Tinderbox by Lisa Gornick Read Free Book Online Page A

was not used to it here. I am used to it now.”
    17
    In the morning, Myra cannot concentrate on her work. She sits in front of her computer,
     but her thoughts will not budge from Eva’s scream. Should she send the girl back to
     Lima? But for what? For being afraid to sleep alone on the ground floor? For having
     a night terror?
    At eight, she calls Ursula’s cell phone. It rings in Paris, where Ursula is on an
     extended shopping trip, on the rose quartz marble ledge of the enormous bath where
     she is soaking, in her suite at the George V Hotel.
    Ursula listens to her cousin’s concerns about Eva’s night terrors, her worry that
     perhaps New York is too much for the girl. She thinks about the problem Eva could
     make for Alicia and her in their San Isidro synagogue, where her eldest grandson will
     soon be seeking his bar mitzvah date, were Eva to ask for Hebrew lessons or Jewish
     education or, God forbid, to join the congregation.
    “Well, of course, sweetheart, if you need to send her back…” Ursula sighs. She climbs
     out of the tub, her brown nipples covered with milk foam. Her waist has thickened
     considerably since she reached menopause, a decade ago, but in her hand-sewn Parisian
     lingerie, her breasts and bottom—with the help of her trainer and ample French emollients—have
     retained sufficient firmness, in tandem with her Centurion American Express card,
     to attract the occasional twenty-something lover, such as the young Spaniard now splayed
     naked on the floral quilted spread of the hotel bed.
    “Well, I suppose I might find her a job in one of the knitting factories on the outskirts
     of the city. Only, they treat the girls there like slaves, paying them piece work
     for hats and sweaters. Fifty cents a hat. Two dollars a sweater.”
    Wrapped in a towel, Ursula enters the dressing room, the chaise longue and telephone
     table littered by now, her third day in Paris, with shopping receipts and clothing
     boxes, one of which produces a red lace brassiere and a matching pair of tap pants.
    She glances at the Spanish boy, who has produced an erection which he is fondly stroking.
    “Sweetheart, I have to go. I will call you later. I promise. But perhaps you might
     give it just a teensy bit more time?”
    Ursula feels a heaviness in her breasts and an urgency between her legs. “Kiss, kiss.
     Bye.”
    The Spaniard grins when he sees the red lace.
    “Be rough,” she orders.
    18
    By the time Myra has finished her midday walk around the reservoir, showered, eaten
     her lunch, and returned to her desk by the open French doors, the solution is clear.
     She will have to reorganize the sleeping arrangements. On the fourth floor, where
     she had planned for Omar to take the front room while she kept her bedroom overlooking
     the garden, she will let Eva stay put. She will give Rachida and Adam her bedroom.
     Omar can have the back bedroom on the third floor, and Adam can still have the music
     room for his office. She will move downstairs into the small room she’d planned for
     Eva.
    She gets up to look at the room. It is narrow, with a twin bed under the window. A
     small wooden dresser and a card table are the room’s only other furnishings. A pegboard
     with hooks serves as a makeshift closet. If she empties the closet in her office,
     there will be enough space for her clothes. In a way, it will be better. She won’t
     have to worry about Eva moving around while her patients are in the office.
    Fifty cents a hat. Two dollars a sweater.
    It is a more logical arrangement, she tells herself.
    19
    After the chubby engineer threw her out, Caro had camped in the fifth-floor walk-up
     apartment of Anne-Marie, a girl from Brussels she’d met at the Parc Monceau. Pooling
     the money from the envelope the engineer had given her and the allowance Anne-Marie
     received from her banker father, they left in June for Greece, after which they took
     the train west to Spain, the ferry from Algeciras to