Jennifer Crusie - GETTING RID OF BRADLEY

Lucy smiled back uncertainly. “Zack.” She hesitated. “I’m Lucy.” Then she turned and went back inside.

Cute. A little snippy but very cute. Even with the hair. Very, very cute. And she thought he was sexy.

Maybe he could convince her that he really had saved her life, and she’d be grateful.

He tried to picture Lucy, naked and grateful, but all he could see was Lucy, blinking at him, surrounded by dogs.

That could be a bad sign. He was losing his ability to fantasize.

Maturity.

Death.

“Sir?”

Zack turned back to the patrolman who had joined him again.

“You’re cleared,” the patrolman said. “What’s going on here, anyway?”

“I’m not sure,” Zack said. “I need you to question the neighbor.”

“The old lady?”

“Yeah. I don’t think she’s going to talk to me.”

“I don’t think so, either. She wanted me to shoot you. So what do you want me to ask her?”

“She said she’d seen somebody hanging around here, possibly trying to break in. And the locks have been tampered with.” Zack frowned back at the house. “Find out what she saw, and when she saw it, and get it to me as fast as you can, okay?”

“You got it. Anything else?”

“Yeah. Keep a close eye on this place for the next couple of days. I think she might really have trouble.”

“With neighbors like she’s got, that’s no big deduction,” the patrolman said.

“You should see her sister,” Zack said.

“I ALMOST INVITED HIM back in,” Lucy told the dogs when Zack had driven away with the lesson plans. “That would have been stupid.” She pulled back the lace curtain at the front window and looked out at the empty street. “He was just so different, you know? I just didn’t want him to go. So much for my new life. I make these big plans to be independent, and then I cling to the first man I meet an hour after my divorce. Still, you should have been there when he told the other policeman to shoot Phoebe. You would have loved it.”

She dropped the curtain and turned to the living room.

Her room.

Her house.

She remembered the first time she’d seen it. She’d passed it one day when she’d taken a wrong turn near the university. A big old cream brick house on a hill with a porch and a cracked old driveway and big beautiful beveled-glass windows.

And a For Sale sign in front.

And she’d wanted that house with a passion that she’d never in her life felt for a man. A big, safe, warm house she could fill with dogs and books and comfortable things. Beautiful things. A house with a big kitchen where she could make cookies and bread and soup. A house with a huge fenced-in backyard where Einstein could run. And maybe another dog. Or two. She didn’t want Einstein to be an only child.

A house. A house instead of her cold, tiny little apartment where Einstein took up half the floor space, and the oven didn’t work right, and she never felt safe. A house.

Her house.

After that, for three months, even after she started seeing Bradley, she’d drive by the house and long for it hopelessly, the way some women long for movie stars. She knew it would never be hers but it was the dream of her heart And then one day she’d been with Bradley and they’d driven by, and she’d said, “Slow down so I can see my house,” and he’d asked her what she meant, and she’d told him. And he’d said, “If we were married, we could buy that house. Will you marry me?”

And she’d said, “Yes.”

What she hadn’t realized at the time was that she was saying “Yes” to the house, not to Bradley.

“Maybe it wasn’t a mistake,” she told the dogs as she moved back into the room. “At least we have the house.”

It sounded cynical. And selfish. Tina would be pleased.

Einstein barked at her.

“I know,” Lucy told him. “I should pull myself together and stop talking to dogs. Well, you’re the only ones who listen to me without telling me what to do. Especially Tina, lately…”

Tina. Telling her to get rid of Bradley. Actually, packing up all his stuff in a box might be another small step toward independence. She wouldn’t throw it out on the lawn, of course, but she could store it neatly in the basement That would make the house seem more like it was hers alone.

Alone.

With Zack gone, she suddenly felt alone, as if something warm was missing.

She wasn’t sure she wanted to be alone. Especially if Zack was right about the shooting and the scratches… Except of course, he wasn’t right because it was ridiculous that anyone would be threatening her, and besides there was probably a perfectly good explanation for those scratches… And if there wasn’t, what was he doing leaving her alone? He should be there, protecting her. Obviously he didn’t think she was in danger, or he wouldn’t have left her alone.

Alone.

Of course, she wasn’t alone. She had the dogs.

And besides, there were some kinds of alone that were good. In fact, wonderful. For example, the without-Bradley kind of alone was heaven. No more chill in the air, no more one-right-way-to-do-things, no more long silences and emptiness. Just her and the dogs and the fireplace. Warm.

And alone.

“Enough of this daydreaming stuff,” Lucy told the dogs, suddenly straightening. “We have work to do. Let’s get rid of Bradley.”

Lucy packed up everything of Bradley’s that she could find in the house, surprised to find it filled three boxes, not one. “There was more to Bradley than I thought,” she told the dogs. Most of the stuff was papers and books. His clothes were already gone; Tina had thrown them all out the front door while the locksmiths were changing the locks. By the time Bradley had come back mat night, his entire wardrobe was on the front lawn.

Mrs. Dover had enjoyed it immensely.

He hadn’t argued much. He’d knocked on the door and called her name, and then Tina had opened it and threatened him, and he’d gone away.

Not much of a fighter, Bradley.

Not much of a lover, either.

Or maybe that was just with her. Maybe he was better with the blonde.

The blonde. Lucy tensed as she remembered the shock she’d felt when she’d come home to find the blonde standing in the middle of the living room. Her living room. Saying that she and Bradley had been together in the house. Her house. Her bedroom. How could she have been so stupid, not to even have had a clue? How could Bradley do that to her?

He had just stood there with his mouth working like a fish, saying he could explain.

Except he never had.

He was a creep. Bringing that woman into her house. Her house. What a creep.

At least she was free of him now.

Her eyes fell on the boxes.

Or she soon would be.

She stood, gently displacing Einstein’s head from her knee, and carried Bradley’s boxes to the basement door. She set them down, opened the door, picked them up again, and threw them down the stairs, watching them turn and smash against the steps as they fell.

“Too bad there wasn’t anything breakable,” she told the dogs, and shut the door.

Then she went back into the living room and studied it. Beautiful. Bradley-less. Un-Bradleyed.

Almost.

His chair still sat in the middle of the room beside the love seat. It was ugly-a recliner upholstered in synthetic olive-green flecked with red. If Bradley had been born a piece of furniture, he would have looked like that chair. Practical, boring, and irritating. The fact that he’d loved it and wouldn’t let the dogs on it only made it more Bradley-like. The dogs had been napping on it regularly since he’d gone, but it was still an annoyance.

“What do you think?” Lucy asked the dogs. “Getting rid of a perfectly good chair would be totally irresponsible, right?”