Evenings at Five by Gail Godwin Read Free Book Online Page A

dish, scraped off the dried food, rinsed it and placed it in the dishwasher, got a clean dish, opened a can of Salmon in Chunks for Feline Seniors, making a little pas de deux with Bud as he wound himself in and out of her legs.
    Only after he had flattened his elegant tail and hunkered down to take nourishment did she genuflect on one knee and gaze beseechingly into the crannies of the wine rack.
    A last bottle of Gigondas, placed there months ago by Rudy’s living hand, suddenly materialized and nuzzled its neck into the welcoming curl of her fingers. (“Enjoy a glass of wine with friends,” Dr. Gray had said, “but I’d be careful when you’re home alone.”)
    No, it’s not easy, my love, when you’ve outgrown or outlived all your authority figures. But you’re strong. I remember the time I picked up your hand in the coffee bar in Saratoga Springs. They were playing that popular tune stolen from the Mozart G-minor. We had just decided to set fire to the status quo and be together for the rest of our lives. “Your hand is astonishingly soft,” I told you, “but the grip is like steel.” You’ll work it out, if I know you—you’ll make your own rules. The Cope palled and now you’ll invent your own rituals.
    “Ah, Rudy, Rudy, Rudy.”
    Assuming he was the one being addressed, Bud answered with an upbeat Siamese syllable.
    “You couldn’t walk around the house anymore without stopping for breath, but you could still pop the cork on champagne and open a bottle of wine.”
    Bud vouchsafed another syllable and then segued into his “going out” command.
    (“Don’t look at me like that. I want a decision on your part. Just make up your mind and I’ll do whatever you ask. You want to sit there. All right.”
    . . . the pasha’s daughter’s glass
    Christina had been in her study one summer morning when Rudy’s voice, an octave below God’s, came floating up to her. He was standing at the front door, reasoning with Bud, who was deciding whether or not he wished to go out. She had snatched up a pencil and scribbled the words on the yellow pad beside her computer because of their quintessential Rudy-ness—she knew they would give her a pleasure and a pang to reread someday.)
    Christina accompanied Bud back to the door and he swished out expectantly into the star-filled winter night.
    Back in the kitchen, she reached into an uppermost corner of the cupboard and eased forward Rudy’s cordial glass with the etched grapes, given to him by the pasha’s daughter in Cairo. She drew forth its elegant shape, held it up to the light, then wiped it lovingly with a fresh dish towel, the way Father Paul wiped the chalice with the purificator after communion.

    Across the street from Christina’s childhood home had lived a reclusive old lady, all by herself, in a big ocher stuccoed house, half hidden by overgrown shrubs. Mrs. Carruthers. Mr. Carruthers had been dead longer than most people’s memories. Sometime after five each evening, Mrs. Carruthers’s middle-aged son, Freddie, who worked at the bank, would park his black Packard in his mother’s driveway and dart behind the shrubbery carrying a brown paper bag twisted at the top. A half hour or so later he would emerge, carrying the same bag, twisted at the top, and drive away. Everyone knew what was in the bag and everyone knew the pact Mrs. Carruthers had made with her solitary life. The bag contained a bottle of wine. Inside the house, Freddie uncorked the bottle, measured exactly half of its contents into his father’s old cut-glass decanter, poured his mother her first glass, and drove off with the recorked bottle to his own house, which he shared with another bachelor who worked in the library. The next evening, Freddie would arrive punctually and pour the rest of the previous day’s bottle into the decanter. On the third evening he would bring a new bottle and start the process over again.
    “Well, the sun has just set over the yardarm,”