Phoenix (Kindle Single) by Chuck Palahniuk Page A

cooked; nothing looked appetizing against his black-glazed china. He blinked. He asked, “What are you saying?”
    Slower this time, Rachel said, “We have to find a new house.”
    “No,” said Ted, drawing out the word as if playing for time. “Before that.”
    Rachel wasn’t annoyed. She’d rehearsed this for days. She could’ve paced it better. It was a lot to spring on him all at once. “I said we need to list this house.”
    Ted closed his eyes and shook his head. His brow furrowed, he prompted, “Before that .”
    “The part about Belinda Carlisle?” Rachel asked.
    “Before that,” Ted coaxed.
    It worried Rachel to think that Ted wasn’t stupid—that, instead, he just never listened to anything she said. She rewound their conversation in her mind. “Do you mean the part about being pregnant?”
    “You’re pregnant?” Ted asked. He put his black napkin to his lips. To wipe them or hide them, Rachel couldn’t tell.
    * * *
    It’s still Monday night in Orlando, Rachel is still waiting on the phone. She peels the bedspread down and stretches out to watch the Home Shopping Channel. What she loves most about HSC is that it doesn’t have commercials. Diamond cocktail rings rotate in slow motion, glittering under halogen lights and magnified to one hundred times their actual size. The pitchman always speaks with a down-home drawl and always sounds so excited when he says, “You’d better hurry’n order, folks, we don’t got more’n a couple thousand of these ruby tiaras left …” Emerald solitaires sell for the same price as a jar of cashews from the minibar.
    With the TV on mute, over the phone she can hear the neighbor’s dog barking. The barking disappears as if muffled by something. As if April’s put the receiver to her ear. Holding her breath to hear better, Rachel says, “Sweetheart? Boo-Boo? How are you and Daddy getting along without Mommy?” She talks until she feels like an idiot babbling to herself in an empty motel room.
    This silence, Rachel suspects, is retribution. The night before her flight, she’d noticed her teethlooked yellow. Too much coffee. After dinner she’d prepared the bleaching trays and let April examine them. Rachel had explained how tightly they fit: Mommy couldn’t answer any questions for at least an hour once the trays were on her teeth. Mommy couldn’t talk at all. If April needed something, she’d need to ask her father. No sooner than Rachel had squirted the expensive bleaching gel into each tray and snapped it into her mouth, April was already tugging at her and asking for a bedtime story.
    Ted wasn’t any help. April went to bed in tears, and Rachel’s teeth still looked like hell.
    From the sounds that come through the wall, the guests in the next motel room are full-fledged screwing. Rachel cups one hand around the receiver and hopes her daughter won’t overhear. She worries that the line has been disconnected, and keeps asking, “April? Sweetheart, can you hear Mommy?” Resigned, Rachel asks the girl to hand the telephone back to her father. Ted’s voice comes on.
    “Don’t stew about it,” he says. “She’s just giving you the silent treatment.” His voice muffled, his mouth pointed somewhere else, he says, “You’re just upset that Mommy’s gone, aren’t you?” A measure of dead air follows. Rachel can hear the carnival music and silly voices of a cartoon playing in the living room. It’s not lost on her that she mostly listens to television with no sound while her daughter watches without visuals.
    Still directed elsewhere, Ted’s voice asks, “You still love Mommy, don’t you?”
    Another beat of silence follows. Rachel hears nothing until Ted begins to placate: “No, Mommy doesn’t love her job more than she loves you.” He doesn’t sound very convincing. After a pause, he scolds, “Don’t say that, missy! Never say that!” From the tone of his voice, Rachel braces herself for the sound of a slap. She wants to hear a