Lark and Termite Read Online Free PDF

third-floor porch off her room. Even in black and white, her dark red hair looks red, and her eyes look blue, the pretty lines at the corners a little deeper. She rests one hand on her rounded belly, her smile languid and sweet, like she’s about to pour him a glass of that minted tea she spikes with a little rum. This morning when the platoon hurriedly pulled out, the new replacements stumbling and nervous, Leavitt missed the carefully flattened cigarette pack and Lola’s picture. Losing it was bad luck. On the back she’d written Seven months along. He will be hearing any day. It could be happening. It might have started . She’d knocked off the juice, she said, and even the cigarettes, could he believe it? She still sang weekends, sitting primly draped behind the piano in the silk kimono he’d sent her from Tokyo. At the end of the set she’d slip it off and stand up in a dress cut simple as any Mrs. Brown’s jumper, but black and sequined, clinging tight across her breasts and swollen front, and her shape inspired wild applause. That was Lola, never who you thought she was, inspiring hordes of boys to whom she was off-limits. Why had she let him upstairs that night, years after she said she’d stopped with men—she had her girls to love her and packed roomfuls of boys to fend off. Something about the quality of your attention, she told him, and the fact you’re a solid musician. Two flights of narrow stairwell to her room, each dim landing a turn farther into silence, until they might have been stepping into space.
    Louisville was hopping now, she said, full of green Fort Knox recruits and basic-hardened boys hot to knock hell out of this tiny little war. Enough, she wanted to leave as soon as he got back. Florida, she’d written him, Coral Gables. She’d picked the town based on the name alone and the fact it bordered the sea. They’d buy a cottage first, then something bigger. Run a little tourist home, she’d said in her letters, a guesthouse. There were always vacationers on budgets and big-city tourists tired of the cold. She was saving all she could. I can be respectable, if I’m not run out of town for corrupting a minor. He’s no minor. He was twenty-one when they married; she was twenty-nine. Jesus, she was wild about him, with a hunger like a man’s. He’s glad about the baby; he’s put his mark on her, held his territory until he can get back and claim her. He thinks about her with other men, in a past before he knew her, and blocks images out of his mind. He never asked how she smoothed arrangements with a character like Onslow. Lola has a past and a kid, a daughter who lives with her older sister in West Virginia. The sister manages a restaurant, pays a mortgage on her own house. Noreen was the strong one, Lola said, and nobody’s fool. It was better. Leavitt imagines an ultra-respectable schoolmarm type, kindly enough to raise Lola’s daughter while she disapproves of singers and bars and military towns, disapproves of Lola, no doubt. Lola sends money every month and keeps a picture tucked into her mirror: a school picture the size of a big postage stamp. Skinny kid, serious and pale, like Lola without the auburn hair and smatter of freckles across her cheekbones. Lola wouldn’t say her daughter’s name, even to him. I gave her a bird’s name. Maybe she’ll grow up safe and fly away. There were other small pictures clipped together in her drawer, one each year since the daughter was three and went to live with the aunt. Lola never showed him, never looked at them, only kept the newest one where she saw it every time she looked at herself.
    When he asked about the kid’s father, Lola was silent. But who the hell was he, had she loved him like this, like them, their room, their bed? God no. He was a sleepy sort, she’d had to walk him through it like a brother. Served his purpose and back where he came from, good riddance. “Ah, you mountain folk,” Leavitt said and touched her,