All the Possibilities Read Online Free PDF

up the damp shirt. "Okay, come on upstairs." With one hand, she tugged off her work apron, tossing it aside as she breezed through the doorway. "I suppose you're entitled to one drink on the house."
    "You're all heart," Alan murmured as he followed her up the stairs.
    "My reputation for generosity precedes me." Shelby pushed open the door. "If you want Scotch, it's over there." Motioning in a vague gesture, she headed in the opposite direction. "If you'd rather have coffee, the kitchen's straight ahead there's a percolator
    —
    on the counter and a half-pound in the cabinet next to the window." With this, she disappeared with his shirt into an adjoining room.
    Alan glanced around. The interest he'd felt for the woman was only increased now by her living quarters. It was a hodgepodge of colors that should have clashed but didn't. Bold greens, vivid blues, and the occasional slash of scarlet. Bohemian. Perhaps flamboyant was a better description. Either adjective fit, just as either fit the woman who lived there. Just as neither fit his life-style or his taste. There were chunky striped pillows crowded on a long armless sofa. A huge standing urn, deep blue with wild oversize poppies splashed over the surface, held a leafy Roosevelt fern. The rug was a zigzag of color over bare wood.
    A wall hanging dominated one side of the room, of a geometric design that gave Alan the impression of a forest fire. A pair of impossibly high Italian heels lay drunkenly next to an ornately carved chair. A mint green ceramic hippopotamus of about three feet in length sat on the other side.
    It wasn't a room for quiet contemplation and lazy evenings, but a room of action, energy, and demand.
    Alan turned toward the direction Shelby had indicated, then stopped short when he saw the cat. Moshe lay stretched on the arm of a chair, watching him suspiciously out of his good eye. The cat didn't move a whisker, so for a moment Alan took him to be as inanimate as the hippo. The patch should have looked ridiculous, but like the colors in the room, it simply suited.
    Above the cat hung an octagon cage. Inside it was a rather drab-looking parrot. Like Moshe, the bird watched Alan with what seemed to be a mixture of suspicion and curiosity. With a shake of his head for his own fantasies, Alan walked up to them.
    "Fix you a drink?" he murmured to the cat, then with an expert's touch he scratched under Moshe's chin. The cat's eyes narrowed with pleasure.
    "Well, that shouldn't take more than ten or fifteen minutes," Shelby announced as she came back in. She could hear her cat purring from ten feet away. "So, you've met my roommates."
    "Apparently. Why the patch?"
    "Moshe Dayan lost his eye in the war. Doesn't like to talk about it." Because her tone seemed too careless for deliberate humor, Alan sent her a searching look she didn't notice as she crossed to the liquor cabinet. "I don't smell any coffee did you decide on
    —
    Scotch?"
    "I suppose. Does the bird talk?"
    "Hasn't said a word in two years." Shelby splashed liquor into glasses. "That's when Moshe came to live with us. Auntie Em's an expert on holding grudges he only
    —
    knocked over her cage once."
    "Auntie Em?"
    "You remember
    there's no place like home. Follow the yellow brick road. I've always
    —
    thought Dorothy's Aunt Em was the quintessential comfortable aunt. Here you go." Walking to him, Shelby offered the glass.
    "Thanks." Her choice of names for her pets reminded him that Shelby wasn't altogether the type of woman he thought he'd always understood. "How long have you lived here?"
    " Mmm , about three years." Shelby dropped onto the couch, drew up her legs, and sat like an Indian. On the coffee table in front of her were a pair of orange-handled scissors, a copy of The Washington Post opened to the comic section, a single earring winking with sapphires, what must have been several days worth of unopened mail, and a wellthumbed copy of Macbeth .
    "I didn't put it together last night," he