Read Online The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass - Free Book Online Page A

towers of books. The porch surrounded by Japanese maples. Celestino's room on the third floor the first time he stayed there: a small room, like a bird's nest. Later on, the larger room on the second floor, the room left behind by Etienne, Dr. Lartigue's son. Isabelle's room, next to Etienne's, her white bedspread with the blue-flowered squares. Isabelle's voice. Isabelle's eyes and hands and feet, everything between.
    If not for Isabelle. If not for Dr. Lartigue's heart attack. If not for Senora Lartigue's anger. If not for his own childish fear. If not, if not, if not. How useless these words, these dead-end wishes. His sister Marta, who knew about these wishes, told him they proved he'd been tainted by his time in America. People with too much money bought themselves regret along with big houses and cars, she said once. Regret was a disease, a fever. (But the money that went with the illness--this she liked, didn't she?)
    On his way from the station in Lothian, Celestino bought eggs, an onion, a potato, and a pepper. The fat green ones tasted raw, unfinished, but they were the cheap ones. Mrs. Marsh, whose vast vegetable garden Celestino weeded and watered twice a week, had told him to help himself to her tomatoes that morning. They were spectacular tomatoes, some purple, some striped like flames, others yellow as taxis. When he shook his head, she said, "Don't be ridiculous. All I did was plant them. You're the one who keeps them growing." He had carried the bag of tomatoes with him to Mrs. Connaughton's, his afternoon job, but then, stupidly, had left it beside the kitchen sink of the man who'd let him call for a ride. He should have walked to the train station, to hell with Gilberto. He had been lazy.
    In his kitchen, he turned on the radio--the volume low. He was careful to keep Mrs. Karp happy, to jump when she needed him and otherwise to intrude on her life as little as possible. She was kind enough, but she could raise the rent at her whim--or decide she didn't need him. And what if she should sell the house? Would he be forced to join his "compadres" in Packard?
    He listened to the news while he cooked. The war, always the war in Iraq. More suicide bombings. Children blown up on their way to school. I could have family there , he thought. He enforced the habit of reminding himself how his life could be so much worse, how Guatemala was said to be peaceful now, no more soldiers burning down villages, raping and killing the women. Even in the city, his mother and sisters were safer now. Mrs. Connaughton had insisted on showing Celestino her photographs from a tour she took the year before. "Your country is divine," she declared. "I have never seen people who have such an exquisite sense of color."
    As he chopped the pepper, he pictured the tomatoes he'd left on that kitchen counter. Mrs. Connaughton's neighbor--Percy--had reminded Celestino of Dr. Lartigue. He was tall, his eyes the same silvery blue. But more than these features, he had that scholar's air about him, the same clothes: khaki shorts and a thinly striped cotton shirt with the sleeves rolled up, the same shirt you could wear with a tie and a suit. As if such men must always be prepared to dress up at a moment's notice for a party or a business meeting. The first time Celestino had gone to live in Cambridge, Dr. Lartigue had bought him some of these clothes.
    The rooms Celestino had passed through, on his way to Percy's kitchen, were old in a vain sort of way. The dark rafters hung below the ceilings, and the floorboards slanted this way and that. The rooms were stuffed with old things, decorated with flowery patterns the sun had faded long ago. You could not have fit in one more stack of books or historical picture: so much like Dr. Lartigue's study. There was a portrait in a gold frame over a fireplace, the paint so crackled and darkened by smoke that all you could really see was the man's moonlike face, its attitude grim, and a white patch of shirt