Cool Water by Dianne Warren Read Free Book Online Page A

about him.
    Willard hears a creak outside his door and realizes that Marian is still there. He sits up and checks the clock: 3:20. She’s never before stood there for twenty minutes. But perhaps he’s mistaken. Perhaps she slipped back to her bedroom just as the dog barked and he missed the padded footsteps. He decides she isn’t there after all, and is about to lie down again when he hears another creak and Marian pushes the door and it swings slowly open. In the moonlight Willard can see her in the doorway. She’s like a ghost in her long nightgown. He swallows and prepares himself for what she’s sure to say: I’m sorry, Willard, the time has come . . . But then she pulls the door closed again without speaking, and Willard hears the footsteps padding back down the hallway.
    So she’s put it off for one more night. He doesn’t know whether to hope she’ll keep putting it off or to wish she would just get it over with. The latter, he concludes. Always best to get things over with. He’ll try to bring it up tomorrow at breakfast. Perhaps she’s worried about him, about leaving him on his own, and he’ll try his best to let her off the hook. He’ll be attentive when it’s her turn to speak— Yes, Willard, you’re right, I feel the need to carry on with my life —and to look like a man who can accept bad news.
    It doesn’t occur to Willard that his explanation for Marian’s odd behaviour is entirely wrong, that he’s not understanding the new language she’s added to her quiet repertoire. And that, in nine years of living with Willard, of his constant companionship, she has grown to love him. Romantic love is not a topic Willard has spent any time at all on, in spite of being the proprietor of a business that thrives on the anticipation of love in its various forms—silly, tragic, dangerous, young, old, true, dispassionate. He’s seen it all, but never once felt that he was watching a movie that had the remotest thing to do with him. And all that love in the front seats and back seats of cars, or on the hoods of cars on summer nights when it’s too hot to sit inside them, or next to cars on blankets in the sand—love for teenagers, Willard believes. Willard has never been in love, not even once. Or at least not that he knows.
    He’s feeling something now, though, as he tries to go back to sleep. He’s feeling the loss of Marian. It’s a feeling of dread, an ache in an unknown place. Just to prepare himself, to get used to the idea of her being gone, he tries to picture her walking out the door with her suitcases. He can’t remember her having had suitcases, although she must have, when she arrived to be Ed’s wife. Willard tosses and turns and throws his pillow to the floor, and then retrieves it when the bed feels too hard and flat under his head, and when he finally falls asleep again, he dreams he has the most awful toothache. He is jolted awake by a rhythmic throbbing in his jaw, and then he realizes that the throbbing is an owl— who who whooo —and the sound has gotten right inside him like the bit of a dentist’s drill.
    Sleep now is impossible, so Willard rises and pulls on his clothes and walks out into the night air. He stands in the middle of his drive-in lot with its miniature hills of sand, ordered to position the cars with their windshields at the right angle for movie watching. He rolls himself a cigarette and looks up at the blank screen, and then he turns a slow circle, puffing on his smoke and looking at the yardlights in the distance, thinking about all the people in Juliet and in the farmhouses around him, and how people come and go, they grow up or die or go broke and move away, and the ones who are left carry on, that’s just the way it is. He’ll carry on without Marian in the same way the two of them continued without Ed after his death. When Willard’s circle