Juliet in August by Dianne Warren Read Free Book Online Page A

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 behavior 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, young, tragic, dangerous, 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 backseats 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 when she arrived to be Ed’s wife, although she must have. 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 yard lights 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 how 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 points him in the direction of the house, he thinks about the way she sits in the picture window—Ed’s window—invisible in the dark, and watches the movies. He stares at the window, perplexed by his own feelings, without knowing that Marian is staring back.
    Watching this man, wishing she could speak up, wondering if she ever will. And where would she go if she were to speak up and ruin things, frighten Willard half to death and drown the two of them in awkwardness? Her life would be over if she had to leave. She follows Willard’s dark shadow as he turns another circle like a man who has lost his way and is trying to remember the tricks of navigation. She watches the firefly light of his cigarette, disappearing and then appearing again as he turns, turns in the darkness.
    Crash
    The Dolsons’ yard light is one of the ones that Willard can see north of town. The Dolson house—which of course Willard can’t see in the darkness—has the same vinyl siding as his own house. It had galled old Mrs. Dolson to no end when she