Suspicious River by Laura Kasischke Read Free Book Online

bald spot was wet and white as a saucer of milk in the middle of a mess of jet-black hair. His upper lip was sweaty, and he wiped it with the sleeve of his suit coat, cheap and tweed.
    “Man alive,” he said, staring. “Wow. Woo-wee, look at you.”
    I could’ve asked him right away if he had a reservation, turned the conversation to business, but I just stood stone still so he could look. Then I smiled slightly with my lips closed over my teeth and let it sink into him for a minute that I might be available if that’s what he was interested in, which he seemed to be. I licked my lips, stretched my neck in slow motion as if it were stiff. Finally I said, “Do you have a reservation?”
    He seemed flustered, shook his head no.
    “No problem,” I said.
    He was looking straight at my breasts. I took a deep breath and watched him watch them press a little tighter against my shirt—a thin white cotton one with a silver button at the neck. Then I took a check-in card out of the drawer. He exhaled, and the sound of it was like the tire of a tricycle, perforated, leaking slow. Whatever it was we weren’t talking about now was slathered like shaving cream all over the silence.
    “How many nights?”
    “Just tonight.”
    I turned the guest card toward him. Showed him the total. “How will you be paying?”
    “Cash,” he said. When he looked back up at my face, I held his eyes longer than he expected, and he leaned toward me then, sounding out of breath, “Oh, baby,” he said, “Uh.”
    “Maybe you need a back rub after lugging that enormous thing all over. Think?”
    “Yeah. Oh yeah.”
    “Well,” I put two fingers lightly on the top of his hand with the red pen in it, “it wouldn’t cost any more than the room. Does that sound good?”
    “Oh shit yes, sweetheart. Yes, yes.” He signed his name fast on the check-in card then handed me two fifties, which were crisp and stuck together. “You just keep the extra,” he said, “I’ll give you the rest in a minute if that’s okay,” he pointed to his suitcase, “It’s in there.”
    I handed him a key, 22—right underneath Gary Jensen’s room, I’d already thought about that—and said, “I’ll be over in ten minutes.”
    He stared at me some more before he hauled his suitcase back out the door like a load of bricks. I tilted my head and waved a few fast fingers bye-bye at him, and after he was gone I made change for myself from the cash drawer and put the money—thirty-seven dollars and sixty cents—straight into my red purse, locked the cash drawer again and hid the key, put the plastic sign on the counter and, this time, took the phone off the hook before I left.

 
     
     
     
    M Y MOTHER stands to the left of the choir, white robe glowing under the hot ceiling lights. Dust settles in long, rose-tinted boas of morning sun behind the stained glass in the church silence, and then her voice lifts through empty air above the pews and hymnals, the winded mailmen in their stiff Sunday suits, the young mothers with infants struggling red-faced in their laps.
    My father has his hands pressed over his kneecaps as her voice rises above us all, an invisible bird—one perfect, earthshattering note. High and cold, it is a needle taking a piece of white thread up to the ceiling like a stitch.
    Ave—half breath, half pure steel scream—Maria.
    Helium, the simplest and lightest of the elements.
    All the women in the church touch their throats at that moment, afraid the sound has come from them. The men look away, ashamed. But the children look up to the ceiling, believing we might even be able to see that last note as it pierces the thin blue skin of the sky like a woman’s wrist.
    Then, it’s Sunday night, and my mother sits at the edge of my bed and describes Spanish moss to me before I go to sleep—how it hangs in wet ropes over the branches of trees in Louisiana, matted as fur.
    You can smell it like old blankets in the air, everywhere, even in the