Russian Winter by Daphne Kalotay Read Free Book Online

Lenore drifted out the door like a breeze.
    When she first took the job, four years ago, and Lenore called her “my lieutenant,” Drew had still been in her twenties. But she was now thirty-two, had little lines at the outer edges of her eyes when she smiled. In the past month something had even happened to her voice: a distinct, if subtle, breaking sound at the back of her throat, that biological shift to some horrible new maturity. The other day the girl behind the counter at the Dunkin’ Donuts had called her ma’am. Drew had gone straight to Neiman Marcus and purchased a minuscule tube of the face lotion her best friend, Jen, swore by, some clear, sticky substance that had ended up costing twenty-five dollars. Jen was knowledgeable about that kind of thing. A few months ago she had rubbed some cream that smelled like bubble gum through Drew’s hair “to soften your look,” taken a photograph, and, without asking Drew’s permission, opened a subscription in her name on a dating Web site.
    Drew mostly found the ruse humorous—after all, Jen meant well, and had found her own fiancé that way—and had even gone on a few dates, though really she wasn’t looking for a husband. The one love she had known had been ephemeral and naïve, perhaps even a trick of self-delusion. And though four years had passed since her divorce, only in recent months had Drew’s guilt finally begun to lift. Not that she felt any better about having hurt Eric. But she was growingimpatient—with her family, who even from a distance continued to treat her with faintly spiteful pity, and with herself, for continuing even now to feel shame at having made a mistake and hurt someone, when really lots of people made such mistakes, and found themselves exiting relationships they had sworn to remain in forever.
    It helped, too, that Eric had finally moved on. After two years of angry silence, and a brief spate of resentful letters, he had written an e-mail to say that he had fallen in love. In yet another reference to the notion he had clung to, that only some sort of insanity could have caused Drew to forgo their marriage, he described his new woman as “a solid person” who had “her head on straight” and “all of her ducks in a row.” Then last month Drew’s mother—who through sentimentality as much as love remained in touch with her former son-in-law and every so often accidentally released some tidbit of information—let slip that Eric had changed jobs and was moving to Seattle, and that the woman with the ducks was going with him.
    And so Drew was all the more aware of time having passed, of having completed, without quite noticing, the passage from “girl” to “woman”—if without any great improvements or new wisdom to show for it. Since her move to Boston she had lived in a diminutive Beacon Hill apartment whose rent continued to rise in small increments, like a slow bleed, despite there being each year a few more splintered floorboards, and smudges on the walls, and cracks in the ceiling. When she first moved in, the ancient building had felt like a fresh start, so different from the sparkling Hoboken unit filled with wedding gifts: 1,200-thread-count sheets, thick towels of Egyptian cotton, Laguiole knives, a cappuccino machine she and Eric never used. Drew’s “new” furnishings were secondhand and giddily sub-standard: stocky chairs of nicked wood, a table with one of its edges faintly splattered with gray paint, an assortment of mismatched cutlery she had found bundled together in a rubber band at a garage sale. She no longer possessed a television, an automobile. Thispared-down life suited her, was proof to Eric and the others that there really was no one else, Drew had not left her marriage for some other, better draw. Proof to herself, too, that she had been right to leave; she did not need anyone else, did not need much at all. She was proud of her self-sufficiency, of being able to replace the fuses herself,