not know. He never strayed from routine: never drove off in the
company of a woman, never turned left where he should have
turned right. Often she phoned the pub from inside the car, but
when he answered she found herself with nothing to say.
December. Streetlamps were furnished with garlands, the
Green Man with strings of bright colored lights. She and Violet
had never really made much of Christmas, but they’d enjoyed their
simple routine: a bottle of champagne, Richter’s good panettone,
and, if Violet was feeling nostalgic, a walk past the church to listen at mass. What pained Erma now, as the holiday neared, was
not simply the end of these things; it was the belief that, in her own absence, Violet would have managed to carry them on. For
it was clear now that to Violet they had merely been roommates,
bound first of all by convenience and thrift. How foolish Erma
had been. That most everything had been left to her was hardly
any consolation at all; she’d got that because it was only fair that she should, the same as when her parents had died. The greater
gift, it seemed to her now, had been Killian’s, precisely because
it was worthless, because it was no more than a symbol. In this
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short, meager life, it is a thousand times rarer to be given what
isn’t owed.
When she telephoned Catharine it was midday, though
Erma had not yet been out of the house. Outside, the landscape
was fogged in and dreary. The sea and the sky were a similar gray.
There was a pot of leftover soup on the stove, bread to warm in the oven for lunch. It took a moment to explain who she was; they’d
not spoken since the will was retrieved.
“I thought I’d tell you how I was getting on,” Erma said. “And
how the town remembers her. They still wave at the car when I
pass. They forget, you see. Friends everywhere she went, Violet.”
“Yes.”
“Was she always that way? When you knew her, I mean?”
“I suppose she was,” Catharine said. “She was a prettier girl
than you’d think.”
“So she wasn’t always plain?” Erma said. She pictured Violet,
laughing and near. She’d been the taller between them, the fairer.
“I was, always.”
Catharine made no reply.
“And she had a good sense of humor?”
“Yes, of course,” Catharine said. “But you know that, Erma.
You knew her a longer time than I ever did.”
Erma smiled hearing that and let the silence stretch a moment
over the line. She was in the sitting room of their house, curtains drawn to the fog, the fire unlit. It had been she who’d split wood for them winters, having learned the proper way from her father,
a job that more often a man would have done.
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“Erma,” Catharine said. “Why have you called?”
“She must have been popular,” Erma went on. “With boys, I
mean.”
“That was part of the trouble.”
There had been girls she’d admired, too, Erma thought now.
From the far past there emerged an image of one, books clutched
tight to a pretty white cardigan, skirt ballooning away from her
waist. The sort of girl who might smile at you from a distance
or offer to show you how makeup was worn, who might suggest
asking a boy to spring ball, never thinking those things could be
hurtful to say.
“She left home after school?”
“She never finished,” Catharine said. “I’m surprised you didn’t
know that.” There was, for the first time, some cruelty in her voice.
“Once she left, she never came back.”
Erma was reminded of all the many occasions she’d been sur-
prised by some item from Violet’s past, as though assuming she’d
not have had one at all, or that, as a matter of course, it would
have matched exactly her own. That belief had been another part
of the foolishness, for what in life had ever suggested that she
might so possess her beloved? She should have recognized Violet,
having seen her before: no different from the girl in the skirt, the kind boy; she’d been generous, loving after a fashion, but finally remote, beyond grasp.
“I held her all night when her mother died,” Erma said. She
had never told anybody before. “I held her and kissed her neck
while she wept.”
Catharine sighed. She was silent a moment, and then she said,
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in a voice no longer cruel but exhausted, “I nursed Violet’s mother through the whole of her suffering.”
By the time they had each said good-bye and rung off, the fog
had given way to a rain. It fell steadily, softly, without any purpose, a sound like handfuls of dry, scattered seed. Erma stood, relit the stove for her soup, feeling she might stay in after all.
In the next days she didn’t return to the pub. It was
not that she wished to let go of Violet or surrender the memory
of her to Killian. Only she felt that the point had been reached
where there wasn’t anything left to be learned. There was solace to be taken in one thing, at least: that the biggest changes of her life had already occurred.
And yet, as happens, despite her resolve, she did see John
Killian again: a mere ten days later when, in the evening, she
answered the door and was met with his figure. He was dressed in
the same ill-fitting suit, the same tie, the overcoat she’d seen on so many nights. This time he was still wearing his hat, and it cast his face into deadening shadow.
“Now look here, Erma,” he said.
She stepped back, aware of her own beating heart, her own
ribs.
