Seventh Heaven by Alice; Hoffman Read Free Book Online Page B

drove straight to the White Castle on Harvey’s Turnpike, but he couldn’t eat anything he ordered, he couldn’t even swallow his coffee. He kept thinking about the house from the outside, how it looked like any other house in the neighborhood. He could have been blindfolded and still have found the oil burner in the basement. You couldn’t tell a goddamned thing from the outside, and it made him wonder exactly what he’d been seeing for the past six years when he looked at the houses on his block. He felt sick. He might as well have been the one who punched that woman in the face, because he knew it had happened and, with no complaint from her, he had to walk away. And the worst of it was, he’d been relieved, and that was why, nearly a week later, he was standing in his driveway at dawn, waiting for the milkman.
    He tried to think of his own children, asleep in their beds. He thought about the grocery money his wife always kept in a cream pitcher on a shelf above the stove, about the clean, wet smell of shirts as she ironed in the morning. By now he should have forgotten the pictures tacked up in the little girl’s bedroom; he shouldn’t even remember the shape and color of the bruise forming above her mother’s eye. He could hear the hum of the milkman’s truck as it shifted gears. Across the street, at Olivera’s old place, the weeds had grown since Hennessy had cut the lawn; they were as tall as a man’s thigh. The truck parked, and Hennessy could hear the milk bottles clink against each other as the milkman reached into the back of his truck. All Hennessy wanted was for everything to stay the same. That’s all he was asking for.
    The milkman came up and surprised him. “How you doing?” he said, as if Hennessy stood out here to meet the truck every day at dawn.
    â€œCold,” Hennessy said, and he realized that he was. The weather had changed and he was wearing only a short-sleeved shirt and chinos.
    â€œTwo quarts and a cottage cheese,” the milkman said.
    Hennessy nodded, although he hadn’t the faintest idea of what Ellen had ordered. The milkman gave Hennessy the bottles of milk and the container of cottage cheese.
    â€œSee you,” the milkman said, and he took his metal carryall and headed for his truck, then pulled away slowly, since he was going only as far as the Shapiros’.
    If there isn’t a sign, Hennessy told himself, everything will stay the same. I’ll put this milk in the refrigerator and go back to bed and be grateful that my children are safe whenever they go out in the street to play. I’ll eat scrambled eggs every morning and I’ll never ask for anything again. Just let me be, he thought, but it was a little too late for that. He’d wanted detective and he’d gotten it, and now he was stuck with the job and everything it forced him to know. And then he made a big mistake. He should have turned around and walked up the path to his house, but instead he looked up at the last few stars, and they filled him with yearning the way diamonds did other men. He turned his gaze east, to see if the sun was rising, and that was when he saw the woman up on Olivera’s roof, cleaning out her rain gutters, oblivious to anything else on the street, and Hennessy realized that it was too late to make any deals. He had already asked for things, and what happened was what always happened whenever a desire was granted. He wanted more.
    B Y SEVEN THIRTY YOU COULD SMELL COFFEE AND toast, you could hear the metal milk boxes open and shut, and the sound of cars idling as the fathers on the block got ready to commute to work. Soon the houses would be empty, except for the mothers and the youngest children, toddlers learning to walk and babies set down for their naps, because by eight fifteen bands of children headed down Hemlock Street, the boys up front, hitting each other and stopping to wrestle on the lawns in their