Last Look Read Online Free PDF

know.
    “Hi, Matt?” The woman’s voice, soft and tentative, played in the quiet room like music. “This is Diane.” Nervous laughter. “I guess you know that.” More laughter. “I…um…just wanted to thank you for last weekend. I had a really good time, and…um…well, I just wanted to thank you again.” Another pause. “I’d like to do it again sometime. You have my number….” The fumbling sound of the phone being returned to its cradle.
    Diane?
    Dorsey didn’t remember having heard about a Diane. Not that her father had to keep her up to date on his social life, but the last Dorsey had heard, he’d been dating a woman named Anna.
    She sat in the overstuffed green chair near the fireplace and sipped the soda. The air was close and warm to the point of being stuffy, and would get warmer as the June sun continued to beat down on the roof. On the mantel a series of photographs paraded left to right, achingly familiar pictures of her mother, Bernadette—Bernie to all—some with Dorsey, some with Matt, the occasional shot of a smiling Bernie alone. The last photo was from their last Christmas, right before Bernie had stepped off the curb in front of the real estate office where she worked and had been struck by a car driven by an eighteen-year-old college freshman home on winter break.
    Dorsey had been nine, old enough to recall every minute that followed a neighbor banging frantically on their front door. She’d heard his breathless speech, watched her father run barefoot out into the snow and down the six blocks to the site of the accident. Dorsey had run, too, but had been stopped by one of her mother’s coworkers far short of the white sheet that lay on the ice-covered street.
    The boy who’d been driving the car stood on the sidewalk ten feet away from Dorsey, sobbing loudly and inconsolably, his face blotched red from the cold and tears. Whenever Dorsey recalled that scene, what she thought of was bone-numbing cold and the tears of a stranger who had changed their lives, and her father yelling at the paramedics to do something,
do
something. The empty feeling of being abandoned would wash through her every time, choking her with the memory of her father scrambling into the ambulance with her mother’s body. He’d never looked back, never given a second thought to Dorsey, who’d stood forgotten and alone in the cold.
    Years later, Dorsey had tried to rationalize, reminding herself that her father had been in deep shock. That maybe he hadn’t known she’d followed him from the house. That he hadn’t been thinking of anything at that moment but hoping to save the life of his wife, even though everyone there knew it was already too late.
    That had been twenty-seven years ago, and her father had never remarried. So, Dorsey reminded herself as she returned to the kitchen, if her dad was dating more than one woman, he’s certainly entitled, and it was certainly none of her business.
    She poured the rest of the soda into the sink and tossed the can into the recycling bin, then called her father’s cell phone again. Still no answer. She left the house the same way she’d entered it and locked the back door.
    “Hey, Dorsey, is that you?” a voice from the next yard called.
    “Hi, Mr. Genzano, how’re you doing?” Dorsey stepped across the stretch of grass that marked the property line to give her father’s elderly next-door neighbor a quick hug.
    “Can’t complain.” Thin, weak arms encircled her and gnarled hands patted her back. Mr. Genzano was eighty-eight that year. Or was it eighty-nine? “No one cares if you do, so what’s the point?”
    “You’re looking well.”
    “I’m looking older than dirt, but nice try, Dorsey.” He beamed. “So, you thought you’d pay a surprise visit to your old man, did you?”
    “And you know it’s a surprise because…?”
    “Because if you’d called ahead of time, you’d have known he was at the beach house.” A bony elbow nudged her ribs.