Tiny Ladies by Adam Klein

Author:Adam Klein [Klein, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781941088159
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Hannah is standing by the car, smoking. I should have given her the keys, I think.

‘Is everything all right?’ I ask.

She stands still for a moment, not responding. ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me to explain myself. I didn’t mean to get so angry.’

I unlock her door. ‘Get in,’ I say. I walk around the car, watching her reluctantly sit down, close the door after her.

‘I hope I didn’t ruin that for you,’ she says as I warm the engine. ‘I just hate it when a guy immediately assumes he can interrupt and be welcomed.’

‘Well, I think you ended that assumption, for him at least.’

‘You’re really angry at me?’ She asks me as though I’m persisting in this, not letting it drop.

I decide not to answer her. Telling her I’m angry might make her think I was interested in the guy. She’d find a way to confirm her fantasy. I turn on the tape recorder. We sit there quietly listening to Laura Nyro singing ‘Stoney End’, finding our way back to the familiarity between us. There’s a bruised quiet between us neither one of us wants to touch. After we’ve passed the last convenience store, the houses begin to thin out, the stars appear more dense.

‘It’s beautiful, isn’t it?’ I ask, leaning forward to take in as much of the sky as I can.

‘It seems like a big empty dome with a billion lights. You can almost imagine it echoing with voices, people who have never been heard.’ The snow has been falling steadily for the past week. The new cover is glinting innocently under the moon.

‘I can’t believe you’ve never met your grandmother,’ she ventures. ‘You have no other family?’

‘We were cut off,’ I say. ‘It was something my parents wanted, but I think it sort of got out of control. They could have used my grandmother’s help, but they were too proud.’ I laugh at the word.

I remember my mother saying of her mother, ‘Too much water under the bridge.’ The water doesn’t move; it is mirror-still.

We pull up to the cottage and begin to crunch our way up the path.

‘Do you need me to take care of King while you’re gone?’ she asks, as we shake our boots off on the porch. ‘I’m good with dogs.’

‘No,’ I say. ‘My friend Gina’s going to do it.’

‘Gina who?’

‘The one you know. Or she knows you, at least.’

She looks into my eyes as she passes me in the doorway. ‘Did she tell you I worked for her?’ she asks, handing her coat to me.

‘I don’t remember. I don’t think so.’ I hang them, use the chance to look away from her.

‘I did it for a little while. It wasn’t really sex. But it wasn’t really massage either.’

‘Listen, Hannah.’ I turn on the lamp and remove some of the files from my couch. ‘You really don’t have to explain it to me because I’ve been there. I did all that shit in San Francisco. I don’t have an opinion about it one way or the other.

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