House Next Door by Anne Rivers Siddons

Author:Anne Rivers Siddons
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2006-07-18T16:00:00+00:00

We did not hear from the Sheehans during that week, and except for a couple of times when Claire Swanson saw Buck drive up to the house during the day and pick up Anita and bring her home an hour or so later, nobody saw her at all. I supposed, when Claire told me about seeing them, that he was taking her to the therapist the New Jersey doctor had recommended, and that the man had, perhaps, advised her to curtail any sort of social activity. I was rather grateful for the moratorium. We were in the middle of a new business presentation at the office, and I had been working late all week. I hadn’t really liked the idea of an evening with the Sheehans so soon after their two weeks at the beach. I didn’t want to talk about their problems for a while or have them feel they must thank us over and over. I did not want to hear any more hopeful allusions to recovery and wholeness and eventual health. I simply wanted it to happen, quietly and without incident. I was tired of pain and fear and strangeness. Anita’s and Buck’s. Kim’s. Walter’s and mine.

Midway during the next week I ran into Virginia Guthrie on the street downtown outside my office building just as I was coming back from a hasty trip to soothe a client whose press kits had arrived forty-five minutes after the press had departed. She was trundling along toward the multilevel parking garage at the end of the street, department-store boxes piled chin-high in her arms.

“You look like you’re ready to spit nails,” she said.

“I am. And you look like you’re about to collapse in the street. Let’s go blow two hours on lunch at Rinaldi’s. With Bloody Marys. I’ll treat. If I go back to the office right now I’ll probably bash my dimwitted secretary’s head in with a zip-code directory. Or ruin her manicure, which would be an even greater disaster.”

She seemed reluctant for a moment, and then she said, “Oh, why not? I don’t have to be anywhere until four. And I’ll take you up on that Bloody Mary. I may even have three.”

“Bad day on the barricades?” I said. Virginia does not like to shop.

“Bad week, sort of. I guess. I don’t really know. It will be good to talk to somebody about it.”

“Anita,” I said, looking at her closely in the white noon light.

“Anita,” she said.

We walked across the street and went into Rinaldi’s, and Vito, the maître d’ who had professed a courtly and florid letch for me for all the years I’d been at the agency, found us a quiet table in a sunny bay overlooking the milling human traffic on the street outside. The contrast between the teeming street and the subdued noon restaurant bustle was soothing. We ordered the Bloody Marys and they came immediately, rich and thick and sprinkled with snips of fresh dillweed, in outsized frosted goblets.

“What’s happened?” I said when the silence had spun out between us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.