Read Online Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) by Joy Williams - Free Book Online Page A

woman said. “I hope you’ll all be my guests for dinner.”
    The fat girls and Cynthia stared at her.
    “I’d love to,” Donna said. “What is Festive Chicken? Can I bring anything? Wine? A salad?”
    “It requires toothpicks,” the old woman said. “You bake it with toothpicks but then you take the toothpicks out.”
    “It sounds wonderful,” Donna said.
    Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Would you give it a rest,” she said to Donna.
    “I’m tired now,” the old woman said sweetly. “I’m tired of playing cards.” She put the cards back in the box but it didn’t have reef residents on it. It had a picture of a drab, many-spired European city, the very opposite of a reef resident.
    “These don’t belong in this box!” she cried. “It’s the first time I’ve noticed this. Would you go to my house and bring back the other deck of cards?” she asked Donna.
    “Sure,” Donna said.
    “My house is a little strange,” the old woman said.
    “What do you mean?”
    “I bet it is,” one of the fat girls said.
    “I love my little house,” the old woman said anxiously. “I want to get back to it as soon as I can.”
    She gave Donna the address and a key from her pocket-book. That evening, when visiting hours were over, Donna drove to the house, which was boxy and tidy with a crushed-rock yard and a dead nestling in the driveway. The house didn’t seem that strange to Donna. One would be desperate to get out of it, certainly. There were lots of things that were meant to be plugged into wall outlets but none of them were plugged in. She found the cards almost immediately, in the kitchen. There were the colorful fish on the cover of the box and the deck inside had the image of the foreign city. Idly, she opened the refrigerator, which was full of ketchup, nothing but bottles of ketchup, each one partially used. Donna had an urge to top the bottles up from others, to reduce the unseemly number, but with not much effort she resisted this.
    On the way back to her apartment she stopped at a restaurant and had several drinks in the bar. The bartender’s name was Lucy. She had just come back from a vacation. She had spent forty-five minutes swimming with dolphins. The dolphin that had persisted in keeping Lucy company had an immense boner.
    “He kept gliding past me, gliding past,” Lucy said, moving her hand through the air. “I kept worrying about the little kids.They’re always bringing in these little kids who have only weeks to live due to one thing or another. I would think it would be pretty undesirable for them to experience a dolphin with a boner.”
    “But the dolphins know better than that, don’t they?” Donna said.
    “It’s not all that relaxing to swim with them, actually,” the bartender said. “They like some people better than others, and the ones that get ignored feel like shit. You know, out of the Gaia loop.”
    People in the restaurant kept requesting exotic drinks that Lucy had to look up in her Bartender’s Bible. After a while, Donna went home.
    The next afternoon she swept into Pond House in her long black coat bearing a bunch of daffodils as a gift in general.
    Cynthia was in the lounge in a big chintz slipcovered chair reading
Anna Karenina
.
    “Should you be reading that?” Donna asked.
    Cynthia wouldn’t talk to her.
    Donna found the old lady and gave her the deck of cards.
    “I’m so relieved,” the old lady said. “That could have been such a problem, such a problem. Would you do me another favor? Would you get my dog and bring him to me here?”
    Donna was enthusiastic about this. “Do you have a dog? Where is he?”
    “He’s in my house.”
    “Is anyone feeding him?” Donna said. “Does he have water?” She had found her vocation, she was sure of it. She could do this forever. She felt like a long-distance swimmer in that place long-distance swimmers go in their heads when they’re good.
    “Nooooooo,” the old woman said. “He doesn’t need water.”