Gone So Long by Unknown

Author:Unknown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Epub3
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

26

SUSAN’S CELL phone rang, and now she was talking to her husband, and that gave Lois the chance to go outside to her car for the bag of Dresden lamps. The sun was low to the west, and it made the dead pine needles in her gravel driveway look golden, and Lois was breathing hard from her slow climb up the stairs with those lamps. From down in the kitchen came the smell of chicken broiling. Suzie had found a Cuban or Mexican station on the radio and men were singing in Spanish above strumming guitars and high-flying horns and all of life seemed to be a raucous party under the sun. It was hard to miss the change in her granddaughter. Even though she came into the kitchen apologizing for being late in starting their dinner, she looked . . . happy wasn’t the word. She still wore no makeup and her short chopped hair was a mess. She looked too thin too, but she seemed lit up from somewhere inside herself, if that made any sense. At first this ticked Lois off, and she wasn’t sure why. She wasn’t really hungry and didn’t care that their dinner hadn’t been started. Maybe it was that Suzie had found something to do in this house that made her feel good for once. Why couldn’t she have been that way as a kid? It would have made things a hell of a lot easier. Though her reading used to do something like that to her as well. Susan would be in her room for hours then come down in a spell from some faraway world that Lois was never invited into herself. Then the boy years began, along with their fights upon fights upon endless damn fights.

But tonight Suzie seemed to read all this in Lois’s face, and she said, “I wrote a lot today, Noni.”

“I thought you said you weren’t any good at writing.”

“I’m not. I’m just beginning not to care anymore.”

Lois could do without the Spanish music. There was too much of it in town as it was, but there was a festive lightness in the air that she and Suzie were making together in this dark old house, and Lois was glad Susan was still on the phone with Bobby because now she could wrap these two lamps she’d decided to give them both.

Well, Marianne had helped with that. Just before they closed the shop for lunch, Lois told her how much Suzie had liked those Dresdens, and Marianne turned to her and said, “You should give them to her and her husband.”

Perhaps if she hadn’t said husband, Lois knew she might not be doing this at all. Her business was doing well enough, but these two lamps were a good acquisition and eleven hundred bucks was eleven hundred bucks. But still, all through lunch the idea hung inside her like the vanishing fragment of a good dream, and now, sitting on the edge of her bed with

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