Two Sisters: A Novel by Mary Hogan Read Free Book Online

bottom drawer of his desk. Suddenly he felt a presence behind him. Without even looking, he knew she was there. Lidia Czerwinski appeared at his cubicle holding a picnic basket in both hands and seductively twisting that elfin waist of hers.
    “Come with me,” she said in a slightly commanding way.
    Dumbfounded, Owen sputtered, “Outside?”
    “I brought a blanket. Wool.”
    To Owen, each word seemed infused with sexual innuendo. The word “wool” itself made him blush as red as the McIntosh apple in his tired brown lunch bag. Conrad, one of the idiot engineers in Owen’s department, hung his ape arms over the tweedy partition and said in a clearly suggestive manner, “Don’t forget your jacket, O-Man.”
    Leaping up, Owen grabbed his coat and hurried Lidia out of the office before the other engineers had a chance to gather like hyenas at a freshly killed carcass. “Bye,” Lidia said to Conrad, wiggling her fingers over her shoulder. It was the second time Owen had seen her do that. Obviously the behavior of a woman who knew she was watched from behind.
    Cogswell Tower in Jenks Park was the focal point of Central Falls. Such as it was. High on Dexter’s Ledge, the old stone clock tower was Rhode Island’s own Big Ben, on a much smaller scale, of course. Lidia suggested they eat lunch there, which struck Owen as patently reckless. Not only was it cold out, they would most certainly be alone. Or worse, not. What if a band of hoodlums waited on the far side of the tower? Was he expected to fight them off? He was wearing leather-soled loafers! The only scuffle he’d ever been in was years earlier when the class bully purposely hit him in the face with the tetherball at recess. His bloodied nose had camouflaged the tears streaming down his cheeks. The massive amount of red on his face scared everyone. The bully ran, screeching, “Hemophiliac!” For the rest of the school year, Owen was mentally tortured with the nickname “Hemo.”
    Pasting an optimistic smile on his face—and surreptitiously pushing his wallet to the very bottom of his front pocket with the heel of his hand—Owen gamely carried the picnic basket along the rambling walkways into Jenks Park, careful not to huff and puff up the hill. Always slim, he’d never been one to work out, believing he’d achieve more success in life if he exercised his brain . If nothing else, the tetherball incident had taught him as much. At that moment, however, what with the multiple stressors, even his brain was flabby, unable to conjure up a single intelligent thing to say.
    “Nippy,” he blurted out, twice, turning away from Lidia and wincing.
    As she had at the Halloween party, Lidia seemed unfazed by Owen’s social feebleness. She chattered on about crispy leaves and chubby squirrels and the way residents walked right past the beautiful tower every day without looking up. “The way New Yorkers who live on Staten Island blithely pass the Statue of Liberty on the ferry every morning without so much as a glance. Know what I’m saying?”
    He didn’t. An engineer, Owen constantly looked up at Cogswell Tower, marveling at the brick barrel-vault support, the clock faces on all four sides, the almost-feminine ironwork of the surrounding pergola.
    “Or San Franciscans who pay no attention whatsoever to the Golden Gate Bridge. It’s almost a crime.”
    Owen nodded and attempted to arrange his features in a thoughtful way. Lidia was as opposite Madalyn as a woman could be. She was a runaway train, wholly unconcerned about who might be on the tracks. And she used words like “blithely” absolutely, well, blithely . From the start, she mowed him under. He was petrified of her. But he had never desired a woman more.
    “How’s this?”
    In a protected nook at the back of the tower on Dexter’s Ledge, where Owen would never dream of sitting, much less eating (no doubt kids smoked marijuana and did God knows what in that very spot), Lidia didn’t wait for an