Sisters of the Road Read Online Free PDF Page B

thought maybe we would go on a trip together—she kept wanting to go back to California where she was from. I’ve never been there. I’ve never been anywhere except to Portland where my dad …” she broke and continued nervously, “Rosalie was always making jokes about the weather here. She used to say she was losing her tan!” Trish giggled. “Isn’t that a riot? She always said things like that.”
    “You say your dad lives in Portland?”
    “No, I mean, he has business there, so we sometimes went down there.” She looked uncomfortable and I let it go. There were a lot of mysteries about Trish and I’d already begun to suspect that there were many things in her life she was lying about. A rip-off artist, a street-wise hooker, that’s what June had said she was. I’d have to be careful. But there was something in Trish I liked and something, too, I felt called upon to protect.
    “Why don’t you just hang out at the shop this afternoon? Well go upstairs and I’ll buy you a book and you can read and do whatever you want and then I’ll take you home to my house for dinner. And we can have a good long talk then.”
    She looked as if she’d been given a present. Or a life raft. “Oh, that would be great!”
    We went upstairs and I bought her Jane Eyre. She might as well start at the beginning.

7
    C AROLE WAS TALKING ON the phone when we came back and waved while continuing her story.
    “So then he asked me was I an arsonist and where had I gotten that blow torch anyway. I was only trying to help, I said, am I supposed to wait for the weather to warm up so I can wash my dishes? I mean, I don’t feel like doing my dishes every day, so when I do feel like it I can’t stand something like the stupid weather and then the stupid landlord saying I can’t.
    “Getting off in a minute,” she mouthed to me, and pointed vigorously at the receiver, to indicate the other person was talking too much.
    Carole had short straight blond hair that stood up surprised above her forehead with one lock that trailed down in a long curl like a question mark behind her left ear. She had eager, slightly empty blue eyes below startled brows and a gaze with the weak intensity of a flashlight turning here and there in a dark room full of strange furniture.
    “Well, I’m not a firebug, if that’s what he thinks,” she announced when she’d hung up the phone and turned to us with her charming, slightly wacky smile.
    “Who, your landlord?” I asked. I always found myself trying to clarify the direct antecedents of Carole’s pronouns.
    “Really! So who’s this?”
    I introduced Trish.
    “I love your sweatshirt,” Carole said warmly. She herself was dressed in a training suit as usual. Besides taking aerobics and self-defense she had lately started running three miles a day and was forever doing stretches in the front office and bounding from one room to the next, singing snatches of Chuck Berry and Cyndi Lauper.
    I wondered once more what it would be like to go to bed with her. Her attitude towards me was eager and flirtatious, not seductive, but vaguely unsettling. She had a way of standing stock-still when I was talking to her, eyes wide, lips parted, quivering slightly like an ardent, but well-trained retriever longing to put her paws on my shoulders and lick my face.
    I was probably just imagining it.
    “Well, back to the grinding board,” Carole said and sprang away to the darkroom, accompanying herself with “Maybelline” (“Why don’t you be true?”).
    Trish watched her leave. “Is it just women who work here?”
    “Mostly,” I said. “There’s one guy, Ray. He’s in Nicaragua now with my sister. She’s my twin.”
    “Wow, does she look like you?”
    “She used to. We seem to get less alike every year. Age, I guess.”
    “You don’t have so many wrinkles though,” Trish said innocently. “Just around your eyes.”
    “Well, I’m only thirty.” I might as well have said one hundred