“What are you after, ringing the pub? Slinking about, follow-
ing me? I don’t like it. I’ve a mind to see the police.”
Momentarily, she tried to muster some anger: he’d come to
her home, unannounced. What she found, though, instead, was
embarrassment, shame. Her shoulders fell; she lowered her head. It did not cross her mind to tell him a lie, as it never had, really, in all
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of her life. Seeing her face now, one might have wondered if its lack of beauty had forever been a consequence of inability to deceive.
“Come inside, Mr. Killian,” she said. “Come inside, John.”
In the sitting room, he seemed slowly to alter. She watched
him with his hands in his pockets, blinking as he regarded it all: the unfinished puzzle, the jars of glass beads, the doilies and anti-macassars on chairs.
“I’m having potato dumplings for supper.”
He frowned, puzzled, seeming not to have heard.
“I haven’t shared a meal these six months.”
She took his coat and his hat, led him into the kitchen. At the
far end of the corridor was the bedroom, but she didn’t say that,
knowing he knew.
On a pan, she arrayed the small yellow pies. She motioned for
him to have a seat at the table, and when she’d put the dumplings
in the oven, she joined him.
“How long has it been since last you were here?”
“Decades,” he said. “Twenty years, Erma.”
From the sadness in his voice, she believed him.
They were quiet. He put his hands on the table. One wrist
was broader than the other one was, irregular in shape, as though
from arthritis. It would have bothered him lifting the desk. She
wondered how he’d managed once he’d gotten it home.
“I’m sorry I lurked at the pub.”
“I thought you’d gone mad.”
“I didn’t mean trouble.” She shifted her gaze, not allowing it to
rest on his face. “How did you find me out?”
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191
“The car, Erma.” It almost seemed as if he would laugh.
“Everybody recognizes that car.”
She smiled and glanced at the clock. “Not exactly double oh
seven, I guess.”
At length, she rose to take the food from the oven, returning
with two plates of dumplings, two forks. She offered a beer, and
he accepted.
“It was hard when I found you were named in the will.”
She sipped her own beer, wiped the foam from her lip.
“It was something she’d kept a secret from me, which I never
liked thinking she did.”
Killian nodded. Steam rose from his plate where he’d opened
a dumpling with the side of his fork.
“She loved you, I suppose,” Erma said.
His chewing slowed, and she recognized in him the feeling
she’d come to know in these months: the almost overwhelm-
ing weight of the heart, the way food became like a stone in the
mouth.
“I drove her home in the evening sometimes,” he said. “She
drank too much in those days. She was mistreated.”
It no longer shocked Erma hearing that said, only saddened
her. “She was prettier then?”
“Maybe she was, but it was never just that. You know what
she was like. Sometimes, when I put her to bed she would say
something sweet to me,” he said. “But she was as likely to say
something cold.”
“It’s terrible finding you were wrong about someone.” She did
not want to eat. She was thinking of Killian sitting alone at the
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desk beside Violet’s bed. Listening, waiting for her breath to find a rhythm.
“I’m glad she never told you about me,” he said. “It wasn’t easy
pouring drinks for the two of you, seeing you in the passenger’s
seat of that car. I’m glad Violet and I had one thing to ourselves.
It’s only fair, Erma, since you got all the rest.”
“Oh, no, no,” she said, as she had also on the day when he’d
come for the desk.
She cleared their plates. He thanked her and stood, though it
seemed he might like to stay a while longer.
As she showed him out, as they exchanged apologies and con-
dolences, as they even embraced in the doorway, Erma knew that
in John Killian’s eyes it was she who’d had the better end of things, who’d won Violet’s heart and what time there had been. He did
not know, as all the other people of Glass did not either, that her endearments had gone for twenty years unanswered, that the desk
in the bedroom had been replaced not by one large bed but by
the addition of a second twin. When they’d waved at the car as it
passed on the road, they had all thought or spoken aloud, “There
is Violet with her Erma.” And when Violet had sounded the horn
they had taken it for a proclamation of love. They need never find now how mistaken they’d been; what they believed had in time
become its own truth. This was the gift that Violet had given in
death, having been unable to offer what was asked for in life. It
was quite a lot. Nearly everything, really. For Killian, there was only the desk and the memory of things whispered in the darkness of a room: thanks offered vaguely as breath through the lips; prayers from the world between waking and dreams.
The Well Sister
z z z
Friday evening, slowed by an ache in his foot, Myron
Idris climbs the narrow flight of steps to his room.
