Impossible Things by Connie Willis Read Free Book Online Page B

what else happen to her in fifteen years to close her face. In which case, there had been no point in my driving all the way out here. But Mrs. Ambler had had an almost impenetrable public face, and you could still catch her off guard. If you got her talking about the dogs. If she didn’t know she was being photographed.
    Katie’s house was an old-style passive solar, with flat black panels on the roof. It looked presentable, but not compulsively neat. There wasn’t any grass—tankers won’t waste their credits coming this far out, and Apache Junction isn’t big enough to match the bribes and incentives of Phoenix or Tempe—but the front yard was laid out with alternating patches of black lava chips and prickly pear. The side yard had a parched-looking palo verde tree, andthere was a cat tied to it. A little girl was playing under the tree with toy cars.
    I took the eisenstadt out of the back and went up to the front door and rang the bell. At the last moment, when it was too late to change my mind, walk away, because she was already opening the screen door, it occurred to me that she might not recognize me, that I might have to tell her who I was.
    Her nose wasn’t sunburned, and she had put on the weight a sixteen-year-old puts on to get to be thirty, but otherwise she looked the same as she had that day in front of my house. And her face hadn’t completely closed. I could tell, looking at her, that she recognized me and that she had known I was coming. She must have put a notify on her lifeline to have them warn her if I asked her whereabouts. I thought about what that meant.
    She opened the screen door a little, the way I had to the Humane Society. “What do you want?” she said.
    I had never seen her angry, not even when I turned on her at the vet’s. “I wanted to see you,” I said.
    I had thought I might tell her I had run across her name while I was working on a story and wondered if it was the same person or that I was doing a piece on the last of the passive solars. “I saw a dead jackal on the road this morning,” I said.
    “And you thought I killed it?” she said. She tried to shut the screen door.
    I put out my hand without thinking, to stop her. “No,” I said. I took my hand off the door. “No, of course I don’t think that. Can I come in? I just want to talk to you.”
    The little girl had come over, clutching her toy cars to her pink T-shirt, and was standing off to the side, watching curiously.
    “Come on inside, Jana,” Katie said, and opened the screen door a fraction wider. The little girl scooted through. “Go on in the kitchen,” she said. “I’ll fix yousome Kool-Aid.” She looked up at me. “I used to have nightmares about your coming. I’d dream that I’d go to the door and there you’d be.”
    “It’s really hot out here,” I said, and knew I sounded like Hunter. “Can I come in?”
    She opened the screen door all the way. “I’ve got to make my daughter something to drink,” she said, and led the way into the kitchen, the little girl dancing in front of her.
    “What kind of Kool-Aid do you want?” Katie asked her, and she shouted, “Red!”
    The kitchen counter faced the stove, refrigerator, and water cooler across a narrow aisle that opened out into an alcove with a table and chairs. I put the eisenstadt down on the table and then sat down myself so she wouldn’t suggest moving into another room.
    Katie reached a plastic pitcher down from one of the shelves and stuck it under the water tank to fill it. Jana dumped her cars on the counter, clambered up beside them, and began opening the cupboard doors.
    “How old’s your little girl?” I asked.
    Katie got a wooden spoon out of the drawer next to the stove and brought it and the pitcher over to the table. “She’s four,” she said. “Did you find the Kool-Aid?” she asked the little girl.
    “Yes,” the little girl said, but it wasn’t Kool-Aid. It was a pinkish cube she peeled a plastic wrapping