Perry, Thomas - Jane Whitefield 02 - Dance for the Dead by Perry Thomas

Author:Perry, Thomas [Perry, Thomas]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub

17

Mary Perkins had spent most of her month in Ann Arbor learning about Donna Kester. She had discovered that Donna was not comfortable in the apartment that Jane Whitefield had helped her to rent. It was not Jane Whitefield’s fault, although she was tempted to sweep up whatever annoying particles of blame were lying around and heap them on her. Mary had assumed that Donna Kester was going to be someone who would like the long, clean lines of the modern apartment complex. It reminded Mary of the hotels where she had stayed for most of her adult life.

But as the winter came on, the building seemed hastily built and drafty, as though the carpenters had left something undone that she couldn’t see. The exercise room that the tenants shared was a big box with a glass wall where women a lot younger than Mary went to display the results of many earlier visits to young men who seemed to be too intent on lifting large pieces of iron to notice what was being offered. The pool in the courtyard promised more of the same in the distant summer without the chance to hide the mileage under a good pair of tights. And the dirty snow that had drifted over its plastic cover began to contribute to her feeling that summer wasn’t something that was still to come.

As Donna Kester explained her position to herself, the place wasn’t congenial. She moved closer to the university and rented the top floor of a big house that had been built in the 1920s. It was the sort of house where she had grown up in Memphis, with a lot of time-darkened wood in places where they didn’t put wood anymore, and a layer of thick carpet that covered the stairway and muffled the creak and was much cleaner at the edges than at the center.

Her apartment had a small, neat little kitchen and a bedroom with a brass bed in it that wasn’t a reproduction of anything, but wasn’t good enough to be an antique. The closet was small, but it was big enough for the sort of wardrobe that Donna Kester was likely to acquire. The living room had a bad couch and a good easy chair that was aimed as though by a surveyor directly at a twenty-year-old RCA television set that picked up only two channels she had trouble telling apart. But the two channels had forecasters who did a fair job of predicting the weather, and this was about all she required of them for the moment because it let her know what to wear while she was out looking for a job.

Mary began to feel more comfortable as Donna Kester soon after she moved into the old apartment. She had no trouble suppressing the landlords’ curiosity with a vague reference to a divorce. In the future, whenever they had a question in their minds about her lack of a work history and shallow credit record, she could be too sensitive to talk about it.

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