Elizabeth and After Read Online Free PDF Page B

with strangers. Carl’s eyes, when they really looked at you, were soft and unmoving—soft green-brown baby eyes that let you fall apart inside. Except when he was in fighting mode, and then they narrowed and turned grey; no person or thing wanted to be in Carl’s way when he was fighting.
    Carl offered her his hand.
    “Good,” she said. She took his hand. It was rough and sandpapery inside, the way it used to be. No special pressure, no hidden messages of love or violence. “We shook hands,”she almost told Fred later but at the last minute stopped herself because she knew Fred wouldn’t want to think of her touching Carl. And then she noticed his moustache; no wonder he had seemed smaller. Black and carefully trimmed, it made a precise line across the top of his mouth. She would tell Fred about the moustache. “Makes him look foolish,” she would say, though in fact she was already getting used to it.
    Lizzie had arrived beside her. She had Carl’s eyes and they were on him now, drinking him in. He shifted his weight as though he was going to reach down to her, then changed his mind. Tiny motions Chrissy would not have noticed in anyone else, but being with Carl had tuned her to his microcosmic dances, his split-second jive steps disguised as ordinary breathing. And now, without thinking about it, she was on his wavelength again, tuned to the the exact movements of their bodies through space, suddenly uncomfortable in her clothes, wanting to brush back hairs that had strayed across her forehead, hearing and not hearing the beat Carl always lived to.
    “I’m Carl. Do you remember me?”
    “Sure I remember you,” Lizzie said in a complicated voice Chrissy had never heard before, a voice inflected with winning and losing and ownership.
    “We could go for a drive or something.”
    “I’d like to.”
    And then their backs were turned and they were walking away from her. Halfway across the grass towards the truck, Lizzie’s hand came up and slid into Carl’s. Chrissy was crying. She didn’t know when she’d started. She was crying and for all she cared she might have been crying from the moment she opened the door to him. She wiped her eyes and by the time she looked out again Carl had his hands on Lizzie’s waistand had hoisted her high in the air, lifting her while Lizzie kicked and laughed as though she were a baby and not seven years old.
    “She stayed faithful,” Chrissy thought. “Now she’s getting her reward.”
    He opened the door for her and Lizzie jumped up into the seat, quickly, as though afraid to be left behind. When Carl got in his own side Lizzie had the glove compartment open and was looking through the postcards she’d sent him. Now he got his first real look at her: her hair, tied back in a pony-tail—slightly frizzed the way it always got when it had just been washed—was darker than it used to be, almost black, but laced with burnished chestnut highlights from the sun. Her face had lengthened from round to oval; the tiny perfect baby teeth were now replaced in front, their new whiteness contrasting with her tanned skin. He didn’t remember her long dark eyelashes being so thick, or most of all her eyes, a bright startling green he hardly recognized.
    Meanwhile, not wanting her to feel stared at, he started up the truck and drove it to the turnaround at the machine shed. Where Chrissy’s uncle’s rusting tractor had once been parked was a new riding lawnmower. Carl resisted looking for other changes, kept his eyes resolutely forward as he glided back to the road.
    “Where we going?” Lizzie asked as they turned onto the blacktop. She was leaning back now, totally at ease, her feet propped up on the dashboard, chewing a stick of gum from the package on the dash.
    “See your grandfather, I guess.” That had been his plan. Go into West Gull, get that part over with, his first time back after three years.
    “Too early,” Lizzie said. She pinched her nostrils and made a voice