The Affairs of Others: A Novel by Amy Grace Loyd Read Free Book Online

didn’t. Nothing.
    I saw gray in her hair—on the side that stuck straight out; it looked as if someone had made an example of it. Still she stood there.
    “The woman who works for me doesn’t show some days,” I said.
    She blinked.
    Then I gambled. I wanted so much to go outside and surely what she most needed was her privacy—some reassurance of her own self-possession. I had needed that once; I’d had a map of bruises on my body once. “You’re okay, right?” I could have waited for a reply or just waited longer, but I was impatient. I could have reached for her hand, even if it seemed unnatural, too hastily built a bridge right then. Yes, my tone could have been more querying. Instead I instructed, I told her: “You’ll be okay. You’re all right. You just need a … shower. Coffee. These things are—” What was I saying? “—common.” I fell too hard on “common.” What was I saying? Common enough?
    This woke her eyes. They squinted at me as if she hadn’t really seen me there before, then they watered and the gold inside the blue of them glowed. She glowed. I had embarrassed her. She was not all right, emphatically, and seemed too confused to move to her door, George’s door. For an instant it appeared she didn’t quite know where she was or how she got here until she jabbed her hand into her bag in search of her keys. She turned the pockets of her long raincoat out and then sent her hand diving again until it found its object. Then all of her was in motion, to the ends of her hair. The door was opened and then closed. One world effectively separating itself from another.

 
    FROM ATLANTIC TO PACIFIC
    A FTER THAT , I HEARD LITTLE from Hope, from her feet that should have been walking my ceiling or from any other part of her, for a day. I thought to knock on her door, bring something—what? What did women bring one another these days? Casseroles? Booze? I thought to apologize—for what? For being where I did not belong? Where I had such a poor compass from years of disuse. Instead, I crowded myself into inaction with platitudes, the ones we all barter in, that time heals, that a good night’s rest is the stuff, that we’re all grown-ups here. I even composed other speeches, practiced divulging something, for her sake, but my tongue only flopped around, incapable. So when the crying came I listened with relief. At first. Was attentive to it out of respect. She hiccupped, working her way in, and then leaned into peals, which said no and please and no again. I found out she had lungs and stamina for this.
    It went on for three nights, sometimes during the dinner hour but mostly just after, when the rest of the world had done their washing up and were preparing to go to bed and more often than not into someone’s arms. I knew this nowhere time well. She moved from bedroom to living room and back again. When one room was too full of grief, she found the other, to fill it up. She shuffled, walked, bolted. To the bed, then to the hardness of that leather couch, letting it hold her for as long as she could bear it. Last night, she’d gone hoarse yet she stayed at it. Her cries were staccato and pointed and she carried them into both rooms, back and forth, moving slowly, as if spraying the present with the shards of them, trying to break it up. A battery. Steady enough.
    My sleep had become fragmented too. I’d lived with sleep deprivation before. I had cried and worked the floors. I had examined my hands that had touched him last and marveled at them. Not here. I hadn’t brought that grief with me here or that was my intention. I wanted order for me, the building. I’d wanted certain barriers, the right to them. But sleeplessness makes your days feel rubbery, the walls thin and movable. How much could I have expected from this new place once I’d filled it with people? And in a building that had already been stretched and reimagined by locals so many times?
    I took some refuge in its