Page 16

"Five-thirty."

He goes next door. I hear his screen door scream, then the muffled shush of the shower coming on through the wall. I stand in my bedroom and look at the garment bag hanging at the back of my closet.

I've been looking at it for five months. My hands are shaking at my sides.

I take hold of the zipper, and it goes down in one long, slow pull, like a held breath being let go.

Chapter 4 — Ben

I told a woman this morning that nobody believes the practiced one. At 5:29, I'm standing on her side of the porch in the only jacket I own that isn't canvas, with a sentence I've been rehearsing for eleven minutes. I knock once, because I said I would.

The door opens. The sentence is gone.

She has the porch light behind her and the hallway lamp in front. The dress is red, a deep dark one, the color of wine held up to a window. Cut in a wrap that crosses low over her chest and ties at her waist in a knot she's left loose. It does what a dress should do and nobody has ever let it do for her.

It follows her. The weight of her breasts, the soft roll of her stomach under the knot, the broad flare of her hips and the fall of fabric over her thighs to just above the knee. Her hair is down, loose and thick, a dark-auburn wave on her shoulders. Her glasses are on.

There's a freckle at the edge of the neckline, just below the hollow of her throat. I have apparently decided to look at that and nothing else because it's the only place I can survive.

"Is it too much?" she says.

Her hands are at her sides. They're not smoothing the dress, or tugging it, or hiding. They're open and a little unsteady, held out from her body as if she has just stepped through a door she can't walk back through.

"I had a sentence," I say.

"Did you?"

"It's gone."

A laugh escapes her, startled and warm. Her chest shakes with it. I watch the red fabric move. I look at the porch swing for a moment with great attention.

"That's the nicest thing anyone's said about a dress," she says.

"It's red."

"It is."

"I've seen red," I tell her. "That wasn't..." I stop. "It's very good, Hollis."

Her smile is slow, crooked, bigger than she wants. She takes her coat off the hook and I hold it for her. When I settle it on her shoulders my hands stay a second at her arms. She's warm through the wool and I'm not ready to let go of the warmth. She turns her head and her hair brushes my knuckles.

Neither of us says anything about it.

The walk to the Common takes ten minutes. She talks through all of it. She points out the house where the Hendersons lived through the ice storm, the lamppost that Carmen's cousin once drove into, the stoop where she sold lemonade at nine and drank her own inventory.

The evening has come down blue over Bloomfield. Every porch we pass has a jack-o'-lantern set out, half of them lit. The smell of woodsmoke is thick enough to taste. She walks with her hand through my arm and her hip bumping mine at every third step. I feel each one like a tap on a bell.

The Old Granary is lit from the inside like a lantern. Strings of white bulbs hang from the beams in loops over the threshing floor. Tables run the length of the building under pumpkins and bundled wheat. A fiddle trio is warming up in a corner.

Her banner hangs outside the double doors. I stop under it for one second because she's walked past it without looking. I think she's done that on purpose.

"I saw your chalk this morning," I say. "On the café window."

She turns. "The pie sign?"

"It had your initials in the corner. Tiny. Like you were hoping nobody would look."

"I was," she says, quiet.