The Color Master: Stories by Aimee Bender

Author:Aimee Bender [Bender, Aimee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
ISBN: 9780385534895
Publisher: Doubleday
Published: 2013-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

We headed up together, past Hovick’s pastures. As soon as he walked into the small bedroom, he knelt at the edge of the bed, his knees on the slippers, his hands clutching at the flower petals, clutching and letting go, like they were the most special thing in the world to him.

I watched for a minute. I could not tell what he was feeling. “I’m very sorry,” I said. “I don’t know why I did that.”

He rested his cheek against the petals for a moment. “It’s okay,” he said, heavily.

“They’re your daughter’s?”

He kept his eyes closed. Shook his head. “No.”

To give him some privacy, I stared at the floor. At the petals he had dropped. At the specks of gold in the green flat carpet weave. I did feel, against my will, creeping into my cheeks, a surge of what could only be called pleasure, which came from the fact that something interesting was starting to happen, something I myself had instigated, a feeling I found repellent in its selfishness but still unyielding.

“Are they from your wedding?” I asked, softly.

“No.” He held a handful of petals close to his face.

A funeral, I wondered. One of his beloved parents. What a rude thing for me to do, to take something precious and throw it all over the room like that.

“No funeral,” he said, as if he had read my mind. He closed his eyes. “They’re from nothing,” he said. “They came in the book.”

I nodded. “What do you mean?”

“The Ohio flora book,” he said. He rested his face on the bedspread again.

“It came with flowers?”

“I found the book and inside were these flowers.”

“You mean when you bought the book?”

“They were in the book when I bought it.” He smoothed the petals near his hair. “I bought it used,” he said, by way of explanation.

I took a step forward on the lush green carpet, careful not to crush the petals he’d dropped. “I don’t understand,” I said, slowly. “They’re not your flowers?”

“No,” he said.

“Then why are you upset?”

He opened his eyes and looked at me straight on. “Because they meant something,” he said.

“To someone else.”

“To someone.”

He kept gathering up the petals, smoothing them over the comforter, gathering and smoothing, and as I watched him I felt the very beginning, the very tiny initial curdles of irritation start to cluster and foment inside me. Something in the house was beginning to close in on me, and my softer feelings of sympathy at his old-man isolation were starting to harden and shrink into a kernel of annoyance that emitted a vaporous cloud of what could only be called entitlement. Like I owned this house. Like I lived in it, or could, or should. Like I was there to do whatever I wanted, me making the mark for all young women, and he would not, or could not, stop any of it.

“Maybe they did come from a wedding,” he said, bringing a cracked petal to his nose and sniffing it.

I walked over to the old oak dresser and pulled open the top drawer.

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