Hometown Brew by Ellen Akins

Author:Ellen Akins [Akins, Ellen]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-83215-3
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2013-01-16T00:00:00+00:00

25

He’d almost gotten back to sleep, or so he told himself, when he heard her car and found himself wide awake hoping the noise hadn’t woken his neighbors. For an hour and a half, he’d been lying in bed going over their conversation, if it could be called that. What troubled him most, at least on the slippery surface his thoughts were negotiating, was his failure to ask her how she’d known who’d broken into her house. “I think,” she had said, as far as he was able to recall now. I think it was them was what he was fairly certain she’d said, though if she’d said I think, a comforting thought, he couldn’t imagine he wouldn’t have asked her why. The omission implied that no explanation was needed—and that implication was damning indeed. It was also a nuance, necessarily subtle, and look how unsubtle the woman’s mind was, he tried to reassure himself, but at once he was subjected to a mental picture of her as she’d sat before him on the sofa, face tilted up, all eyes, looking not so much unsubtle, let alone stupid, as young, much younger than she could possibly be.

The look impressed itself on his conscience, which so far his thoughts had managed to skate over, and irritably he searched around until he got hold of another reasonable idea: she was a victim of coincidence; her suspicions were unfounded, accusations false. He could see her as she’d sounded, holding the phone like a lifeline, whispering about the wreck around her as if the room might hear, that look of hers wandering with no one to fix on now—and whereas the image had provoked him only a minute before, now it filled him with sympathy utterly unlike the earlier, needling kind. It was a surprisingly powerful feeling, seductive as any sexual fantasy, and he sank into its depths.

The harsh coughing sound of her car then, disrupting his drift toward sleep as well as the fancy that buoyed him along, was too crudely real, like an angelic vision in a silent picture opening her mouth to emit a Bronx rasp.

He’d pulled on his slacks and his shirt and was about to go down when he realized that she hadn’t knocked yet, or rung. Stopping to look out the window, he found that Alice hadn’t even gotten out of her car. There was something about this, the dark little car sitting there like a troubling second thought, that erased the last traces of his annoyance, even quickened his step descending.

When he opened the door, she opened hers, then sat there still and silent as if awaiting a sign from him. Finally he was forced to go out to her, the cool grass, then pavement, under his bare feet a peculiar sensation, as if he hadn’t touched ground for years—and it occurred to him that he probably hadn’t—and rounding the car with the lush smell of the air weighing on him was like walking into a memory of no particular time and place, a long-ago lifetime of warm summer nights.

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