A Place in the Country by Elizabeth Adler

Author:Elizabeth Adler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: St. Martin's Press

chapter 44

Isabel—as she had now chosen to be known—was sitting on the terrace of her grandparents’ house, with pale purple wisteria petals drifting down on her head from the old blossoming vine. She was thinking about taking a walk through the well-mowed grounds. Her grandpa never got off his bloody tractor, he just buzzed around smiling and cursing the bugs which took huge bites out of him, threatening them with DDT spray that of course he would never use. He just put Neosporin on the welts and hoped for the best.

“The bugs were there before you,” she’d heard her grandmother telling him calmly. “They resent being disturbed.”

She walked down to the pond—more like a lake really. It was so quiet she could hear the whirr of the dragonflies’ wings as they hovered, iridescent green and turquoise and coral over the water, snapping down every now and then onto the surface without so much as a ripple or a plop.

Her grandpa had created this lake, he had personally hauled the rocks that lined two sides, laid the springy turf that sloped directly down to it; he had even made the wooden bench from a couple of trees felled in a major storm a couple of years ago. Just two stumps and a plank across, but perfectly suitable for the rustic surroundings, and very useful for an idle girl to dawdle away an afternoon, trying to think about nothing in particular, because thinking was too painful.

Isabel supposed she would “get over it.” Everybody said she would. “Work through it,” was an even worse phrase someone had used. As if it were a math test and not a death in the family. Her grandmother, though, had the right attitude.

“Fuck it, Isabel,” she said, “if you’ll pardon my French. Let’s just go shopping. It’s only a temporary solution, but you’ll find out before too long, life is made up of temporary solutions.”

“Temporary” was now Isabel’s new philosophy in life. After all, nothing so far had turned out to be permanent. “Wise up to it,” she told herself. “Life goes on, with or without some people in it.”

Anyway, today she was wearing the dress her grandmother had bought her in Bordeaux: red, strapless, and too short. She suspected it was totally unsuitable but her grandmother had laughed and said, “Go for it. Just don’t save it for a special occasion, you might have grown out of it before that happens.”

That’s why she was wearing it now, to feed the fish who came clustering round her dangling feet as she threw their special food into the water. She suspected she was overfeeding them. Her grandpa only did it once a day but she loved the feel of them swimming round her toes. Maybe they liked it too.

Her phone beeped. It was a text from Sam saying she missed her, and that Upperthorpe was in the swim meet against two other schools that weekend. “Have a good time,” she texted. “I think about us, together in Singapore.” She signed it, “love you…”

Isabel texted back immediately.

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