And that wasn’t the worst of it. All our friends started wanting to know why we never went out with them any more. The only thing I could tell them was that she was working on her writing. I hated doing that. You tell people something like that and they look at you like you’re crazy. I mean, who sits around writing fiction besides Edgar Rice Burroughs or Stephen King, or in other words, somebody who knows what the hell he’s doing? I used to tell her that shit. Especially if she’d just written something I didn’t particularly like. Like this one time, she wrote a short story about a woman who was a hunchback. She called it “The Hunchwoman of Cincinnati.” It wasn’t worth a shit! l didn’t want to hurt her feelings, but it was boring as hell. And the whole time I was reading it, she was sitting right beside me on the couch, sipping a glass of wine, smoking one cigarette after another. She was looking over my shoulder, trying to see where I was on the page. This damn woman who was a hunchback had a son who was a cripple. The only thing he was good for, apparently, was shoveling out horse stalls. But every night he’d bring his little twopence or whatever home. I think it was supposed to be set back in olden times or something. They were trying to save up enough money for an operation. But she didn’t say who was going to get the operation, the woman or the kid. That was the big suspense of the whole crappy story. It turned out they had this damn dog you didn’t even know about until the last page, and the dog had some rare disease that only this veterinarian in Cincinnati could cure, for—you guessed it—the exact same amount this kid made after working for a year shoveling all this horseshit. I damn near puked when I got through reading it.

But I didn’t say anything when I finished it, not right away. I got up and went into the kitchen and got a beer. I still had on my radioactive work clothes. She hadn’t even given me time to eat my supper. I was trying to think of some nice way to bring her down, but hell, I didn’t know what to say. She was sitting on the couch with her legs tucked underneath her, grinning. Sipping that wine, smiling like the cat that ate your sardines.

“Well?” she said. “What did you think of it?”