|
|||||
once they saw her jumping up and down and had a big laugh about it and when she came home told her they'd seen her on TV and treated her like a celebrity because nothing like that had ever happened in the family before. Down at the lot they did TV ads but Charlie had never been in one. He was a good salesman. He had an easy manner that inspired confidence and aside from the few rough patches did pretty well though not well enough to lift him out of his circumstances and thought of himself as being stuck on the lot for life, not liking his boss who never had a good word to say and treated him like an indentured servant. Ginny, on the other hand, loved her job and thought her dentist was a god. A word of praise from him and she'd float around the house as though he'd pumped her full of laughing gas. She only worked the mornings and had her own car, devoting her afternoons to her social life. They ate dinner together at seven and the kids too if they were around and chatted for a while 
|
before settling down in front of the TV though if Ginny got on the phone it could be for hours. She had a sister in Georgia and another one up north. Charlie's brother and widowed mother still lived in Memphis and they'd get together from time to time for a family day with the barbecued pork ribs. Charlie's brother had a boy with leukemia and they were at the hospital a lot and sometimes his wife looked like a wreck so he didn't envy them though his brother was the head of a regional marketing office and had a $400,000 house in Germantown. Life was like that, Charlie reckoned. It always managed to knock you down, but most often it didn't let you get up. Joe daydreamed about Christine sometimes, mostly about getting off her bra, tearing it off her and making her do whatever he wanted, and sometimes about hurting her too the way she had hurt him. He knew they'd looked funny in the street together and she was ashamed to be seen with him. He was just 5'8" so he'd been a roly-poly  |
||||
