Juliet in August Read Online Free PDF

get home, Lee disappoints Cracker and walks toward the house, weary and ready for at least a few good hours of sleep.
    â€œSorry, pooch,” he says. “If you want more excitement, you’re go-ing to have to find it on your own.”
    Cracker obliges and heads across the yard, and as Lee is about to step into the porch he hears him barking at something near the barn. Lee hopes it’s not another porcupine. The dog is fearless when it comes to porcupines, and having had a nose full of quills on more than one occasion has not deterred him.
    In the kitchen, Lee gets himself a glass of water and his eye lands on the silver tea service behind the glass doors of Astrid’s oak cabinet. It’s looking tarnished and he doesn’t know what to do about it. His wrinkled shirt, spots on the water glass in his hand, rings of blackened grease around the burners on the stove. To Lee, these are domestic mysteries. So too is the stack of mail on the counter by the phone, solicitations from credit card companies and charities and politicians. Astrid always knew which envelopes could be recycled without being opened. Lee lets them pile up until there’s no more room and then he burns the whole works. There was a phone message from Mrs. Bulin at the post office earlier in the day: “Give me a call, Lee. There’s something I need to discuss with you.” Maybe he’d burned a letter that he shouldn’t have, the yearly bill for his mailbox perhaps. He’d erased Mrs. Bulin’s message without writing down her number. He dislikes her. She knows too much, sees his mail every day, and he’s sure that she takes note of exactly where it’s coming from. He’s annoyed that she called him at home. She can easily catch him in the post office if she needs to talk to him.
    Lee places his glass in the sink, turns out the kitchen light, climbs the stairs, and lies on his bed without undressing.
    The dog is still barking. Not from the direction of the barn, but right under Lee’s window. The hoofbeats start up again, only now they’re close by and clear, and not the distant muffled beats of his restless imagination. Lee gets up to look out the window, and in the moonlight he sees a gray horse loping in a wide circle in the yard below, his head high, a lead shank trailing from his halter. Lee recognizes the fine, dished face and arching tail of an Arabian. Cracker is sitting at the edge of the circle, watching. His head moves with the arc of the horse’s path. The horse lopes a few times around in one direction, then stops, reverses, and goes the other way, trotting a few steps and then breaking into a lope again.
    Lee calls down from the open window. “Yo, Cracker,” he says.
    The dog looks up at him and whines, then turns his attention back to the horse. He looks puzzled, like he doesn’t know what to think of this four-legged stranger. The horse stops momentarily at the sound of Lee’s voice, then resumes circling.
    By the time Lee gets outside, pulling on a light jacket now that the air has finally cooled, the gray horse is casually grazing in the moonlight on Astrid’s now overgrown lawn. Lee approaches the horse’s shoulder, talking softly, picks up the lead, and gives him a rub along the crest of his neck. He notes that the horse is a gelding, and assumes from the combination of brown flecks in his coat and faded dapples on his rump that he’s in between young and old. He’s well fed, free of scars. His feet are trimmed. Lee can’t imagine that this horse came to be here the same way that Cracker did. Someone will be looking for this horse.
    â€œYou’re a handsome devil,” he says. “Where did you come from?”
    Cracker watches with interest, waiting for direction from Lee as to how he should proceed. The horse continues to graze, paying not much attention at all to either Lee or the dog, even as Lee runs his hands down a front