Free The Used World by Haven Kimmel Page A

Claudia rubbed her arm. Her shirt was drying and she was suddenly cold.
    Rebekah shook her fingers. “That was fun,” she said, smiling up at Claudia.
    “In its way.” Claudia leaned over and picked up her coat, her book. She opened the front cover and the photograph was still there. Maybe it had been a hot flash, she thought, glancing again at the young Hazel. Or maybe it had been a barb on the shaft of nostalgia that had struck her, listening to Frank Sinatra sing “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas.”
    “I was looking for you, actually,” Rebekah said, still standing close. “Hazel needs you—somebody bought that gigantic ugly painting in number forty-two, and also the love seat with the yucky upholstery job.”
    “The pink one?”
    “The pink one.”
    “Let me go put these things in the office,” Claudia said, turning.
    “Oh, and also, Claudia? Thank you for the groceries.”
    Claudia blushed, rubbed her hand over the top of her head, a gesture she’d made since childhood. “You’re welcome.”

    The new owner of the ugly pink love seat fell into one of east-central Indiana’s most recognizable categories: the married woman with small children, the kind who might have been adorable or saucy or wild in high school, but who had long since cut her hair, stopped trying to lose weight, and who had donned her I Give Up Suit. In this case she had also plucked her eyebrows too thin, which struck Claudia as a peculiar trend. Everyone seemed to be doing it, creating a county full of startled women.
    “Do you think this will fit in my Suburban?” the woman asked Claudia, who had tipped the love seat on its side and was wheeling it on a dolly toward the delivery door.
    “Probably,” Claudia said.
    “Because I could maybe borrow a truck from someone but I don’t know who—we aren’t really truck people. Well, my husband isn’t a truck person. There’s a long list of things my husband isn’t but I’m sure you don’t want to hear them.” The woman was wearing the holiday uniform of her class: a red turtleneck, an oversize cardigan sweater embroidered with a Christmas scene, blue jeans, tennis shoes.
    Claudia said nothing.
    “I’m Emmy, by the way. I just hate Christmas, I hate it,” Emmy said, drawing in and exhaling a shaky breath. “I’m buying this love seat for myself when I ought to be Christmas shopping but I’m not, I’m buying a piece of furniture that my husband is going to despise because it isn’t new and we didn’t get it at Sears.”
    They passed the shelves of blue, ruby, and carnival glass. Claudia backed the dolly up, turned it until it was straight, started up the breezeway.
    “I need a new one because one of my kids set the old one on fire. That’s what he’s doing these days, setting things on fire. I found hundreds of burnt matches in his closet a few days ago, taken from my husband’s matchbook collection. No one is saying he set the couch on fire, it’s just assumed and kept quiet. Do you hate Christmas? Don’t you?”
    The answer, Claudia thought, might be: I have. I could. I can sure see how it’s possible.
    Before she could speak, Emmy continued, “I say to my husband, ‘Brian, admit it, admit what you expect of me,’ but he won’t. He says I make my own choices and I should live with them. Does he think I want to spend two weeks decorating the house, leave those decorations up two weeks, then spend two weeks taking them down? Does he think I want to bake cookies and little cakes for the neighborhood association and the postman? And do all the shopping, all the wrapping, pick out every single goddamn gift, including for his parents who he won’t spend two seconds thinking about? And send out Christmas cards with a picture of the kids in it every year when I can’t hardly get them to sit still to take the picture, not to mention the furniture is on fire and one of the boys has decided he can’t live without a python ?”
    They turned the corner at NASCAR