People in Trouble Read Online Free PDF Page A

easily.
     
    "Listen," Molly said.   "You do not have a maternal relationship to me.
     
    I'm your lover.   I'm just younger.   But you don't take care of me, so don't pretend that you do."
     
    When Molly spoke to her that way, Kate didn't want to listen.
     
    She heard the challenge, imagined the reason and knew enough to let it go at that.   It didn't mean that her feelings never changed.
     
    They did, but not because Molly said they should.   So the tensions continued, slightly under the surface.   This one was resolved some months later in an afternoon when they were ready for love.
     
    "Kate, take my earrings out for me, will you?   I don't feel like doing it for myself."
     
    Kate felt the silver slide through Molly's ear, casting shapes on her neck like Indonesian shadow puppets.   Then the pieces of metal were lying still in her palm.   Kate surprised herself by thinking, How could two women ever be closer than this?   Later she realized it wasn't so much a sudden closeness but that she had grown to love Molly.   She hadn't loved her at first, but she did now.
     
    "What are you thinking about?"   Molly asked.
     
    "Thinking about you."
     
    "What about?"
     
    "That you are becoming more real to me."
     
    "Good," Molly said, holding her, holding her head against Kate's chest, so girly and soft.   "Now I don't have to be your child anymore.   From now on I'll be your mistress."
     
    It didn't feel like a threat.
     
    All summer, every single person had been uncomfortable.   It was not unusual for the city to smell of baking garbage and decomposing bodies.
     
    But most New Yorkers found a point each season when they begrudgingly accepted the heat.   They no longer tried to defy it.   They picked out the air-conditioned subway cars, knew which banks to stop in to cool off between the subway and work.
     
    They slowed down their pace of accomplishment in order to accommodate it.   But this summer had been different.   There had been a suffocating brutality that seemed brand-new.   It was the absolute lack of relief that put each person into a private state of wondering if it would ever get cool again.   This year Peter noticed that the air had stayed so warm there was a creeping sensation of melting polar ice caps and a lot of speculation about the greenhouse effect as seasons came to an end as a concept.
     
    Peter was past forty and intended to live as long as possible.
     
    He took care of his body, but more importantly, he had developed an approach, a way of facing the world that left him enough room to breathe.   He never scheduled one event on top of another, so there was always extra time to do new things on a whim, like run that strip of land along the Hudson River where developers were demolishing the piers.
     
    It is so important to have flat, open space by the waterfront, he thought, inhaling the salt.   It was the only place a man could go to get between the city and the sea.
     
    All along the route someone had spray-painted the word Justice inside stencils of pink triangles.   He wondered if that was just another rock band, but then got lost in the feeling of the open city over his left shoulder and the sea breeze on his right.
     
    He was having a good run until the air between him and water started to get more complicated and cluttered with the beginnings of various constructions.   There were ditches, then pipes and strips of metal until, surprisingly, there was no more water at all.   Instead he came upon an incongruous addition to the island of Manhattan.   It was stuck on like some clumsy extension or unsightly tumor that had grown where the borough was once sleek and symmetrical.
     
    The sign said: Welcome to Downtown City Ronald Home, Developer Then he remembered from his newspaper reading that this was created land.   It was invented real estate.   He had recently skimmed an article about this in The New York Times business section.   Manhattan was running out of