Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler Read Free Book Online

he marvels:
All this stuff in my head is prompted by that man in New Leaf. Not even him. My first mistaken impression of him. He has nothing to do with Vietnam.
    “You were restless last night,” Darla says.
    He turns to her.
    She stands in the doorway in black running tights—she still has fine legs, this Dr. Darla Quinlan—and red fleece jacket. She holds her watch cap, her hair pulled back and bunned up, the pull of her hair smoothing the wrinkles in her face enough for them to nearly vanish at this distance. If he were nearer, he would touch the bottom of her chin with his fingertip, lift her face just a little, and even her incipient jowls would vanish.
    “No more than usual, I think,” he says.
    “Perhaps not,” she says.
    “Sorry I disturbed you.”
    “It’s not about me. I wondered if you were all right.”
    “I am.”
    They look at each other in silence, each feeling the wish to have more to say but unable, for the moment, to think what.
    “Tea first?” Robert finally asks.
    “I like to run first,” she says. But she does so without a trace of a dumb-shit-you-should-know-that-after-all-these-years tone. Robert wonders if that means she’s considering putting the running preference aside.
    “Just this morning,” Robert says. “It’s cold out.”
    She hesitates, but says, “That makes it better to take the tea when I return.”
    They fall silent a moment.
    “You’ll be working by then?” she asks.
    “How long will you be?”
    “I don’t know,” she says. “I didn’t sleep well.”
    “Sorry,” Robert says.
    “It wasn’t you. I knew you were restless because I was already awake.”
    “Does it make you run longer or shorter, not sleeping well?”
    “Longer, usually.”
    “Tough girl,” he says.
    “Tough girl,” she says.
    “We’ll see,” he says.
    She angles her head to indicate she doesn’t quite understand.
    “Whether I’m working when you get back,” he says.
    They are silent again, but not moving.
    “I can stay,” she says.
    “You should run,” he says.
    “All right.”
    She puts her cap on. She turns. She turns back. “You could have a second cup. You love the new beans.”
    “The second cup goes to my desk,” he says, though without a trace of a tone—or even a trace of a feeling—that she should know that after all these years.
    Darla goes.
    How is the silence of this kitchen consequently different because she is out running somewhere on the dirt and macadam remnants of a WPA road instead of still sleeping upstairs? Somehow different. Felt several times lately by Robert, like a newly, faintly arthritic knuckle. He cannot say why.
    He takes up the coffeepot, and now, in order to work, he has to try to put Darla out of his mind along with Bob andJimmy and Lien and Dad and the others who hover around them.
    Perhaps because his work often leads him to consider the smallest semantic details, he hears the shift in his mind from his earlier memory to this present moment: Pops stopped being Pops somewhere along the way. He is Dad now. And to his face, there was rarely an occasion to address him with a name at all.
Dad
to his mother, when they spoke of the man.
    But this is exactly the hovering of others he needs to resist. Semantics—his
mind
—snagged him on his father just now, so he thinks it will be a simple matter of the will to return to this kitchen and his coffee and the scholarly day to come. But a woman slips into him. To his surprise, it is not Darla.
    Lien. She came to him last night beneath the oak tree, across all these years, and he left her last night just as he left her when the Tet siege began. Now, she comes to him as she always did, silently, gently. Borne not on a thought but a river.
    The sunlight flares from the water and he turns his face to her, pressed chastely against him in the narrow bow of her uncle’s sampan, the man out of their sight line behind them, beyond the bamboo thatch shelter in the middle of the three-plank boat. He is