Read Online Dear Doctor Lily by Monica Dickens - Free Book Online Page B

inher nightgown and bare feet. The house was warm. The refrigerator made a responsible whirring sound. My own home! She stroked counters and door frames, and furnished the house in her mind with flowered wallpaper and bright-coloured chairs and carpets. She had bread and grape jelly and tea without milk. Among the few groceries Buddy had got in, he had remembered tea. She thought of him fondly.
    He came home in his lunch-break and they went to the huge dazzling Commissary and the Base Exchange and bought masses of everything, and Ida bought a postcard of a jet fighter going like a dagger over Washington D C. That evening they went to a late-night discount store to look at couches and tables. They bought a television set. Buddy seemed to have plenty of money.
    Ida would write to Lily:
All okay. Marriage is wonderful. I like it here.
    Next day Buddy came home for supper and a quick bash on top of the bed upstairs, and went out again, because the boys wanted to celebrate his wedding.
    In the following days Ida made friends with some of the other wives in this settlement of white wooden houses. They thought she was cute, and invited her in for coffee to astonishingly immaculate interiors, considering they had two or three children and sometimes a dog. They took her shopping in their cars, because the base was so huge, you couldn’t walk anywhere.
    At the end of the week, Buddy came home from his work in the supply warehouse to change his green fatigues, went out without eating the supper Ida had prepared, and didn’t come back at all until he woke her by kicking open the bedroom door at seven a.m. and changing into uniform without a word or a look at her.
    â€˜Where have you … Buddy, I… Pardon me asking, but…’
    He was a man of stone. Soft fleshy stone, but stone.
    That day she finally wrote the card to Lily, and Sandy from two blocks down took her to the base post office.
    All okay,
she wrote to Lily.
You okay?

Three
    About six years after the side trip to Iceland, Paul Stephens went to England again to promote a new type of waterproof horse blanket manufactured by the firm for which he was now chief buyer.
    The store near Boston Common sold bags and belts and suitcases and boots and wallets and everything made of leather, including jackets and camel saddle stools. They also sold everything for horses and their riders and slaves. They had small subsidiary tack shops in two of the horsier towns outside Boston, displays at all the big shows and cross-country events, and a small workshop which made their own lines of equipment.
    Paul had started out with them on the floor, and graduated to buying and marketing. After high school, he had served two years in the United States Navy and come out of it knowing how to cook and splice a rope, but knowing nothing about what he wanted to do, except that he did not want to be a lawyer.
    â€˜You’re breaking your Dad’s heart,’ his mother said, but his father, an overworked attorney, was tougher than that.
    â€˜You’d never make it, anyway,’ he told Paul plainly. ‘You’re too easy-going. You like everybody.’
    â€˜He gets that from you.’ Paul’s mother never gave up trying to sentimentalize her prosaic, private-souled husband.
    â€˜Not guilty. That’s not the way I got to be successful.’
    Paul went to business college and came out to discover that finding a job took longer than he expected. He cooked fast-food in a highway service-stop for a while, and tended bar in a restaurant that was dark at lunchtime, and shared an apartment with two friends from college.
    Walking in Boston on his day off, he stopped in at Turnbull’s to buy a belt that was in the window, with a buckle like a snaffle bit. Horses were an old love from childhood riding days.
    The salesgirl had an eager, confiding way with her. She was not busy, so they talked, and Paul found out there was a job going, and applied for it on