Read Online The First Warm Evening of the Year by Jamie M. Saul - Free Book Online

pickup. A long flagstone path curved left from the barn leading to the side porch of Marian’s house, an old farmhouse with a small, oval flower bed fanning out and away from the side porch, stretching to four larger flower beds.
    About fifteen feet from the right of the house, a smooth lawn opened to a woodland park, and I could see winding paths, hedges, deep stands of trees and gardens of various sizes that seemed to expand rather than recede toward an expansive vanishing point, like a phantasmagoria. I wondered if it was one of these gardens that Marian had described that day when I fell in love with her outside Laura’s house.
    Marian must have heard my car pull up. She was stepping off the porch just as I started walking across the driveway. She wore faded jeans and a gray sweater the color of pale smoke. Her hands were in her pockets. When she said hello, she sounded neither surprised nor displeased to see me.
    I could have made up a dozen excuses for my coming there, but I told her the truth.
    â€œI haven’t stopped thinking about you since we met,” I said. “And it’s scaring the hell out of me.”
    Marian smiled at me, turned her head toward the house, and said, “Let’s go in.”
    I followed her to the side porch and into the kitchen. She invited me to sit, and we sat facing each other across the table.
    There was a small desk to the left of my shoulder, above it on the wall a picture of a man who I assumed was Buddy, tan and aesthetic—not the way I’d imagined him—lying face-up on a white-sand beach.
    There was a shelf with cookbooks next to the door leading to the pantry, and above it a round clock that read four-thirty.
    I looked at the arrangements of platters and ceramic pitchers on the shelves of the corner cupboard, the two framed watercolors on the wall next to a window, then I looked only at Marian, at the way her hair was parted on the side and swept across her forehead, like a boy’s, and which would have been too masculine except for her eyes, which revealed a deep femininity. I may have noticed this before, but that was the first time I was aware that they were not the kind of eyes you could look at in haste. You had to take some time to see them, see the depth within them and her interest in what was happening.
    Her chin was a put-up-or-shut-up chin. And I wanted to be sitting with her in a restaurant in the city, in a dark corner booth, just the two of us telling each other cautionary tales because we both were aware of what was at stake, even if there was really nothing left to lose.
    And then, I wasn’t thinking about anything, except how happy I was to be seeing her, and all I wanted was to be there with Marian.
    She leaned forward and rested her hands on the table. I could smell her perfume. She looked at me as though she were making a calculation. It was the sort of expression that, if I’d known her better, would have made me ask what she was thinking, but I met her eyes with silence.
    We stayed like that for a moment longer, before Marian asked, “What do you want?” in a way that was neither challenging nor inhospitable. “I don’t mean right this second. I mean— You don’t need me to tell you what I mean.”
    â€œI have a girlfriend in New York,” I told her, “who’s smart and attractive, and who likes that we don’t live together, that we don’t want to get married and are too old to have children. When I get back to the city, she won’t even know I was gone. Or if she does, she won’t ask me where I’ve been. She’s been my girlfriend for three years. Until a few weeks ago, that’s what I wanted.”
    â€œWhat does that have to do with me?”
    â€œBecause I don’t want that anymore.” I leaned a little closer. “I want to know what you like for breakfast on a rainy Sunday. And what your hair smells like in summer. I want to hear your