Read Online The Mango Opera by Tom Corcoran - Free Book Online

wanted simply to hold her, to pull her closer, to lock her to me until I could forget her absence, her fading, her silence.
    We held each other, hardly breathing. Her lips formed words against my shoulder. I wanted the panties off. They reminded me of Ellen Albury’s dead body. Annie pushed my hand inside the front elastic, then turned my wrist to aim my fingers into the folds. The dampness, her openness, begged a shift from distrust to the faith of love. Her warmth melted the boundary between wariness and submission. She tugged me to the bed. The underpants slipped to her ankles as she let herself fall backward.
    I gazed at the soft skin of her belly and thighs and wondered for a moment if this was a fresh start or some crazy finale. I bent to kiss and nudge with my tongue the skin of one breast, from the bump of a rib upward to the nipple. A minute later, as my mouth moved down that sweet line from her neck to her navel and farther, I caught myself recalling Julia’s smooth olive skin.
    Annie must have sensed my wandering. She shifted and pushed my head downward, then cried as if in pain and pulled me back toward her face. Her eyes took me away from Julia and demanded my presence. Her surrender and compliance erased everything else from my mind.

7
    This piece of theater had played on my brain for twenty days.
    Annie had invented a morning game. She had worked on timing, perfected her routine. She would get up first, and after her shower I would watch her dress for work. That was it. There would be no talking or eye contact, and my pillow-height point of view was wondrously exaggerated by her five-nine height. She would begin by untangling the underwear, then perform exquisite hop-steps as she looped her slingshot panties over one foot and the other. Some mornings I would get a rear view of this stage; other mornings she would face me but still no eye contact. After she had adjusted the panties for comfort, smoothing them over her upper thighs, she would choose a bra. She took her time with its positioning and snugging, taking each breast in a full handhold to ensure its exact place in the cloth cup. Then came the blouse selection, the shoes and bracelets, the flow of the sun-streaked brown hair that would go anywhere she wanted it to go. After Annie had buttoned her skirt—always the last step—and had left for work, I’d head to the kitchen for my Cuban coffee.
    I wanted this morning to be one of those. Along with the slow-motion lovemaking that had closed out the night, the voyeuristic ritual would affirm that our romance still had a chance. If I still wanted to take that chance. I felt Annie get out of bed. Smells of mangoes and figs drifted in the morning air. The traffic on Fleming sounded urgent but far away. I can’t recall how long she’d been out of the room.
    Then she was back in the room, nudging my foot with her knee.
    “You come out here and deal with him.” Her voice was a forced whisper. “I walk around bare-assed for five minutes before I realize he’s out there. It’s that goddamned detective with the smelly cigars.”
    “Is he smoking one now?”
    “No, but he looks like he wants to.”
    Resplendent in a sky-blue guayabera shirt, navy-blue trousers, and white dress shoes, Avery Hatch had made himself at home on my porch. The Keys section of the Miami Herald covered the table—he’d moved the nearly empty Calvados bottle to a plant shelf—and he sipped coffee from a McDonald’s cup. Torn sugar packets and empty nondairy creamer thimbles littered the lounge-chair cushion. Light filtered through the hanging plants and reflected off a faint sheen of mousse in his mod pompadour. His right breast pocket held four large dark-colored cigars.
    I stood in the doorway in my jockey shorts, scratching my stomach.
    Hatch threw out the first ball. “I find out after all the rigmarole at the Olivia scene that you and the Minnette lady are friends.” He twisted his head to peer into the house, then