Robbi McCoy - For Me and My Gal by Robbi McCoy

Author:Robbi McCoy
Language: fr
Format: mobi
Published: 2011-05-28T12:21:17+00:00

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Gwen parked in front of 322 Santa Clara Avenue and stepped out of her car. It was a quiet residential area with old elms growing together into a sparse canopy above. Some of the original houses on this street had been replaced and many had been renovated. This particular one, once the home of Arlene Brewster and her daughter-in-law Lucy, looked not just old-fashioned, but old. It had a wide, covered porch with a couple of blond wicker chairs on it and square columns framing the front door. In the flowerbed fringing the porch, orange and yellow zinnias bloomed cheerfully.

That should make a pretty picture, Gwen thought, removing her camera from its case.

She took some front-on photos, standing on the sidewalk before the open gate. As she composed her shots, the house 10 Robbi McCoy

framed in her view screen seemed to cast a spell on her, calling to her from the past with its strange, alluring story. The house was a fixture in that story, the very stage where the action had taken place behind that forest green front door with its semicircle window and its intriguing brass knocker. She could imagine those three women—Arlene, Lucy and the sailor without a name—like characters on a stage, playing out their roles here day to day. She felt it would almost be possible to enter that scene, to open the door and step through to another reality like Alice through the looking glass.

Gwen was entranced by a story like this, the past coming vividly alive in her mind, allowing her to briefly inhabit the lives of people who had gone before. Certain people, certain stories, captured her this way. For those stories she would go without food and without sleep, driven to complete the missing parts of the tale.

She was inside the fence now, snapping a shot of the door, peering at the camera screen as her feet carried her along the narrow pathway, up the gray wooden steps onto a porch of thick painted planks. She focused on the knocker, a brass ring framed with brass leaves, discolored with age.

As she peered at the screen, she was roused from her concentration by a dog barking inside the house. The front door opened and a frantic little dachshund came running out and jumped excitedly around her feet. She looked up to find herself face to face with Shelby. It took her a moment to register this as they stood staring in surprise at one another. She let the camera drop to dangle from its strap, her heart leaping for joy at her unexpected good luck.

Even as she was trying to understand the situation, she couldn’t help noticing how cute Shelby looked, dressed in an old, stained “Hillary for President” T-shirt and shorts cut just above the knee. She had a smudge of dirt across one cheek.

Still distracted by the story she’d been living in her mind, Gwen barely knew what she was doing as she took a step toward Shelby and gathered her in her arms, kissing her as if it were something they did every day.

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