A Little Love Story Read Online Free PDF Page A

Reno. She says she does therapeutic massage, but I’m pretty sure she’s talking about a certain kind of therapeutic.”
    “Really? Does she like it?”
    “I never asked. She has some methedrine problems and that’s made her a little hard to talk to. Unless you talk very fast. My brother is a Trappist monk in northwestern Connecticut. To balance things out.”
    “Nobody ever married.”
    “Not yet. What’s your mess?”
    “My father was working on the Mystic River Bridge and either fell off a staging or jumped. We were never sure. Thirteen years ago today, actually.”
    “Sorry.”
    She waved her fork. “He was a good man. I just try to remember the good things.”
    On that hopeful note, Abraham returned and we ordered dessert from him the same way we had ordered the main courses. Janet said, “Fruit for me, if you have it. Sweet and no chocolate for the gentleman.”
    With dessert we each had another Vietnamese coffee and the last of the wine and we scooted and slipped through the usual conversational alleys and came out okay. Even though she wanted to split it, I paid the check and put in a forty-dollar tip. I’m old-fashioned there: if you do the inviting, you do the paying. And I was in a mood to spend money outrageously. That happens to me sometimes. Walking away from an ATM machine once in Harvard Square I gave a hundred dollars to a street musician. Five new twenties in his hat. I’d had what people call a comfortable childhood, in what they call the middle class, and I’d built up a thriving little two-man carpentry business, and sold some paintings besides, and I had more money than I knew what to do with and it meant almost exactly nothing to me. During the meal, all the normal insecurities and self-consciousness of a first date had somehow been knocked away and, though I didn’t know why that was, I liked it and it made me reckless, nutty. Plus, it wasn’t Jeffrey’s fault that he was Brian.
    When we walked out of Diem Bo I wasn’t nervous. It had rained most of that week but the night was unusually warm for September—hot, really—and I felt completely at ease in it, and with Janet, standing on the sidewalk watching women walking dogs, and couples holding hands, and men in suits on cell phones, and taxis and traffic lights, and a moon almost full, and the healthy brick facades of the townhouses there. Gerard and I had gutted a whole floor of one of those townhouses once, tearing out the old and putting in the new, and it had made us feel heroic, in spite of the parking problems.
    I believe Janet felt at ease, too. She was standing close to me, and had draped a pretty striped sweater over her bare shoulders. We were looking away from each other, watching the parade of another city night.
    Completely without having planned to do it, I said, “Would you want to go out on the river?”
    She turned her face toward me and her eyes were slightly wide and it was easy to see that she’d had a little tickle of understanding what I’d meant, or had made a good guess, and the idea was exciting to her.
    “I have a key to the BU boathouse. Have you ever been out in a racing shell? Would you want to?”
    “Wouldn’t we need another seven or eight people to fill it up?”
    “They have some that are made for two.”
    “Are you going to drown me?”
    “Not unless one of us makes a huge mistake.”
    She moved her eyes in small jumps across my face, and I wondered if I’d pushed the elastic edges of our nice easiness too far too fast and it was going to break open and all the good air between and around us was going to rush off up Newbury Street. I stood still and let myself be looked at. In a situation like that, it is the next thing to impossible for a man to imagine the kind of fear a woman is capable of feeling. I knew that, at least. I knew there was no reason for her to be afraid in that way, and knew I couldn’t say so.
    “How weird are you?” she asked. “Really.”
    “Weird within normal