Anna From Away by D. R. Macdonald Read Free Book Online Page A

he could muster in middle age, and that hurt Anna the most—the extravagant attention, and the memory of receiving it herself. She had been the object of his romance once, of the pleasure he took in them both. And she could never forgive what he’d said to her in the heat of an argument: I wanted to fall in love again, like I did with you, you see, Anna, I wanted that long lovely dive when you can barely catch your breath.
    She diverted herself instead by reading the closing paragraph of a Melissa letter she had saved, planning a reply:
There’s a new kind of correspondence on the scene now, by the way, called electronic mail, goes through the computer, it’s catching on. I’ll have to give in soon. Wouldn’t touch you where you are, I’m sure. Over at the college now, Roger says students expect him to be on it, you mean you don’t have email? they’ll say. He grumbles, can’t ignore it like a telephone, there it is on his damn screen. Computer stuff coming out so fast, can’t keep up, don’t want to keep up, here we are, whirling through the last decade of the century. Remember when we saw 2001: A Space Odyssey years back? Seemed way way in the future then, didn’t it? Maybe you feel closer to older times, being where you are. Anyway, I miss you a lot, so do Emma and Lilli (when is Anna coming back? they’re always asking), I think of you there by yourself. I couldn’t do it. The tulip trees are blooming, gorgeous.
    Somewhere in her belongings she had stashed, all but forgotten until now, a joint Chet had pressed upon her before she left, There will be a day you’ll want this, Anna. She was tempted to dig it out, but it would be one-and-done, a little diversion, a conversation with herself, a possibly amusing high, with engaging but maybe unsettling insights, even, as it sometimes was, aphrodisiacal. She had her fantasies, her teasing memories, and she didn’t want to kindle them right now, when afterward the rest of the day would yawn with impossibilities. She hoped there would not be a time when she’d need it more, but there might be.
    She bustled about the kitchen stove, clanging pots, a frying pan, the noise beat back any need to hear his voice, to be embraced by the familiar ambience of that town, where her life had touched his life every day—mutual friends, places, figures of comment, politics, benchmarks, allusions, jokes, music. Affairs. Her own were just play. Weren’t they? Maybe there was no such thing as just play, not where love was bound up in it. Had she given him, without realizing it, a licence to seek love, opened a door behind which waited Alicia Snow?
    But I am here, Anna said,
here.
    Breagh had left her phone number on a scrap of drawing paper but Anna did not recognize her name at first: she’d thought it would be spelled
Bria.
It was like coming upon a little etching on a stone—unexpected, rich with place.
    She hauled a bucket of stove ashes to the back porch, then, in a snowy wind, she split kindling with an axe. Standing up, she thought she could make out a boat, a rare sight, no more than a swaying profile in the swirling snow of the strait. To the west, the pond was merging into the whiteness around it, the ice, with its dark stains, veiling over. Anna carried an armload of kindling into her room. Okay, she said, gorging the
Warm Morning
with wood. I’m okay.
    Cash? Damn scarce here in the country, in them days, Donald John said. When I was a little fella, an old bachelor run a small store over home. Didn’t have much there. He was getting on and he needed a certain kind of help, so he paid me thirty-five cents a week for to bring him a jar of milk in the morning and put drops in his eyes. You see, he drank that goddamn red liniment, so he was going blind. He got into that when he was peddling medical products, I think. When soda pop came in, he had no cooler, so he stored it in a gunny sack in that little cellar under the floor. If you wanted a bottle of pop, he’d open