Eden Close by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page A

down the rotted stoop. Reflexively he looks at his watch. Quarter to. He knows she works four hours a day, from ten to two, seven days a week, at a nursing home nearby. It was a detail among many in a letter or a phone call from his mother that he'd read or heard quickly, but now the detail comes back to him, and his mother's expression of bewilderment at anyone's willingness never to have a day off. "She even worked Christmas," he remembers his mother saying or writing.
    He calls to her when she is at the bottom of the stoop. She looks at her car and then turns to look at him. Delicately, she brings a thin hand to the side of her brow to shade her eyes, for the sun is behind him, and he must be to her a black silhouette against a brilliant sky. But he can see her clearly, as he couldn't yesterday: a pinkish-gray dress, an upturned face, her skin as soft as chamois. Perhaps she forgot that he would be there, but she shows no surprise. He towers over her, and she has to squint to see him. Her hair is ashen, where once it was the color of her bracelets,
and is still worn long, drawn back in an intricate knot at the nape of her neck. She has on a strand of pearls—incongruous on a summer morning, driving in a Plymouth to a nursing home, but so in keeping with how he has remembered her that even the greater incongruity of her careful grooming against the ugly ruined farmhouse barely registers on his consciousness.
    She walks toward him, each foot grating slightly on the gravel.
    "Mrs. Close," he says, and instantly regrets the childish greeting, when he knows her name is Edith and he ought to call her that now, at thirty-six; but he feels diminished in her presence, as if he were a boy again and she'd come out to give instructions. He begins to back down the ladder.
    He sees that there are folds beside her mouth where her skin has fallen and that her eyelids are hooded now. And below her eyes, there are smudges indicating that she hasn't slept well; the smudges match the color of her dress. He wants to break free of his image of himself as a boy, but when he says, too loudly for just the two of them, "I thought I'd tackle your lawn too, Edith, while I'm at this one later," his voice seems uncharacteristically boorish and rude.
    She looks around at the tall grass and the wild privet, a look of weariness passing over her face.
    Again he feels the boyish compunction to please, the awkwardness he has always felt with her.
    She doesn't answer him directly. "A fine morning," she says.
    How strange that they are speaking to each other in just the same tones of voice, using the same polite vocabulary, as they might have twenty-five years ago—as if nothing had intervened or changed in all those years, as if there had not been all that death and the birth of his own son.
    She nods, and there is something in the tilt of her head
or the angle of her profile that gives him a sharp memory of the younger woman he remembers her to have been. He sees a woman's hand on a man's wrist, pulling him up the steps and inside, even though the laundry basket under the clothesline is still half full of wet sheets. He remembers knocking on the back door one afternoon when he was eight, carrying a basket of tomatoes from his mother's garden, bountiful that year, and Edith opening the door, flustered, a red blush staining her throat and chest where he could see it, her hair loose and damp at the temples. She was fingering the top of her dress, where the last two buttons were still undone, and he understood, if not entirely comprehended, that Jim was in the house somewhere, home early, and that they had been doing together something secretive and thrilling.
    The knowledge had come before he had even known what it was or what it meant—the suggestion that there might be between a man and a woman something that set them apart, something that could not be shared by others and ought not to be seen from the outside.
    And after that day, he would watch