Read The Free (P.S.) for Free Online

when I talk to them I don’t know what to say.”
    “Little kids are always bad on the phone,” Mora said.
    “Maybe,” he said.
    “What else is going on?”
    “I don’t know,” he said.
    “You’re a great conversationalist today. Now I know who your daughters get it from.”
    Freddie laughed. He put the last donut hole in his mouth and finished the coffee.
    “At least get some sleep tonight, okay?”
    “I will,” Freddie said.
    “I put an extra twist in for you.”
    “Thanks,” Freddie said.
    She handed him the boxes. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
    “I’ll see you tomorrow, Mora.”
     
    He opened the store on time and drank three cups of coffee until the morning rush ended at eleven. He called Pat and told him the morning numbers, and Pat told him he wasn’t coming in. Freddie hung up the phone, leaned the chair back against the wall, and fell asleep. He was startled awake twenty minutes later when two old painters came in. They saw him asleep and quietly went to the counter. They waited for a moment and then looked at each other and shouted “Freddie!” as loud as they could. Freddie yelped as he woke and fell off the chair. The two painters doubled over laughing.
    “Jesus!” Freddie yelled from the ground.
    “We’re sorry, Freddie,” they both said.
    “It’s alright,” he said and got up.
    “We didn’t mean to scare you that bad,” one of the men said, still laughing, and set down a piece of stained trim board.
    “It’s alright, Paul,” Freddie said. “What do you guys need?”
    “Can you match the stain on this piece by tomorrow, and we’ll need twenty gallons of Super Spec, same color as this morning. Plus we’re doing an old lath-and-plaster job, and Andy said you knew how to make the cracks disappear without re-texturing the whole wall.”
    Freddie took a drink of cold coffee and once again began working.
     
    He closed the store at 5:30 and drove home. With the scrap wood from his front yard he got a fire going in the fireplace. He sat at the kitchen table, took off his coat, and opened a worn folder. He laid out his bills across the table.
     
Memorial/Providence Hospital total bill:
$74,798
Monthly hospital payment:
$575
Monthly alimony and child support:
$600
Monthly mortgage payment:
$692
Monthly home equity loan payment:
$423
Credit Card monthly (in collection):
$200 (total bill $9,000)
Natural gas:
$570 past due and turned off
Cell phone:
$58
Electric:
$556 past due
Water and sewage:
$263 past due
Garbage:
$192 past due and cancelled
Car insurance:
Cancelled
Health insurance:
Cancelled
     
    As he did each week, he tried to think of a way out of the mess, but in the end there was no way out. He just didn’t make enough money. He should declare bankruptcy, but he didn’t want to declare bankruptcy.
    Why did he have to be proud about that?
    He shuffled through his bills. It never made sense to him how he could have health insurance for his family, insurance that cost him seven hundred dollars a month, and still his policy didn’t cover everything. For years his wife had sat at the same table arguing with the insurance company about what they would cover and what they wouldn’t. Which specialists were approved and which weren’t, which surgeries were covered and which weren’t, which medications and which physical therapies. Even with mortgaging their house they fell behind on those payments, and then his wife had to quit working to take care of Ginnie. They began to drown. Now after four years he was left with a total bill of nearly seventy-five thousand dollars. He put the papers away and set his head down on the table and closed his eyes.
    When he woke he looked at his watch and it was thirty minutes later. He put the papers back in the folder and went into the basement. He looked through a box of his father’s things and found the stack of postcards he was hoping to find. He went through them until he saw a pin-up girl, a redhead in a white cowboy hat. She was