Read Online Skylight Confessions by Alice Hoffman - Free Book Online

if not over a son, or maybe he'd actually heard his mother when she told him how disappointed she was.
    John was in the kitchen having coffee on the day Arlie found the lump. He'd actually poured Arlyn a cup. He was trying to be considerate. When he looked up to see Arlie standing there in her nightgown, her hair uncombed, he forgot about the coffee.
    "I think something's wrong," Arlie said.
    John Moody knew his was not the happiest of marriages. He felt he'd been trapped; his youth had been taken from him. He had still never been to Italy, although he'd taken several courses and could now converse in halting Italian, a Venetian dialect, with his teacher, a lovely young woman he'd made love to twice. Three times would be an affair, he told himself. Once was only an experiment, since he'd been so young when he'd married. Twice was simply to be polite so as not to hurt the poor woman's feelings. When he started working on the building in Cleveland he'd stopped the classes; he had received several messages at his office from his Italian teacher, but he hadn't returned them. Frankly, he was settled into his marriage; his wife no longer expected him to be anything he wasn't. She knew him.
    "Look, everyone has problems," he said to Arlie. He'd thought she was a free spirit, but she was a worrier, really. "You can't let difficulties stop you. You can't just give up, can you?"
    Arlie came to the table. She stood in front of him and took his hand. His true impulse was to pull it away, but he didn't. He wanted to read the paper, but he forced himself to be there for her.
    On the evening before his mother had left, she pulled him aside to say, Be kinder. So that was what he was trying to do. Arlie had just had a baby, after all, and couldn't be held responsible for her actions or her moods. Or so Jack Gallagher next door had told him when John complained about how erratic Arlyn was. But then Jack had no children, and in a matter of weeks he'd have no wife.
    Cynthia had made it clear to John Moody that she was available; she had filed for divorce and Jack would soon be moving out. So much for his neighbor's advice. As a matter of fact, John had known about the divorce before Jack himself had. One night soon after Arlie came home with the baby, Cynthia had been waiting for John in the driveway, desperate for someone to talk to, someone who would understand.
    He could deal with his own wife, surely. The newspaper could wait. But instead of wanting to talk, Arlie did something that completely surprised John. She placed his hand on her breast. He felt the lump right away; all at once he realized how long it had been since he'd touched her. And now this, a stone.
    "Maybe this is normal. Maybe you should stop breastfeeding and it will go away."
    That was the way he thought about life. He believed in logic and denial in equal parts, but Arlie knew better. She thought about the instants in time she'd had. Standing on the porch waiting for John, giving birth to her babies, racing along the beach with George Snow while he threw stones at the sea, the snow angels in the driveway, the way Sam reached for her hand. This moment was the dividing line between the before and the after. No more hanging globes of time. No more forevers. Sitting in the doctor's office, dozens of mammograms, making dinner for Sam and John, rock-ing Blanca to sleep, calling Diana to ask if she would come back up from Florida to help out with the children after Arlie had her surgery. It all happened so fast; the past hung above Arlyn as though imprinted on air. She thought of it as a ceiling she walked beneath. She tried her best to remember her own mother. Arlie had been three years old when her mother became ill, with what, Arlie had never been told. If she'd known it was the same cancer she herself now had, she would have known to check herself and be checked, but people didn't talk about such things. Cancer was a spell with evil effects; said aloud, the very word was