A Watershed Year Read Online Free PDF

She decided to view it as a blessing of powerful measure. At a time when Harlan had every right to gather his resources toward the center, to pull inward, he had reached out, thought of her instead. She thanked every saint she could think of for bringing Harlan—in his own inimitable way—back into her life.

three
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    W ith the advent of Harlan’s messages, the anvil of grief pressing down on her either weighed less or Lucy had learned to balance it more effectively. She had lost weight—her ankles seemed almost normal—and she noticed in the pearly light of the bathroom mirror that her face had acquired a new maturity during her period of virtual hibernation. Still, she was rusty on living. She had a hard time making conversation with casual acquaintances like Harlan’s dry cleaner, to whom she took a big armload of clothes that had accumulated in the bottom of her closet.
    “Morning, miss,” the dry cleaner said. “You friend of Har-LAN. So sad.”
    “Yes, very sad,” she said, not knowing whether to put the clothes on the counter or stand there holding them. It seemed wrong to follow “very sad” with “What do you charge for sweaters?” So she waited, nodding her head, until the dry cleaner—square jawed and muscular, clearly the outgoing son in the family business—reached out his hands.
    “What you got?”
    “A lot,” she said. “I’ve been putting this off for too long.”
    “Ah,” he said, as though detecting some hidden meaning in her words. “I fix everything.”
    He sorted quickly through the clothes and filled out a slip, letting her write in her name, address, and phone number. She glanced up atthe dry cleaner’s bristling hair, which reminded her of Harlan when he cut his hair short in the summer.
    Then the dry cleaner handed her a business card, which listed the hours of operation. On the flip side was another business with the same address but on the second floor. It said U-Bet Adoptions—Arlene Kim, Proprietor.
    “U-Bet,” the dry cleaner said, noticing that Lucy had turned over the card. “My mother find best babies. Top quality.”
    She read the card again and thought of Harlan’s message, his certainty that she was destined for motherhood.
Your life surely will take some unexpected turns; you will adopt a whole new frame of reference.
    “You pick up Thursday,” the dry cleaner said.
    “A baby?”
    “Clothes,” he said, laughing. “Clothes ready Thursday. Babies take six, seven month.”
    “Of course they do,” she said, trying to laugh along. She stuffed the dry-cleaning slip and the business card into her wallet. “See you Thursday.”
    She walked slowly back to her car, glancing at the battered storefronts: Ferdie’s Franks ’N Stuff, Charm City Shoe Repair, the House of Foam. She had been living in Baltimore for a year and a half now but never failed to wonder at how the whole messy conglomerate of package stores and check-cashing joints, Italian bakeries and cramped bars, Greek restaurants and sticky-floored sandwich shops managed to function without devolving into chaos. She swore the whole place was held together with fryolator grease and old habits.
    In sections of the city, vandals had stolen all the copper pipes from deteriorating row houses; in others, whole blocks had been abandoned. But the city bottled its own brand of charm. It all but dared people to love it, to embrace its dark alleys and its crab-fixated, tourist-plagued waterfront, its overly earnest street performers and its mumbling homeless. It was a place that attracted the kind of entrepreneur for whom success was all about defying the odds:when a tailor went bankrupt near the college, a twelve-seat sushi bar wedged itself into the narrow storefront and regularly turned people away.
    Lucy rested her purse on the car’s hood and took out the dry cleaner’s business card. She had turned thirty-eight the day after Thanksgiving. The statistical probability of a woman with a PhD finding a