He pauses a moment, reaching the top, long enough
for the overhead bulb to shut off. Outside, the day has only just
begun waning, but in the windowless stairwell it is too dark to
see. He curses, setting his bags on the landing, waves an arm in
hopes of restoring the light. For months he tried to dissuade Mrs.
Usak from having the motion sensor installed. It has only been a
nuisance, as he knew it would be; there was never anything wrong
with the switch. But she was insistent—“For safety,” she said—
and finally he surrendered his case. He is liked downstairs, given a
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discount, because he isn’t the sort of person who presses a point. If his chicken is dry or lettuce has gone off, he only mentions it once, and shyly at that. He is a model tenant, in many respects. Twice he has mended the faucet himself; he is always on time with the rent.
He fumbles to place his key in the lock, relieved when he feels
it settle into its groove. A clatter of dishes can be heard from below.
They’ll be preparing for the first rush of dinner: oil brought up to heat in the fryer, the rims of glasses inspected for stains.
The room, when he enters, smells warmly of rot; it is time he
took the rubbish down to the street. A lamp beside the sofa is lit, and he curses again at the thought of his bill.
On the counter, he arrays the items he’s bought: tuna fish,
baked beans, custard, and peas. Bananas he hangs on a hook
beneath the dish cabinet; a whiskey bottle goes beside the dwin-
dling one. The kitchenette is in need of a cleaning. The whole
room looks suddenly shabby to him. That happens when you are
gone all day from the house: you come back and see your own
life as if from afar. It would not do to bring the woman from the
thirty-six here, any more than it would to have brought the one
from the bookshop.
And so he sets about cleaning the space, the rubbish bag knot-
ted and placed by the door, surfaces dusted and wiped with a rag.
He moves slowly, having nowhere to be, taking care because he is
the sort of person who does.
With a smile, he remembers saying, “Rain again,” displaying
the screen of his cellular phone. That memory has been with him
all day, through his half shift at the bookshop and at the market
as well. She was riding the bus as he’d known she would be: the
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195
thirty-six, going north to the city center. Mornings, she works in a publishing house, a local one, small books of poetry, mostly. He knows because he followed her there, unable to believe his good
luck. On the street, autumn leaves littered the pavement; with her sharp, mincing steps she neither sought nor avoided them. He
would hardly have credited that it was her, except you’d know her
by the birthmark she has. No way you’d mistake her for somebody
else. Dark red, the birthmark: like a wound at the eye.
Beneath the surface of the hot plate, grease has collected. With
the back of a spoon, he scrapes it away.
She smiled when he showed her the phone, set more at ease
than she had been before. When he’d sat down beside her she had<
br />
stiffened a bit, clutching her purse instinctively nearer herself. He didn’t mind; he wasn’t offended. Things are that way in the city.
Later, the memory of her initial disquiet will perhaps be some-
thing they laugh at together.
He steps back. The kitchenette looks more presentable. In the
main room, adjacent, the futon is rumpled, the sheets untidied
for several days.
It was chance, good fortune, that brought them together. He
will say that if ever they are alone. A blessing for him, and for her as well, because in a strange way they need one another.
He needs her because she might be a friend. He is lonely some-
times, if he’s telling the truth. It was the same with the woman he met in the bookshop, but that didn’t work out in the end.
She needs him because he alone knows her secret. He has a
certain gift for collecting up secrets. In a way, it is a kind of vocation. On Monday he will explain that to her.
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He will tell her what he saw those decades ago. He will assure
her that all is forgiven.
From Old Telegram Press she makes her way to the bus
stop, her coat insufficient to a chill in the air.
She has missed her usual bus, made late because of a mis-
aligned type form. A half run of poetry chapbooks was ruined, or
anyway had to have pages replaced. The machine is antique with
finicky parts: reglets and quoins that easily loosen, a flywheel that seems to keep an unsteady pace. Angharad ought to have noticed
the error—she was supposed to be checking the prints—but some
days the girl can hardly be bothered.
“Oh dear, forgive me,” Mr. Buchanan said, knowing she dis-
likes to be kept late. She is paid minimally for her time, the press being run at a perpetual loss, and in exchange its demands of her
are minimal, too. He is kind and always has been, Mr. Buchanan.
But scattered. These days he is not up to much. At a holiday
party, after some wine, he once playfully hinted at marriage. It
was an absurd proposition, a joke really, not least because he is
gay. “You forget, Robert’s only been gone a short time,” she said, and he nodded, chastened, being widowed after a fashion himself.
Sometimes she wonders how he’s got on; thirty years he has man-
aged the press on his own.
At the bus stop she doesn’t sit down on the bench, preferring
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