Read Online Let Me Be Frank With You by Richard Ford - Free Book Online Page B

browns, blacks, and maroons that any man or woman would’ve wished they were black for at least part of every day. She was, anyone could see, well-to-do. Her red coat with a black fur collar I picked out as cashmere. Her black boots hadn’t come cheap either. When I came closer, still stupidly grinning, she took off one leather glove, extended her hand, took mine in a surprisingly rough grip, and gave it a firm I’m-in-charge squeezing. I felt like a schoolboy who meets his principal in Walmart and shakes hands with an adult for the first time.
    â€œI’m making a terrible intrusion on you, Mr. Bascombe.”
    â€œIt’s fine,” I said. “I like intrusions.” For some reason I was breathless. “I was just reading for the blind. Sally’s over in Mantoloking.” I had the Naipaul under my arm. Ms. Pines was a lady in her waning fifties. Snow was settling into the wide part of her beauty-parlor hair, the third not covered by her tam. She’d spoken very explicitly. Conceivably she had moments before gotten out of a sleek, liveried Lincoln now waiting discreetly down the block. I took a quick look down Wilson but saw nothing. I saw what I believed was a flicker in the Bitticks’ front curtains. Black people don’t visit in our neighborhood that often, except to read the meter or fix something. However, that Ms. Pines had simply appeared conferredupon me an intense feeling of well-being, as if she’d done me an unexpected favor.
    â€œI haven’t met your wife,” Ms. Pines said. Somewhere back in the distant days she’d been a considerable and curvaceous handful. Even in her Barneys red coat, that was plain. She’d now evolved into dignified, imposing pan-African handsomeness.
    â€œShe’s great,” I said.
    â€œI’m certain,” Ms. Pines said and then was on to her business. “I’m on a strange mission, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines seemed to rise to a more forthright set-of-shoulders, as if an expected moment had now arrived.
    â€œTell me,” I said. I nearly said I’m all ears , words I’d never said in my life.
    â€œI grew up in your house, Mr. Bascombe.” Ms. Pines’ shoulders were firmly set. But then unexpectedly she seemed to lose spirit. She smiled, but a different smile, a smile summoning supplication and regret, as if she was one of the AME ladies, and I’d just uttered something slighting. She swiveled her head around and regarded the front door, as if it had finally opened to her ring. She had a short but still lustrous neck that made her operate her shoulders a bit stiffly. Everything about her had suddenly altered. “Of course it looks very different now.” She was going on trying to sound pleasant. “This was back in the sixties. It seems much smaller tome.” Her smile brightened, as she found me again. “It’s nicer. You’ve kept it nice.”
    â€œWell, that’s great, too,” I said. I’d proclaimed greatness three times now, even though sentimental returns of the sort Ms. Pines was making could never be truly great. “Mightily affecting.” “Ambiguously affirming.” “Bittersweet and troubling.” “Heart-wrenching and sad.” All possible. But probably not great.
    Only, I wanted her to know none of it was bad news. Not to me. It was good news, in that it gave us—the two of us, cold here together—a great new connection that didn’t need to go further than my front yard, but might. This was how things were always supposed to work out.
    Previous-resident returns of this sort, in fact, happen all the time and have happened to me more than once. Possibly in nineteenth-century Haddam they didn’t. But in twenty-first-century Haddam they do—where people sell and buy houses like Jeep Cherokees, and where boom follows bust so relentlessly realtors often leave the FOR SALE sign in the garage; and where