Heart Song Anthology by Carolyn Faulkner (summer reads txt) 📗

slightly. He helped her to her feet, but I noticed that he kept one wary hand on her upper arm, just in case she went bonkers again and made a second try for Charlie.

“What was that all about?” Joe asked, when no one else had the guts.

Charlie sat up and touched his head. “Janet and I have issues,” he said simply. He sounded so wistful that I knew that I’d been right. Poor Charlie really needed a woman. Not this woman, apparently, since she had now begun running up and down the stairs, pausing now and then to describe in grotesque detail and at the top of her lungs how she hoped Charlie would meet his end. Colorful and bizarre methods, all of them, and each preceded by her personally removing Charlie’s male apparatus with a rusty salad fork. You had to give Janet her due. She had a real way with words.

Charlie sighed deeply, and rubbed gently at the growing lump on his head. “We were married once, you see, when we were both eighteen. For six days.”

“Six days?” I repeated. The married part hadn’t really sunk in yet.

“Maybe three. I guess it depends on how you count the time in jail.”

“She had you put in jail?” Sandy cried.

“The other way around,” Charlie moaned.

Janet looked like she was about to start foaming at the mouth as she left off her stair aerobics, and I noticed Neil regaining his grip on her arm. “He’s a lying scumbag,” she hissed. “And a filthy, fucking pervert.”

I wasn’t especially proud to admit it, but I was getting really interested in hearing Janet’s side of the story. Maybe there was something in her tortured past. Something horrible that Charlie had done that had turned her into what she was today – a rabid, foul-mouthed, screaming bitch – and a woman I admired tremendously. But at that point, Janet broke free of Neil’s hold and stalked off, down the hall. A moment later, the door to her room slammed hard enough to make the wall tremble.

“She was always a little touchy,” Charlie said.

Finally, Sandy found a couple of dusty tranquilizers at the bottom of her purse, and we managed to get them down Janet’s throat – and not a moment too soon. Charlie had gone out on the back porch, and was sitting on the steps in a blizzard, talking to himself. It took Joe and Neil together to drag him inside, where Sandy and I, working as a team, persuaded him to tell us the whole story.

“I guess we were both just too young,” Charlie began. “I didn’t know anything about women, back then. I still don’t.”

“Can you tell us why you had her put in jail?” Sandy pried, while she bandaged the swelling on Charlie’s forehead.

“So I could get away,” he said simply. “I took a Greyhound bus and went as far as I could. All I had left was nine dollars, so it wasn’t very far. She’s still beautiful, isn’t she?”

“For a lunatic, maybe,” Joe agreed, shaking his head. “But, why does she hate you so much, Charlie? Can you tell us?”

“I’m not sure I can,” he murmured. “It’s awful, what I did.”

So, there we were. All of us. Charlie’s dearest friends. Waiting, half-holding our breath in anticipation, hoping that poor old Charlie would spill the beans and tell us the good part. The juicy stuff. Hey, what are friends for, anyway?

“I spanked her once,” he said quietly.

A moment of silence.

“That’s it?” Sandy asked, shaking her head. “You spanked Janet? That’s all that happened?”

“My God!” Charlie said with a groan. “Isn’t that enough? She kept calling me names, and when she hit me with a full pint of half-and-half, I lost my temper, and just pulled her over my knee and started spanking her. It wasn’t hard, or anything like that, but she told me later that it ruined her life. Made her hate men. I think it made her what she is today, guys.”

For a moment, no one in the room said anything. Joe and Neil exchanged a furtive glance, and I found myself wondering for the first time if Joe and Sandy had an arrangement similar to Neil’s and mine. It’s funny, the things you sometimes never know about your best friends, isn’t it?

And then, I started to laugh. Hysterically. Yep, you can always count on yours truly to be the insensitive one.

I sat down on the floor and started telling poor old Charlie the truth, starting with what a sap he’d been all these years, for falling for Janet’s crap. She was rich, successful, and she hated men about as much as your average flea hates your average dog. What she’d hated was being put in her place, and he – eighteen-year-old Charlie Hanson – was apparently the only man in the history of the world who’d ever had the balls to do it.

Charlie seemed to like that, a lot.

It snowed all that night and the next day. There was only one fireplace, so to keep warm, we all had to sleep in the living room, huddled together under every blanket we could find in the house. I didn’t mind, actually, because I wasn’t especially eager to be alone with my husband. Everything that could have gone wrong with Sandy’s and my attempt at matchmaking had already gone wrong, but the weekend was still young, and Neil knew that I’d lied to him. Even the little black satin nightgown wasn’t going to save my butt. Sexy lingerie would only make access to that lying butt easier. I walked around all weekend in a heavy jogging suit. Why risk a chance encounter in a dark hall, right?

One good thing about being stuck for God only knows how long in a small cabin with someone you can’t stand is... Okay, so there’s nothing good about it. But there can be something interesting about it, if you’re lucky.

Charlie stayed pretty quiet, and Janet stayed sullen and hostile, but non-violent. No