Sisters of the Road by Barbara Wilson Read Free Book Online

as I was dishing out the cannelloni. She had kept Ernesto on her lap, and his squarish, tufty head kept appearing over the top of the table like a tea cozy.
    “It has its ups and downs,” I said. “Your social life needs more organization. If you live in a collective household you can all be sitting around and someone will say, hey, let’s go to the midnight movie, and you’ll all go. But if you live alone you’re always having to call around and if you do find someone who’s home, chances are they’ll look in their appointment book and say, ‘I have a free hour Thursday, three weeks from now.’”
    Trish took this in without laughing, as I’d meant her to, and dug into her cannelloni. “What happened to your last girlfriend?”
    I could have told her about Dandi, Betty, Andrea or Devlin. I could have mentioned my on and off attraction to Carole. Instead I said, “She went away last summer. First from me and then from Seattle. I still think about her.”
    “What was her name?”
    “Hadley.” It was strange that I still felt like smiling when I said it. She treated you bad , girl, I reminded myself firmly.
    “Rosalie had a girlfriend when she came up to Seattle. They came up together. The girlfriend was white; her name was Karen.”
    “What happened?”
    “Oh, they had a fight and Karen split.”
    “Do you still see her? Maybe she knows something about…”
    “No, she went back to California, I guess. She just disappeared.”
    The words hung a little longer in the air than they were meant to.
    “So Rosalie was living alone?”
    “Yeah—in this hotel downtown. She had a little room she’d fixed up pretty nice with a couple of posters and a lot of plants. She really loved plants, especially cactus, because it reminded her of the desert and California and everything. She was always getting a new little plant and putting it in the window. She called them her babies, she used to talk to them, like, ‘Hi, how ya doing?’ every morning to each of them, she said she’d read some where they liked it, that it made them grow. It wasn’t weird though—it was funny. I liked waking up in the morning and hearing her.”
    “You used to stay with her a lot then?”
    Trish nodded. She finished her first helping of cannelloni and seemed to like it well enough to reach for more. “Yeah, I went back last night. But it was too strange, thinking of Rosalie never coming home again and the little cactuses all sitting there in a row.”
    “Where are you going to stay now? With Wayne?”
    She suddenly seemed to lose interest in her food. She pushed her plate away and resumed stroking Ernesto. “No,” she said slowly.
    “You’re welcome to stay here for a while,” I said. “You can sleep on the sofa bed.”
    “You mean that?” She gave a little jump and Ernesto, surprised, thudded off her lap. “Oh, I knew you were a nice person when you picked me up. I was so glad it was a lady. I couldn’t have stood to be in a car with a guy.”
    “Do you want to talk about it, tell me what happened? Are you still afraid—of being recognized by the person who did it?”
    I saw from her eyes she was. But also that she didn’t trust me enough.
    “You know,” she said, with self-conscious pathos, “I’m really tired, I feel like I could just fall asleep right now.”
    I didn’t press her further, though I wish I had. I cleared the plates from the table. “You’d probably like a bath too.”
    “Would I! I feel filthy.”
    I ran the water and gave her a towel, then made up the couch into a bed and found her a clean flannel nightgown.
    When she came back into the living room after her bath, she finally looked her true age—makeup gone, hair flat and wet, woman’s body hidden in the ballooning flannel gown, barefoot.
    She went over to the sofa bed and then turned hesitantly to face me. “You can sleep with me if you want.”
    “You’re here as my guest. And it doesn’t cost anything. Now good-night. And sleep