Aquamarine Read Online Free PDF Page A

to”—Jesse is hoping she won’t remember, but it takes Alice only a flash second to pull up the name—“Marty Finch? What a swimmer. Everybody up on the blocks against her must’ve had chills. You must’ve hated her.”
    In lieu of speaking, which is quite impossible in this moment, Jesse gets up and pours herself a mug of burnt sludge from the Mr. Coffee, which has been turned off since the previous morning. Then she has to pretend it is hot and drinkable, but at the same time can’t offer any to Alice, who sees what’s going on anyway, and says, “I’m sorry. I often trip over other people’s wires, even when they’ve considerately laid them underground.” Then she pushes open the screen door. “What say we have a look at that house?”
    On their way out to the lake, Alice says, “So, do you still swim?”
    “Nah,” Jesse says. An all-purpose lie.
     
    “There’s a screened-in porch off the back bedroom,” she tells Alice as they stand in the empty living room of this house on the nearly deserted north shore of the lake. The house Alice is thinking of buying for herself. If she does, it will have to stop being the house Jesse and Wayne use as a rendezvous point when they have more than an hour to spare with each other. Where they sit on the weathered boards of the porch floor, Wayne propped against the wall, Jesse leaning back into him as if he’s a human chair. He lifts her hair and drags his lips, which are fat and flat at the same time, like Mick Jagger’s, across the back of her neck.
    They do so little. Their connection seems so inconsequential once Jesse is away from it. By the time she gets home again, she often can’t remember what it was they talked about.
    “If I knocked out this wall,” Alice is saying, rapping the one dividing the bedroom from the porch, “I’d have a tree house to sleep in.”
    “You might get a little spooked out here at night all by yourself. This far out, you’re a ways from your next neighbor.” Jesse prides herself on being an ethical broker, not just selling someone a house, but the right house.
    “I won’t be alone,” she says. “A friend’s moving down from Kansas City.”
    “Ah,” Jesse says, and pauses so long in her speculation on Alice’s personal life that Alice laughs.
    “You’re subtle. I’ll say that for you.”
    “You mean how I didn’t swallow my gum? I know. I’m smooth.” Jesse yanks open a stuck door she doesn’t remember and pokes her head into a cedar closet. “You must really like it here,” she says to Alice. “To be sinking all these roots.”
    “I think the part I like is the roots. I’ve moved ... I think six times in the past ten years or so. One reason or another,” she says, lifting a hand, waving away the bother of further explanation. “Letting things go as I went, lightening my load. Now I’m practically a Berber—just my tent, my pot and my goat. I’d like to stop awhile. Add a cup and a plate. Hang a picture. You have to understand this. I mean, it’s the impulse you’ve followed yourself.”
    “Because I’ve stayed here?” Jesse says, then shakes her head. “That’s a complicated business, not a simple one. People like you—”
    “Please. Don’t say ‘people like me.’”
    “I’m sorry. You, then. You come out from the city and think small means simple when all it really means is complicated in a smaller space. Which sometimes adds to the complication.”
    In the middle of saying this, Jesse’s regular thoughts are interrupted by a special bulletin from Wayne. First she thinks it’s just some kind of free association, that when she thinks “complication,” images of Wayne instantly follow. Then she realizes it’s his smell, that there are trace elements of Aramis in the air. Then she catches Alice’s straight-on gaze shifting to something just beyond Jesse’s shoulder. Jesse turns to see what she is looking at.
    He is standing breathless in the doorway. He must have seen the Bronco