Practical Jean by Trevor Cole

Author:Trevor Cole
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: HarperCollins US
Published: 2011-11-30T04:18:12+00:00

Chapter 12

It was early Saturday morning, and so the bus that took Jean back to Kotemee was only a third full, a ragged crop of heads, mostly middle-aged tourists, day-trippers, a few mothers with toddlers half-crazed for a splash in a lake. Her overnight bag on the seat beside her, Jean sat looking out an east-facing window, letting the city outskirts, the scrublands, the farmers’ fields earmarked for development all blur past her eyes, and the memories of her times with Adele run together like watercolors. She had tidied the apartment, washed and put away the wineglasses, pulled a duvet over Adele’s clay-cool back. More than once, when they’d lived together during that year of art college, she’d done precisely the same thing after a late, wine-soaked night.

Milt, annoyingly, wasn’t answering when she called at eight-thirty, so, slipping her phone back into her purse, she abandoned the idea of having him pick her up at the station. Then she had to give herself a little mental kick because, of course, the car wasn’t available at all. It was sitting in a garage waiting for parts.

Hardly a cloud. And not too hot. Today would be a good day to be in the studio; the sidewalks would be filled with strollers from the city looking for ways to commemorate their trek into the hinterlands, something to show off to their friends, an artifact from that quaint little town. They’d rattle the bell of Jean’s Expressions, look around with their noses up, and conduct their interrogations. How long have you lived here? How do you pronounce it? Do you ever wish you were closer to the city? Is there any place to get a decent sandwich? Why just leaves? Don’t you have anything with animals?

Jean decided she could do without that today. She was, admittedly, a little hungover. And she was wistful about Adele. About leaving her there in the city, that place of noise and smoke and garbage and gangs. Living her whole life in the quiet of Kotemee, the city had always seemed to Jean to be a place where death—startling, violent, inexplicable death—happened every day, just one of the common transactions of a tumultuous urban existence. She wondered whether, in that savage swirl of mayhem, anyone would really notice that Adele Farbridge had ceased to be. There was a part of Jean that couldn’t bear that thought. Another part was fine with it, admittedly, because the longer Adele went undiscovered the better it would be for Jean, and for the rest of her friends. But overall, she was wistful. Adele had shown her what true sacrifice for a friend looked like, and Jean knew that she had so much work to do to match her example. For Natalie and Louise and Cheryl . . . especially Cheryl. She had an awful lot to make up for there.

At a quarter to ten, with the sun in her eyes, Jean was carrying her overnight bag up the hill of Conmore Avenue from

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