Read Online Warm Wuinter's Garden by Neil Hetzner - Free Book Online

Clarke’s Cove, she could ask her
mother.
    It would be sweet to crawl alongside the
patches of marigolds and petunias that lined the flagstone walks,
pinching off dead blooms and wandering through confusing territory
in the steadfast company of her mother. She wanted to hear what her
mother would say about Brad.
    Lise tore her knuckles from her mouth, closed
her hands into fists and hammered a brisk tattoo on her golden
knees. The vibrations picked up tone as they left her flesh and
traveled down the gray steel legs of the lab stool. She finished up
her solo by raising her fists higher, before letting them drop back
to her taut flesh. The final beats were accompanied with a soft,
Pa, Pa, Pa Pa, Pow from her broadly smiling mouth. She brought the
music to a resolution and her thoughts to a decision about the
weekend.
    They’d go. It’d be a hoot. To hell with Dilly
and Bill and all the uncertainties. After Lise had finished her
solo, the lab was quiet, her body was calm and the energy in her
brain was tamed enough to focus on the complex strands of life
smeared on the slide.

Chapter 5
     
     
    The restaurant was almost quiet. It had been
a long afternoon. Peter Koster’s face grew and shrank in the
spattered bathroom mirror as he rocked back and forth on his aching
feet. He stared at the purple sacs under his eyes, the deeply
etched lines at the ends of his mouth, the question mark curve of
his neck and head. How he had changed. Persistent pain in his feet
had caused his body to curl up. The weight that he had dragged home
from Viet Nam, less bulky but far heavier than his duffel, the
weight of the years of bending over stoves and cutting boards, the
weight of unending seventy-hour weeks, the weight of responsibility
for the food and his employees and his family, the weight of the
pain in his heart and in his feet had worn him down.
    The Provincetown, Massachusetts restaurateur
tried to shrug off the heaviness. He stretched. He took a deep
breath and let it whistle out through his coffee-stained teeth. It
didn’t help.
    Five years before, on his thirty-fifth
birthday, he had stopped smoking. After eighteen years of smoking
and an equal number of years of being hounded by his sister Dilly,
and, later, his wife Gabriella, and, under her able tutelage, his
two boys Chris and Miguel, he had decided that the biggest present
that he could give himself would be to stop smoking. To celebrate
his decision and to cement the commitment, Gaby insisted they make
a symbolic run along the beach. They rode their bikes along the
dunes the two miles out to Race Point Lighthouse where the tip of
Cape Cod curls back like a bass clef. With the boys pacing him,
they ran barefoot along the gravelly sanded beach until his lungs
grew too hot to breath. He coughed and spat phlegm so thick that it
sat upon the damp sand like a jellyfish. He and Gaby watched a
whale watch boat grow big while they waited for his chest to stop
heaving. The boys wrestled until brown bodies, the color of roast
turkey, were so coated in sand that they looked like gingerbread
men. Later, they had jogged slowly back to their bikes and taken
their time riding back into town.
    The next morning Peter could barely hobble to
the bathroom; however after fifteen minutes of moving about the
pain disappeared. The following morning the same pain recurred and,
then, disappeared. It became a pattern for Peter to drag himself
around in the morning by holding on from door jamb to sink to
banister to chair to kitchen counter. But, by the time that he had
showered, drunk his coffee, and dropped himself in and out of the
susurrations of the Today show, the pain would leave.
    At the restaurant his feet would feel fine as
long as he kept moving; however if he sat at his desk to make up
orders, pay bills, or work up staff schedules, the pain would
return. The throbbing that came during the day always seemed worse
than what he woke to in the morning. If he hobbled from his office
and was seen