Read Just Like a Man for Free Online

fourth-grade parents, if she remembered correctly—would be held at the radiant and rambling estate of Bitsy and Cornelius Wainwright, Hannah would still be going to
work.
Being anywhere in Bitsy Wainwright's sphere of existence was work. She just didn't get paid any overtime for it. Or worker's comp. Or hazardous duty pay, for that matter.
    She did go home to her tidy brick bungalow in Broad Ripple long enough to sort through her mail, of which there were only bills and credit card offers, and check her phone messages, of which there was only one: Bitsy Wainwright reminding her of the cruel, shadowy, secret, heinous, archaic, loathsome potluck. And also long enough to shed her beige suit for a more evening-friendly black suit. As she fastened a strand of pearls around her neck, she pretended, as she always did when she donned them, that they had been a gift from her doting Great-Aunt Esmeralda on the evening of her high school graduation ceremony.
    Even though Hannah had actually purchased them for herself earlier this year from a mall jeweler's on a twelvemonths/no interest plan. And even though she didn't have a Great-Aunt Esmeralda, doting or otherwise. And even though she hadn't made it to her high school graduation ceremony because she and her father had been too busy that night slinking out of a crummy tenement because they'd stiffed their landlord for three months' rent.
    In spite of being a reasonably sane grown woman of almost thirty-six, Hannah still found herself pretending things from time to time, because she hadn't quite been able to abandon the rich fantasy life in which she had often lost herself as a child. A rich fantasy life, after all, was what had permitted her to
become
a reasonably sane grown woman of almost thirty-six.
    Her mother had abandoned her and her father when Hannah was barely walking, and although her father had done his best to eke out a living to support them both, the living he had eked out had been, alas, conning people out of their hard-earned money. Which, in addition to being morally reprehensible, not to mention illegal, meant that he and Hannah had been forced to move around a lot in the hope that the police
du jour
—and landlord
dujour
—wouldn't catch up with them.
    Regardless of where they had lived, however, there had always been one constant in Hannah's life—television reruns. Particularly reruns of shows like
Leave It to Beaver, Make Room for Daddy,
and
The Donna Reed Show,
where family life had been depicted in a way that had made Hannah yearn to live family life herself—normally. Or, at least, a young girl's idea of normal. Hey, even on
My Three Sons,
which had featured a motherless family, the Douglases still managed to have a nice, stable, secure life, well rooted in the heartland of America.
    Nobody wandered from town to town under cover of darkness in an old Dodge Dart station wagon. Nobody lived in dingy hotels and stinking apartments—and, sometimes, an old Dodge Dart station wagon. Nobody ate the majority of their meals at places that served more insects than humans—or in the back of an old Dodge Dart station wagon.
    Hannah had known, even as a little girl, that there were people out there who lived life the way it was supposed to be lived. Normally. Uneventfully. Securely. And she had spent most of her days pretending that she was one of them. She had spent the rest of her days planning how, someday, some way, she was
really
going to be one of them.
    Her tidy brick bungalow in Broad Ripple was exactly the kind of home she'd yearned for as a child, right down to the white wicker swing swaying at one end of the broad porch, and the terra-cotta pots of chrysanthemums—geraniums in the summer—that lined the front walk.
    She had stopped short of furnishing the house in the tradition of the Eisenhower and Kennedy eras—like her favorite TV families—and had instead opted for more of a thatched Irish cottage look, complete with lace curtains and hooked rugs