Read Online Perfume River by Robert Olen Butler - Free Book Online

she is standing before him. This he is aware of, and he lifts his face.
    “Linda is home,” she says.
    He’s a little slow to react and Mavis is very quick in turning away, so his acknowledgment is nodded to her retreating back.
    But he goes out at once.
    As Jimmy nears the end of the connecting drive, he sees Linda emerge from the front door and come down the few steps of the porch, her focus on him. He approaches.
    It was not so long ago that he began to think she was starting to seem her age. Not that he could quite say why. She is still white-oak-hard and sturdy and upright, a thing she was when he first met her on a beach in Alameda with flowers in her hair and flowers painted beneath her eyes and with her breasts bare in solidarity with some other young women on the shore. He would soon feel the toned hardness in her body when they were in each other’s arms, hard enough that he was surprised at how gentle she was with her hands and in her voice and with her mouth. And in her eyes. They were as dark and fetching as a seal pup’s, but her brows were thick and severe in their arch. In heart and mind, as well as body and face, she was so very much a child of that era. An era of militant gentleness, judgmental tolerance. Over theyears, paradox continued to shine through her, and it masked the inevitable weathering and wrinkling and sagging of her body. Masked them utterly. She still seemed to him young. She remained interesting. And so the source of this recent sense of her aging was surprising and hard to identify, and it came clear to him now only in its abrupt absence: She is striding to him and there is a thing about her that those of the Summer of Love would have called an aura. An aura. Yes. He is, in this moment, acutely aware of an aura about her, of energy, of something like youth, and he realizes that for the past weeks, months even, it was something else.
    And as she draws near, she says, sharply, “How do you think your mother got our home number?”
    “Did she?” he says, thinking:
So that’s the transformed aura. Anger.
Thinking too that the discovered phone number might be a simple thing, an oversight on his part committed sometime along the way; perhaps it did not occur to him to register the number as unlisted when they moved up here to Twelve Mile.
    She sets her arms akimbo. “She left a message on the machine.”
    “What did she say?”
    “You need to hear for yourself.”
    They head off toward the house, side by side.
    “You’re home early,” she says. “Did Guy cancel?”
    “No. We had coffee instead.”
    “I was at Becca’s. She’s not good. She and Paul may be through.”
    Her anger at his mother seems to have dissipated quickly. She’s put the whole thing off on him now, and he’s okay with that. He says, “Is somebody dead?”
    “Dead?” She looks at him.
    He realizes she’s still thinking about their friends. He’s asking, of course, about his mother’s message.
    They go up the porch steps.
    He concedes to her agenda. “This is nothing new, is it?” he says.
    They’ve reached the door, and they pause. She gives him another look. He’s confused her again.
    He clarifies: “Becca and Paul.”
    She shrugs. “Not yet,” she says.
    Now it’s he who’s lost the thread.
    She reads it in his face. “Dead?” she says. “No one’s dead yet.”
    He leads her inside and into the front parlor, which they’ve filled with Mennonite furniture. He approaches the sideboard.
    He stands hesitating over the answering machine.
    He could simply erase the message. Right now. Erase it and change the number. His mother knows his wishes in this matter. It has always been best for all of them.
    But he touches the play button.
    Her voice wheedles into the room.
Darling Jimmy. It’s your mother. I’m sorry. I can’t tell you how much I regret how things went between us. Between your father and you. I’ve always loved you, my son. He has too. That’s important to say. He has too. I