58
“Where should I put the dishes?” asked Tom, carrying the box up onto the front porch.
Laura knew which dishes he meant. Cheap china, a brown and yellow design of bees and flowers. Tom had gotten them from a grocery store give-away—buy so many groceries and pay a dollar for each dish. They went well with his two jelly glasses. “Couldn’t we store those?”
“Sure. I’ll put it with my sheets, my rug, my couch—“
“This is
“What? What am I?”
He stood there, looking at her, still holding the box. The man she had invited to live with her.
She thought of her nice FiestaWare. Thought of them nested one into the other, their fine sold colors, dark blue, green, tangerine, dark red. Okay, so there would be bees and flowers, too. She sighed. “Okay. Put them in the cupboard near the fridge.”
Still holding the box, he bent awkwardly and kissed her on the forehead. “You’re doing pretty well.”
“You think so?”
“You’ve lived alone for a long time.”
“So have you.”
“But I’m not territorial like you are.”
It was true. As he let the screen door close behind him, Laura realized this would not be easy. When she’d agreed to try it, in the middle of the night three days ago, it had seemed absolutely right. Love was love. It was supposed to conquer all.
But she’d seen him leave towels on the floor of his bathroom.
The morning after Tom Lightfoot moved in, Laura awakened to rain tapping on the roof just before dawn. It seemed to her that the temperature had dropped ten degrees. She crept out of bed, careful not to wake him. Looking down at him and thinking that this was how it would be from now on. She found herself thinking of Buddy and Beth. Were they healing the rift between them? Or would Buddy get a place nearby and hover around his daughter like a guardian angel?
She brewed some coffee and went outside, sitting down on the old steel glider, swinging back and forth. She’d found the Art Deco glider at a yard sale, complete with the original striped canvas cushion. Here on the porch of a house built in the twenties, the scent of the desert around her, she could pretend this was the early part of the twentieth century.
There were serial killers then—though not as many—and plenty of pedophiles, but people didn’t know about it. How nice for them.
The rain was soft and steady—what the Navajos called a female rain. Water dripped off the eaves and splashed on the brick pavement in the few places the porch roof leaked. The smell of wet creosote wafting in, the trunks of the big old mesquites gleaming black as seal skin. The coolness good on her face, a balm to her singed eyebrows and the burn on her cheek.
Now was as good a time as any. She went inside, got her mother’s old electric typewriter and set it on the wood, drop-leaf table on the other end of the porch. She needed an extension cord to plug it in.
It took her a moment or two to figure out how to install the ribbon she’d bought from Hart Brothers Business Machines. The guy had one ribbon left, taking up dust in a back aisle, saying it was fortunate for her this was a common typewriter in its day.
As she lifted the paper bale and rolled the first sheet of paper through, she smiled, thinking how Tom had liked the idea.
Zen and the art of unfinished business. She liked it that her crazy idea had Tom’s approval. But that was predictable; he admired simplicity in all its ways.
She stared at the clean sheet of paper, then typed “Chapter Seven”. The action was strange, percussive. Both stiff and too fast for fingers used to a computer.
She was still staring at the words “Chapter Seven” forty minutes later when Tom came out and joined her. He’d brought her more coffee. He had put the right amount of half and half in it—a quick learner. She told him that.
“I read somewhere there’s a big shot designer in Hollywood who made up a swatch to show his maid what color his coffee should be. You’re not that bad.”
Glad she hadn’t said she appreciated him using her FiestaWare instead of his supermarket china.
He bent to kiss her. Soon the coffee and Chapter Seven were forgotten.
After they made love and were lying tangled together, listening to their heartbeats slowing back to normal, Laura felt a sudden strange bursting in her heart, as profound a moment as she had ever had. Tears unshed for eleven years suddenly came to the surface.
She lay in bed with Tom stroking her hair, her tears soaking the sheets and filling up her nose and throat. Enveloped in his comforting presence.
Feeling that, finally, she belonged.
