Read Online Smoke by Catherine McKenzie - Free Book Online Page A

completely different reasons talking together.
    Was it the emotional loss she felt when she and Elizabeth stopped speaking that made her suddenly attuned to Angus? She wondered about that, knowing that when she was down she tended to amplify other people’s feelings. As if she was a magnifier of other people’s anguish. And that probably explained her obsession with John Phillips too. At least this time, it was going to lead to something good.
    As she pulled into her driveway, Mindy resolved to put these thoughts of her head. And it worked, after a fashion. Peter arrived home while she was checking the chicken for the eighth time, using the meat thermometer he got her, not for her birthday or their anniversary or anything crass like that, but just because he knew she stressed about it and he wanted to help in the small way he could.
    “You should just set that and forget it,” he said. He was wearing one of the suits he’d bought when he got his promotion at the bank, a dark-blue one, with a white dress shirt and a striped tie the kids gave him for Christmas. His sandy hair was still thick, but it was starting to contain shots of gray, particularly where it met his neck.
    “Oh, sure, Ron Popeil, that’s easy for you to say.”
    He held up his hands in mock surrender. He had long, tapered fingers that went with his six-foot-four height. “I know you don’t think highly of sales,” he said. “But Ron Popeil? Sheesh. That’s low.”
    Before Peter started at the bank, he worked in the sales department of the hospital. As Mindy had explained to him more than once, she didn’t have a problem with selling per se . It was the idea of selling medical services, that patients were treated as sales units, something to measured, counted, budgeted for that disturbed her. Not that working at the bank put him in a better moral position. Certainly not when the houses of family after family were being repossessed. Problems Kate and the Coffee Boosters never had to face, or even really understood.
    “Who says I don’t think highly of sales? Plus, Popeil made a shit-ton of money. I could get behind that,” Mindy said.
    “Don’t let the kids hear you talk like that.”
    “I’m sure they say a lot worse out of our hearing.”
    He cocked his head to the side. “Hello, who do we have here?”
    “Pardon?”
    “I mean, where’s my wife and what have you done with her? The Mindy I know and love would never be so blasé about our progeny’s potty mouths.”
    “Oh, I know. I’m in a funny mood.”
    She was in a funny mood. Like her brain was stuck on fast-forward, whirring, whirring, whirring.
    “It’s that spin class, I tell you.” Peter took her in his arms and pulled her close. His hands traveled down to her backside and cupped her butt, which did feel, for once, slightly more toned. “You’re always riled up after that class. Not that I mind—”
    “PDA alert!” Carrie yelled from the other side of the room, where she was sitting at the kitchen table, doing her math homework. She was still wearing her ballet clothes, tights, a black leotard, and a pink shrug, her corn-colored hair pulled into a perfect bun.
    “Now, honey,” Peter said. “You want your parents to love each other, don’t you?”
    “Not, like, in front of me.”
    “How do you think you were created, huh?”
    “Oh, Peter, hush,” Mindy said, but she was laughing.
    Peter’s hands, she noticed, hadn’t moved from her backside. Maybe she could put all this energy to use later, after the kids were in bed.
    “Angus! Mom and Dad are being disgusting,” Carrie called.
    Angus was sitting, zombielike, in front of the kids’ computer, which Mindy still insisted on being in full public view. No private porn searches for her son. Not in her house.
    “Oh, grow up, Carrie,” Angus said, his eyes never leaving the screen. “Maybe if you actually kissed one of those guys in your ballet class instead of—”
    “Dinner!” Mindy said, right before she