Pins & Needles by Brown Karen

Author:Brown, Karen
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Washington Square Press

on the lake

It was spring when his grandmother died, the funeral nearly an hour’s drive in the light rain, with trees budding bright against their wet black limbs all along Route 44, through Avon, Canton, and New Hartford, and Paul insisting we listen to Clapton, and his sister telling childhood stories of their father, who died five years before in a murder-suicide involving his second wife. I wore a gray wool skirt and the light rain beaded up on the front of it. The waistband was too tight, and I worried about being pregnant, alternately believing and disbelieving it. We went first to the funeral home, where I sat in a semicircle of folding chairs with his family, and people came and cried on me. My hands were taken and enfolded in the small, dry, withered hands of old women, the fleshy hands of middle-aged men, who leaned their faces close to mine, showing me their moles, and cracked lips. “You poor, poor thing,” they said. I didn’t know any of them, and their tears wet the shoulder of my blouse, the lank strands of my hair. I had only met Paul’s grandmother once, when he took me to her house for dinner, and she sat tired and depleted in a chair at the table, watching everyone eat the food she’d spent all day preparing—steaming plates of gnocchi alla sorrentina. I remembered her gray hair looking like she set it the night before in pink foam rollers, her quick, assessing eyes, her ashen face. Lying out she looked almost the same, save for the eyes, which were closed, and unable to judge me where I stood, young and alive, peering into her casket. Hers was the first dead body I ever saw.

Paul knew I didn’t want to go, that I did it for him. I made him understand this the day before in his basement bedroom. It had already begun to rain and the new spring grass grew against the window and gave the room a greenish tinge. He had asked me to come over on my lunch break to have sex. He didn’t say as much, but that was all we did together at the time, and I didn’t mind the sex simply because I understood he wanted it with me, and no one else. There was something to that, I thought. I took my clothes off and folded each piece and set everything on the top of his bureau. I stood on the floor’s cold cement. He lay on the bed watching me.

“I can’t really see it,” he said. He looked at my stomach, his eyes squinched.

I put both of my hands there. “It would only be two months.”

I had already told him that I wouldn’t have it, but every day or so he tried to change my mind. I found this endearing. He was still not working from his motorcycle accident and he spent most of his day on painkillers in his basement room, watching television. People came by in the evenings to visit him.

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