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

never really in love.”
    â€œThat may have changed.”
    â€œYou’re a dangerous man, Geoffrey, saying dangerous things.”
    â€œI don’t know when I’ll have the chance to say them again.”
    She grinned. “It isn’t like Laura didn’t talk to me about you and your collegiate conquests.”
    â€œMy conscience is clean.”
    â€œClaims the condemned man as they march him to the gallows.”
    â€œCondemned without a fair hearing.”
    She wasn’t grinning now; in fact, all expression had come to a halt. “If I told you to go back to New York. Today. Now. Please don’t think it’s because I don’t appreciate your . . . Well, your being interested in me. God, that sounds so immodest. But I really don’t want to get involved with you.”
    â€œBecause you think I’m a dangerous man?”
    â€œI want you to go back to New York and forget about me.”
    I told her, “I don’t know if that’s possible.” She was still standing close to me, but she looked as though she were about to tell me to get the hell out of there. What she said was, “I don’t know what you think is happening here,” and pressed her lips together in a tight smile, “but I’m sure you’re not a person who assumes what he wants to about people to fit his own—” She walked away from me and leaned against the side of the sink. “Buddy had a cabin in the Adirondacks. With a lake. He used to go ice fishing in the winter. He loved ice fishing.”
    â€œThat’s very solitary.”
    â€œHe usually went with his friends. He didn’t the last time.” She crossed her arms over her chest and stared down at the floor. “The cabin had an old gas heater. Propane. A wind blew the flame out during the night and Buddy died in his sleep from carbon monoxide poisoning.” Her voice was as flat as winter ice, and she hurried her words with what sounded like a great fatigue, and sorrow.
    â€œI sold the property and never went there again. Buddy was thirty-two years old.” She turned her face to the window. “So, if you came here thinking that I was someone you might be interested in, someone who might be interested in . . . a stupid, avoidable accident, alone in a crappy little cabin.” Marian did not turn around.
    I couldn’t keep staring at the back of her head, I didn’t know where to look, so I glanced at the desk just behind my shoulder. Along with the telephone and laptop was a stack of envelopes, all with the letterhead that bore the same logo that was on the pickup truck. It made me think of the hotel stationery you take with you for a souvenir, a reminiscence; and I wondered if Marian’s life was nothing more than reminiscences and souvenirs; living in the same house she’d lived in with Buddy, driving that old truck. Like a fly in amber.
    I looked up and saw Marian staring at me.
    She said, “People in town used to say that one of the joys of spring was watching Buddy’s designs come back to life. It’s still one of my joys. You won’t understand this, probably, but having that to look forward to is part of a routine, one of the habits of living. Like the year that Buddy died, it was attending to the business of being Buddy’s widow. And after that was finished, it’s anything I can do to—I don’t know— It’s all—”
    â€œA distraction?”
    She opened her eyes a bit wider, as though she’d just been revealed.
    â€œI don’t know what I was doing when we were at Laura’s. You can think I was flirting with you, if that’s good for your ego. Okay, I liked flirting with you. Maybe it was the tension of the moment, but whatever, it wasn’t me. And if that’s who you came up here to be with, it’s not me. Anyway, what I’m telling you is that you can’t just step into my life as