Eden Close by Anita Shreve Read Free Book Online Page B

her carefully, as if important information could be had by examining her. For other boys in the town, boys who liked to climb onto the high leather seat in the dairy truck or boys he knew from the hockey rink or in the cold tiled corridors of the junior high school, the knowledge had come differently, more predictably, from girls seen naked on a dare in woodsheds or from pictures found in magazines. Sean O'Brien, who was the goalie when Andy and he were in ninth grade, and who would be killed only three short years later, had once told of finding lurid and wonderful pictures of men and women together in a drawer marked "Hinges" in his father's cellar; and later Andrew, when he had grown and had his own house, would sometimes have a fleeting and sad image of a middle-aged TV repairman retreating to the bowels of his house for furtive pleasure.
    He was aware that she was different from his mother and from the other mothers—an awareness that was inadvertently encouraged by his mother's disapproval of her neighbor, which hovered somewhere between quiet outrage and thinly disguised envy.
    "Edith is not discreet," his mother would pronounce, having caught sight of her across the yard, or remembering a gesture or a remark her neighbor had made that day. "Edith is sometimes quite careless," she would say, and his father would wisely just nod, although Andy sometimes thought he smiled. And one evening his father volunteered, "Well, at least they're well matched," and his mother had said, "Shush," indicating that the boy was in the room. Her tone alerted Andy to a sentence that otherwise might have gone unremembered, and caused him to save it, as children do, until he was old enough to understand it.
    He understood also, with a child's unerring antennae, that the woman his mother envied loved only the one person and that she was indifferent to the world outside her door, as if she knew she must be careful not to squander her reserves. She had seemed, for example, always to be spectacularly indifferent to Andy, thinking of him only, he felt, as the neighbor's boy and then later as the fellow who helped with odd jobs around the house to earn money for college. He sometimes thought, in fact, that she didn't actually
see
him in the yard as he trimmed a blackberry bush or raked the leaves from the flower bed. He'd say hello and nod; yet she might just pass silently by, lost in her own vision, unaware of his presence.
    She waves once just before she gets into the Plymouth, and Andrew climbs back up the ladder.
    Jim, though, Andrew thinks to himself, did notice him
as a boy. He never passed Andy without a greeting or a question or even a piece of gum for the boy in his pocket. When the adults were in the yard, absorbed in each other, it would be Jim who would break away and take him by the hand—or even play a game of catch with him.
    Scraping and painting the side of the house, as his own father did every five years, Andrew remembers the way Jim would watch his father when he worked—hands in his pockets, restless, but feeling no urgency to tackle his own chores. Jim was a man who started things but never finished them—unlike the steady, slow progress of Andy's father. And Andrew can remember being asked each August to tidy up a vegetable garden Jim had left too long to the weeds. In the spring, Jim would begin with enthusiasm, having bought exotic seeds from the catalogues and coming home each Saturday morning from the nursery with a shiny new tool or a bag of peat moss. But as the spring wove into summer, Andy would see him on the back stoop, smoking, drinking a beer and listening to the radio as if he had forgotten entirely that there was anything in the yard at all.
    He was a tall man, a genial alcoholic, a man whose charm and smile made people say he was good-looking—though he was not, with his long face and its flat planes, a truly handsome man. It was understood that he had appetites—most obviously for