Threats: A Novel by Amelia Gray

Author:Amelia Gray
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 0374533075
Publisher: FSG Originals
Published: 2012-02-28T00:00:00+00:00

39.

AFTER HIS FRIENDS WERE GONE, David noticed that the woman from the salon was sitting on his porch. She had been sitting around the corner of the house, so Samson and Ted likely wouldn’t have seen her upon their departure, but David saw the corner of her salon apron, the cuff of her blue jeans. A thermos and a bag of pears rested by the chair. He walked down the porch steps and approached her from the lawn, eye level with her sensible shoes. “I showed myself a seat,” she said. Her lips were broad and pursed. He remembered how he had seen an ear within them, which seemed like a strange thought in the daylight but not fully outside the stone-walled boundaries of possibility.

“Aileen.”

She stirred the tea in the thermos with a tiny silver spoon, which she slipped into her apron pocket. She reached into her lap and held up a pear. The fruit’s colors seemed too bright against her hand, but he accepted it and placed it on the porch. “I saw you walking in the park earlier,” she said. “You seemed happy. It looked like you wanted company.”

The rocking chair she was sitting in had dug small grooves into the porch over the years, little imprints in the wood that made the chair rock on a track. It made it so the seated individual could rock back and forth within the track, but if he or she tried to shift the chair in another direction—to face the top of the street instead of the corner—the chair would find its groove again and slide back into place. “Who were those men?” she asked.

“Friends.”

“You should eat that pear.”

“Thank you. I just drank a lot of water, though.”

“They are delicious this time of year.”

“Too much water, really.”

She looked toward the driveway. “Frances’s car is gone,” she said, running her fingers along the upper hem of her salon apron at the point where it tied around her neck. “I brought you some pears,” she said. “You have a lovely home.”

He watched the mechanism of Aileen’s leg from his position beside the porch. “City took the car.”

“I’ve been thinking about Frances,” Aileen said. She rocked with one leg crossed over the other. The toe of her sneaker touched the ground. As she flexed and pointed her toe, David saw the calf muscle engage. “I keep thinking about Frances. We used to drink a cup of coffee before the customers showed up in the morning. She brought different types of nondairy creamers for us to try.”

David remembered his own morning routine at the dental office. “I miss her too.”

“Because I have a lactose issue.” She touched one of the pears in its bag with the tip of her sneaker. “It’s unlike Frances to go out the way she did.”

“I guess endings don’t always follow the story,” David said. “Some people don’t spend a day of their lives in a hospital until those last two weeks. Everything is different at the end in a way that hastens its coming.

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