Circle of Three Read Online Free PDF Page A

one time. Ruth answered, and they talked for quite a while. I shook my head and waved my hands when she said, “So do you want to talk to my mom?” Then it was awkward, because he said yes and she had to come up with a reason, quick, why he couldn’t. “Gosh, she was here a minute ago. Well, I guess she went out. I guess she left while we were talking.” He hadn’t called again.
    “Most of it,” I told him. “Ruth helps me paint sometimes. It’s not finished. I guess now…” I let that hang, weighing how frank I should be. Was it too personal to tell him I might have to sell the house? Ruth loved it, though. Even if we sold it, after only three years of ownership, there wasn’t much escrow in our overpriced circa-1880 money sink on the state of Virginia’s Historic Register. I smiled at Jess. “Some of my plans have been pushed back, put it that way.”
    “You need a job.”
    “God knows I do. Excuse me a sec…” I stood up and went to get the coffee.
    He followed me into the kitchen. “This is amazing,” he said as I filled two mugs with coffee, adding milk to his.
    “What?”
    “This room. You did all this, Carrie?”
    “Yep.” I painted the tiles behind the sink and stenciled the wallpaper borders, I even laid the antique bricks I bought cheap at an estate sale. I was quite the craftswoman. “Well, not the counters. I found the slates, but a man cut and installed them for me. And the cabinets were already here, I just refinished them.”
    It was a great room, my favorite in the house. I could’ve made it bigger, knocked out a wall and extended into the pantry; that was even allowed under the strict rules of landmark ownership. But it was a 120-year-old house—who had big kitchens in its day? And there were only three of us when I was weighing the decision. And now only two.
    Jess scuffed the toe of his shoe across the throw rug he was standing on. “And this?” He looked up and smiled, and raised his eyebrows, and rubbed the flat of his hand against his chest—a combination of gestures I knew very well. In different lights, from different angles, I could still see the boy in his man’s face. I felt such tenderness sometimes. It was dangerous, it wasn’t even true, but sometimes I felt that I knew Jess better than anyone, that I was the only one who could really see him. But that was only the power of nostalgia. And loneliness. The mind plays tricks.
    “I’m afraid so,” I said, abashed. SWEET HOME, the rug said, with the date, in green and gray yarn over a replica of my house’s façade. “My first and last rug-hooking effort. Months, this took.” And it was only four-feet square. Of all the crafts I’d ever taken up out of curiosity, interest, boredom, desperation, whatever—rug hooking was far and away the most tedious. The one that had made me feel the most ridiculous.
    “You’re an artist.”
    “No.” I laughed. “A frustrated one, maybe. Stephen used to say I took it out on the house.” But I was so pleased. It was as if Jess had plucked a hair-thin wire running through me and set it vibrating. I am such a fool.
    He set his cup down and came around the kitchen table I’d put between us—we’d been talking across the length of the room. “I have a job for you.”
    “A what?”
    “I could offer you a job.”
    I saw myself milking cows in his barn. I’d have laughed, but I felt deflated. Stupid, but I thought he might’ve come for something else. “What job?”
    “I’m looking for an artist. To do something. Make something.” He looked me over, head to toe. “You’re perfect.”
    I flushed. If he was making fun of me, it was for the first time. “What, you need someone to—to—” I couldn’t think of the name of it, the person who used to advertise mattresses in department stores by sleeping, sleeping in a big bed behind a plate glass window while people on the sidewalk stopped and stared. I saw it once in an old movie.
    “You wouldn’t make a lot of