I Know This Much Is True by Wally Lamb Page B

right.”
    “I’m a vegetarian, though. If that changes anything.”

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    The kid from Domino’s arrived two beers later. I’d ordered a large mushroom and olive, but ours was the last stop before his shift ended, he said, and all he had left in his vinyl warmer bag was two medium pepperonis. “I’m sure it’s my retarded manager’s fault, not yours,” he said. Snowflakes lit on the fur collar of his jacket, on the brim of his dorky Domino’s hat. “Here,” he said. “Free of charge. I’m quitting anyways.”
    When I closed the door and turned around again, I saw my quilt draped around Nedra Frank’s shoulders. Which meant she’d been in my bedroom.
    At the kitchen table, she picked off all the pepperoni slices and stacked them like poker chips, then blotted the tops of the pizzas with paper towels. We opened a second six-pack.
    It must have been a Thursday night because later Cheers was on—a show Nedra said offended her politically because all the women characters were either bimbos or bitches. She’d come late to feminism, she said, after having been daddy’s little girl, then a majorette in high school, then a slave to a chauvinist husband and a Dutch colonial on Lornadale Road. “I had to go into therapy for three years just to give myself permission to get my Ph.D.,” she said.
    “Take this !” She aimed the remote control at Ted Danson, deadening the TV.
    “My wife was in Ms. magazine once,” I said. “She and her friend Jocelyn.”
    “You have a wife ?”
    “My ex -wife, I meant. She and this friend of hers organized day care for women welders down at Electric Boat. Then they got the honchos down there to put into writing a policy about on-the-job harassment from the male workers. It was a year or two after EB
    started hiring women to work in the shipyard.”
    “You were married to a welder ?” she asked, a smirk on her face.
    “Her friend was a welder. Dessa ran the day care center. ‘Kids, Unlimited!’ it was called. Exclamation mark at the end.”
    “Fascinating,” Nedra said. Except she didn’t sound too fascinated. She was attacking that pizza like the shark in Jaws. “My ex-

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    husband’s a psychiatrist,” she said. “He’s an administrator down at the state hospital.”
    I almost told her about Thomas, but didn’t want to encourage any wow-what-a-small-world connections between the two of us.
    Besides, she’d made that crack about my grandfather being “schizo.”
    I kept hoping she’d leave before those bald tires of hers closed out leaving as one of her options. It frosted me a little that she’d just gone into my room and taken the quilt. Who knew what kind of liberties she was taking with my grandfather’s story? What else she was weeding out of that thing besides his “peasant Sicilian”?
    “Todd’s crazier than the inmates, though,” Nedra said. “Vicious, too. It was sort of like being married to the Marquis de Sade, except that it was all pain, no pleasure.”
    “Oh,” I said. “Todd de Sade.”
    That screechy laugh again. I turned the TV back on. “God,” I said. “ L.A. Law ’s on already. It must be after ten. I can drive you back in my truck if you don’t want to chance it in this snow. It’s four-wheel drive.”
    “You tell time by the television shows?” she said. “Amazing.” I let her keep assuming what she assumed: that I was just some uneducated goober she could use to get herself through a lonely evening.
    Back when I was teaching high school, I never would have called a class “brain-dead.”
    “So do you want me to? Drive you home?”
    “Oh, I get it,” she said. “You’re the big four-wheel-drive hero and I’m the damsel in distress, right? Thanks but no thanks.”
    She lifted my quilt off her shoulders and tossed it on the sofa.
    “Let’s listen to some music,” she said. Before I could say