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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
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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
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