Orchids and Stone Read Online Free PDF Page A

like to talk to an officer.”
    Daphne yanked the fridge door open, pulled out a leftover casserole, and set it down hard on the ceramic counter, wincing as she clinked the glass dish. She scooped two lumps of casserole onto a plate while he talked to the dispatcher.
    “I could have done that,” Daphne said when he hung up. She set their single heaping plate in the microwave and punched a button. “I should have done that. Is that just a weather service thing, making a call?” He’d often said that for all his evaluating and predicting climate patterns, at the end of the shift, meteorologists merely made a few phone calls and sent e-mails to tell people what the weather might be. He didn’t control the storms, the fronts, the wind.
    “Doesn’t matter,” he said, folding tote bags and tucking them into the space between the fridge and cupboards. “Coffee? Wine? Anything?”
    They settled on cider, making a fuss of warming it on the stove, adding a cinnamon stick and cloves. She didn’t want alcohol before talking to the police and didn’t want caffeine, lest she couldn’t sleep when alone tonight.
    “Just us on a Wednesday evening,” Daphne said, as they shared the plate of noodles and veggies under cheese. Wednesday nights without kids didn’t happen, according to the custody schedule.
    “You know Jed and Josie are here this weekend?” Vic said.
    “Yeah, I know. We’ll stay home.”
    The previous weekend, Vic’s ex wanted the kids, though it was Vic’s turn. He’d agreed rather than fight, but the swap meant they’d have the kids this weekend. Daphne had scheduled Thursday afternoon and all of Friday off for this week, in hope of escaping her mother’s annual tears. A long weekend getaway with Vic wasn’t going to happen now.
    “Daph, I have an all-day training thing Friday. We wouldn’t have been able to run off Thursday afternoon anyway. And I’d have never guessed you’d want to be out of town this, of all weekends.”
    “When I asked for the time off last month, I didn’t know you’d be on day shift this Friday,” she said. They’d had this conversation two other times. She was glad he didn’t say again: And what about your mother? “But I still get to sigh over not going away for the weekend, don’t I?”
    “Sure. Sigh away. You get to wish for whatever you want. Me, too. I wish for you to be happy.” He pulled his chair closer to Daphne’s and slid his arm around her. “Are you up for watching Josie play tomorrow? It’s a home game.”
    Getting out of his hug, Daphne wondered if Cassandra would be at Jed’s soccer game or Josie’s volleyball match. Vic alternated between the kids’ events, scrupulously fair, and this time was Jed’s turn for Vic to attend.

    When a police officer knocked on their door, Daphne hesitated, cloaked in the memory of police coming to her parents’ home on spring break her senior year of college. That morning, Daphne was barely awake, going for orange juice. When the knock came, her mother had dropped a coffee cup—her father’s coffee cup—then crunched over the broken bits of ceramic to open the unlocked door. The Mayfields were door-lockers, and Daphne had assumed her father was upstairs, on his way down to see what had broken and who was at the door. Though she’d missed the first hints that her mother had already known something was wrong, she absorbed her mother’s dreading demeanor as the door was opened and they listened to news that her father had been found in a motel room and he had left a note. It became the day she learned why a family man would go to a hotel room in the city where he lived, a reason less common than dirt and more painful than infidelity.
    The officer at Vic’s door was of average build but looked stocky under his uniform and gear. He held a notebook but wrote nothing down while Daphne gave a halting account of being accosted in the park. When she was unable to give a detailed description of the two women, the