. Dinner’s almost ready.”
    “Make myself useful? Saving the world all day ain’t making myself useful enough?” He again swallowed back the bile ready to be spat back at her. He turned away from her and muttered under his breath that he’d call the boys down to do that.
    He started to leave the kitchen. Lydia reluctantly caught a glimpse of him over her shoulder. “Jack,” she asked, “how you planning to prove those ain’t weeds?”
    He half-way faced her, a sly smile showing. “I’ll tell all of you over dinner,” he said. Then he left the kitchen. She heard him yell out to the boys from the hallway for them to come downstairs and help their mother.
    Earlier that day when she had come back from seeing Paul Minter, Lydia sat at the kitchen table lighting up one cigarette after the next trying to calm her nerves. The reversal of fortune the attorney was offering seemed too far-fetched. Go from barely scraping by to being rich with a snap of a finger? Thinking about it, though, it made sense. People go all over for amusements. Disney World, carnivals, haunted houses, any little place that was odd and different. Why not here? And why not her? As Helen had said, it was like winning the lottery. But there was a catch. For them to cash in her husband would have to go along with it.
    That thought had brought her out of her near catatonic state. She knew he wouldn’t do anything that went against the contract. An impulse hit her to burn