summer was beginning in which she would be, in all the ways that it mattered, alone. A great shudder of feeling went through her and the thought came into her mind that maybe this was how it would be, always, maybe she would be alone for the rest of her life. She reached over the table and covered Andrew’s hand with hers. He smiled at her, at ease. “What harm would it do if you kissed me one last time over coffee?”
“None,” he said, and he pushed himself out of his chair and leaned over the table. She met him in the middle, and their lips touched, lightly, chastely. He looked around. “The world still here?”
She laughed. “Thank you for everything, Andrew.”
“You’re welcome.
“Are you two arm-wrestling?” said Glynnis, entering the kitchen. She held up an alarm clock. “I forgot this. I put it in the glove compartment so I wouldn’t, and I did.”
“You should have kept it for your collection,” Hazel said.
“Oh, no, it’s yours. It’s a different time zone out here anyway, isn’t it?” She put it down on the table and gave Andrew a kiss on the cheek, but as she was leaving again, Hazel called her back.
“Stay for a coffee. You’ve earned at least that.”
“At the
She sat and Hazel got another cup and grabbed the little box of sugar-coated donuts they’d bought. She called to her mother and Martha. Emily came into the kitchen with a fistful of wispy dead flies, which she dumped into the garbage can under the sink.
“Is my house arrest over?” asked Martha, sitting and taking her coffee.
“You’re free to go under your own recognizance,” said Hazel, “but you’ll have to check in with your parole officer on a regular basis.”
Martha nodded knowingly. “You think plastic surgery will help me?”
“Not a chance,” said her mother. “I’d know you anywhere.”
After washing her hands, Emily came to the table. Around it sat a collection of people who made up, in Emily’s opinion, a very strange family indeed.
Andrew opened the newspaper to the conclusion of the summer short story and turned it to her. “Your daughter, the author,” he said. Emily lifted her glasses off her chest and put them on and began to read. “Maybe you have another calling,” he said to Hazel.
“I’m having a hard-enough time with this one.”
“Another lifetime, then.”
“Yes,” she said, a little sadly, lifting her coffee cup to shield her eyes. “Another lifetime.”
About Inger Ash Wolfe
Inger Ash Wolfe is a Canadian fiction writer whose real name has not been revealed. The publishers have stated that Ash is 'the pseudonym for a well-known and well-regarded North American literary novelist.'The pseudonym was originally to be Inger Wolf until it was recognized that a Danish crime writer already uses that name.
