Read Online Wedding of the Two-Headed Woman by Alice Mattison - Free Book Online

and narrowly missed eating Chinese takeout with her and the children. I promised to come the next day. When she was out of the room for a moment, I dealt with my feelings by pocketing a sugar bowl—a rather nice one, blue ceramic—and later I threw it in the garbage.
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    A s my mother told Daphne, I am no gardener, but on a windy but sunny Saturday I raked the mucky dead leaves of the previous autumn—leaves we hadn’t bothered with when they fell—into piles. Arthur sniffed the fecund stuff my rake was exposing and sometimes rolled in it. I was cold, but activity warmed me. Inside, the phone rang. Pekko wasn’t home, but the machine would pick up the call. When Arthur barked, I followed him down the alley between houses and found my mother ringing our doorbell. She came into the yard.
    â€œDaphne did that for me,” she said, after watching me for a while. “She took a long time, and she charged me by the hour.”
    â€œIt’s a big job,” I said. I leaned the rake on a tree.
    â€œI’m not complaining,” my mother said. “It’s important to know how to charge. I hope you charge your customers enough.”
    I offered her coffee, and as she explained that she’d come with another question for Pekko, I heard him thumping around inside. Roz isn’t shy about visiting, but she doesn’t want me to think she moved to New Haven to bother me, so she always gives a reason. When we came into the kitchen, he’d discovered the blinking light on the answering machine and was listening to a rapid, friendly message from Gordon Skeetling. “Hi, Daisy, it’s Gordon,” and his 432 number—which always means Yale—spoken in the hasty manner of someone who knows you already have it.
    â€œWho’s that?” he said. “Hi, Roz.”
    â€œA client.”
    â€œGordon who?”
    â€œSkeetling. The Small Cities Project. He says he knows you.”
    â€œYou’re working for him ? Why didn’t you tell me?”
    â€œWho is he?” said Roz. “A big shot?”
    â€œHe says Yale barely tolerates him,” I said to Pekko. “He sounds like your sort—inner city and all that.”
    â€œI don’t like him,” Pekko said.
    â€œWhat’s wrong with him?” I put my jacket on a chair and took three mugs from the cupboard.
    â€œI don’t want coffee. He was on the board of the shelter with me.”
    â€œHe said so. He seems nice. He has a room full of papers he wants me to sort out.”
    Pekko walked out of the room, but a minute later, as I was measuring coffee, he returned. “A little too clearheaded,” he said. “Sees things just as they are.”
    â€œWhat’s wrong with that?” I said. “You’re the one who’s always claiming to be a realist.”
    â€œIf I were a realist,” said Pekko, “I wouldn’t rent an apartment to the man I just rented an apartment to.”
    He was standing in the doorway, filling it, but now he turned away again. Roz called after him, “Speaking of apartments, Pekko, I need a good deed.”
    â€œYes?” he said, sounding friendlier. “How are you anyway, Roz? What are you up to now?” My mother’s conscientious vigor amuses Pekko, and he also admires it. “We’re friends,” he says, which is also what my mother says, though she’s more detailed about it: she claims they made friends because they went through the war together, meaning Vietnam. They didn’t meet until years later, but she says they thought the same way about it. She marched, wrote letters to editors, and affixed bumper stickers to her car reading SUPPORT OUR BOYS: BRING THEM HOME . Pekko was drafted and spent a year in Vietnam. “Not as bad as some people’s year,” he says, “but bad enough.” Discharged, he returned to New Haven and, while taking courses at Southern Connecticut, began