Who Will Hear Your Secrets? by Robley Wilson

Author:Robley Wilson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
Published: 2012-11-11T16:00:00+00:00

Six Love Stories

1. VISITS

Coming back to the city on the 10:40 bus from Hartford, Laurence Hussey sits next to a window on the driver’s side. The window is askew in its frame, just enough open to let in an unpleasantly cold stream of air, and though he tries as the bus is leaving to push the window closed, he fails—the window moves upward easily, but as soon as he takes his hands away it drops open again like a slack jaw. Twice more he tries, then surrenders and sits back to watch the shabby downtown storefronts become shabbier old homes like the one where he has just visited his father. Solemn red brick places with peeling white trim. Sparse lawns barely beginning to green. Buckled sidewalks and sick elms. Anne Street. Asylum Avenue. The chill air hisses through the crack in the window and draws forbidden cigarette smoke toward him from the seat just ahead. He leans so he can see the bus driver’s eyes in the rearview mirror, but the driver is not looking back—and even if he were, what good would it do?

“We had a super dinner,” says a woman’s voice behind him. “The nicest Easter ever.”

“Your daughter-in-law cooked?” A second woman. An accent.

“Her nicest meal ever.” The first woman sighs and laughs. “In the beginning she wasn’t much in the kitchen.”

“Nobody is much in the beginning.”

Laurence smiles. Perhaps he should take notes; then the next time he goes to see his father he’ll have a story to tell. Dad? There were these two women on the bus.…

“Were you visiting your children for Easter?” says the first woman.

“We don’t do Easter,” says the second.

The women didn’t know each other, he will say to his father. They were, you know, thrown together by circumstance. He wishes he had gone across the street from the bus station and bought a paper. He wishes he had thought to bring a book to read. This is not a long trip, but it’s boring.

“What did she cook for you, this daughter-in-law?”

“Ham. A beautiful ham.”

The traditional, Laurence thinks. What he and his father ordered, yesterday, in the restaurant: ham, with raisin sauce, and mashed potatoes and green beans, Parker House rolls, a little light wine. Wine for himself, not for his father.

“What else?” The woman with the accent—Polish, he thinks now—must be making a list. “A fancy dessert?”

“Yes, but for the moment I can’t think what.”

An old woman, forgetful. Laurence tries to recall the others waiting at the bus station, several of them women. Which is she, this lady with the faulty memory? Not to be critical—his own memory is beginning to sputter like an old outboard motor, and his father, nearly ninety, can remember in detail all the jobs he held during the Depression, but can’t recall what happened yesterday.

He wants to turn and tell the women to talk about something else, something significant, and the desire is just for an instant over-whelming—so that he sees himself rising up from the seat, bending

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