Five Tuesdays in Winter by Lily King

Author:Lily King [King, Lily]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Macmillan

TIMELINE

My brother was helping me carry my stuff up to his apartment. “Just don’t talk about Ethan Frome, okay?”

“What?”

“It’s a thing of hers,” he said. “She gets drunk and we fight and she says, ‘Just because I haven’t read Ethan Frome.’ ”

“Wait, seriously?”

We’d stopped on the landing. He could see how delicious I found this detail.

“C’mon. Just don’t,” he said.

If the situation were reversed, he’d be memorizing passages from that book already. “ ‘Okay,’ she said, quite reluctantly.”

He made a noise that wasn’t quite a laugh. “This may be a complete disaster.”

We headed up the next flight. They were outdoor stairs, like at a motel. We dragged my garbage bags of clothes and books in. My room was straight through at the back. His and Mandy’s was off the kitchen. I never went in there the whole time I lived there, so I can’t tell you what it was like. From the kitchen, when they left the door ajar, it looked like a black hole. My room was bright with two windows looking out onto North Street, not the parking lot, and plenty of room for my desk. He thought it was funny I’d brought a desk. It was a table really, no drawers, with legs I had to screw back on.

I’d moved a lot but this time it was more like self-banishment. I didn’t have the same feeling I normally did, setting up my room that night, twisting the legs back into the underbelly of the plank of wood and pushing it against the wall between the windows. That fresh start, clean slate, anything’s possible feeling. I didn’t have that. I knew I was going to write a lot of stupid things that made me cry before I wrote anything good on that table.

My brother came in and laughed at my only poster. It was a timeline of human history. It was narrow and wrapped around three walls and went from the Middle Paleolithic age to the Chernobyl nuclear disaster a few years earlier. It comforted me.

He put his thumbnail on a spot close to the end. “There I am. Born between the first manned spaceflight and the construction of the Berlin Wall.”

We hadn’t lived together since I was seven and he was thirteen. Now I was twenty-five and he was ancient. He sat down on my bed. “Does that guy know where you are?” he said.

“No.”

“Will he find out?”

“Probably.”

“Am I going to have to fight him?”

“More likely you’ll have to listen to him sing ‘Norwegian Wood’ on the sitar under my window.”

“Then I’ll really have to beat him up.”

“Your neighbors will probably beat you to it.”

He laughed, hard. “They really fucking will.” He looked around. “Mandy is not going to like all these books.”

I didn’t have bookshelves so I’d stacked them in columns in various parts of the room. They looked like a grove of stunted trees. “No Ethan Frome as far as the eye can see.”

“Shut up. Now.”

“Just tell her that,” I said, louder. She wasn’t even home yet.

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