I hope he did, Mary said. She got up and went into the house and brought back a blanket and spread it over Dad. He sat in the chair looking out at the street, the blanket drawn up to his chest.
The millers were swirling under the porch light and bumping it and dropping to the floorboards and fluttering upward again. Mary went back and switched off the light and returned and sat down. The millers still singed themselves against the hot bulb and fell or fluttered away. From beyond Berta May’s house the corner street lamp cast long shadows through the trees that moved a little in the night air.
10
YEARS AGO Alene walked along a wide Denver sidewalk with her arm in a man’s arm. That was in wintertime. A snowy evening. The snow was falling thickly and it was pleasant under the lights along the street, walking slowly past the city stores, looking in the windows, delaying going back to the hotel for the pleasure of being out in the cold air together. She was a young woman then, just thirty-three, nice-looking and slim and tall and brown haired and blue eyed. He was a little older, closer to forty, a tall man with the gray starting to show at the sides of his head. A principal in a school in the same district as the school she taught in. Which was how and why they met, at a district-wide school meeting. She had felt something at once. And then she had found a way of saying something to him. She couldn’t remember what it had been but it’d made him laugh and then they’d met again at another gathering and he had wanted to know if she would join him for dinner sometime in Denver. They both understood what he was saying. She said yes, she’d like that. And that was when it began.
The snow had started to collect on the sidewalk. The cars were beginning to pack it down out in the street. Going quietly by, quieted by the snow.
At the end of the block they stood waiting for a city bus to pass, the interior illuminated in the evening, the people in the bus moving past them as in a kind of movie. An old woman alone in her seat on the bus. An old man wearing a hat. A young girl at the back looking out the window as the bus passed and went on up the street. They crossed the street, she held on to his arm so as not to misstep.
Are you ready to go up? he said.
Yes. Are you?
Yes.
They turned in at the lobby of the hotel. It was a block east of the train depot, an old hotel, one of the oldest in the city, a tall square redbrick building with an ornate front. She stood near the elevator while he got the key from the desk clerk and they rode up to the third floor, another man with them, and she felt his now familiar hand pressing the side of her hip through her coat and that was something she would remember afterward, the feeling of that and the secret of it, while he and the other man made conversation about the weather. What about this snow? It might go up to a foot. Is that right? That’s what they were saying on the news, if you can believe them, and then the elevator stopped and they got out and walked down the long narrow hall, following the runner tacked to the floor, she in front, he following, and came to the room and she stepped aside so he could open the door with the key.
The flowers he had brought her that afternoon were still there on the mirrored buffet. Their fragrance was in the room. She waited as he locked the door and then he turned to her and she kissed him, she was full of joy and happiness. Then he undressed her. The bed was cold and they clung to each other until they were warm and the sheets were warm.
The room had been rich once, beautiful, with wallpaper that had dark red roses aligned up and down, and with an elaborate brass light fixture in the ceiling and a tall mirror on the wall and a narrow door letting into the bathroom, you took a step up to enter, and inside were the claw-footed bathtub and the free-standing sink with the two porcelain faucet handles, and an oval mirror with tiny silver cracks around the edges.
She rose above him in the bed and kissed him and looked down into his face. He had a good face. And brown eyes, looking at her. Oh God, she said.