Songs Without Words Read Online Free PDF Page B

sat on the curb in front of her car and talked for forty-five minutes while her peach sorbet melted and her free-range chicken got busy welcoming colonies of bacteria.
    And he was so interested in her! And he thought her lampshades sounded so cool! They met for coffee a few days later, and for lunch a week after that, and then for sex every Monday noon and Wednesday evening for the next thirteen and a half months.
    And then they didn’t. Now they didn’t. It was coming, the anniversary of their breakup. She longed to be someone who could face such a thing with equanimity, who would not joke to her friends, as she had been doing, relentlessly, that when the day came she would mark it somehow: by lighting a candle, calling him, slitting her wrists.
    Enough, she thought. Enough.
    She was driving. The sky was the intense blue of early autumn, and there were pumpkins on porches—pumpkins already. Halloween was around the corner, and all at once the entire holiday season loomed up on the bare calendar in her mind like a group of massive fortresses coming into view on an otherwise empty horizon.
    It came back then, the girl and the woman. Walking in the mist. They were walking
toward
an empty horizon: a horizon that was all mist. She saw them clearly: the girl and the woman walking, and the girl looking up but not speaking, not speaking, never speaking.

3
    B rody worked at a company called Oiron, where he was VP of business development; he’d been on board almost since the beginning, moving from one position to another as the company went public and grew to its current size of five hundred employees spread over three continents. The best-selling product was Parapet, a comprehensive Wi-Fi security system; Oiron was the name of a fortress in France.
    It was Friday now, the end of a long week. Brody was in front of his terminal, triaging the afternoon’s e-mails and thinking about tonight, when he and Liz were taking the kids to his favorite restaurant in North Beach, a tiny, crowded place where you could almost taste the garlic from the sidewalk, and the waiters jostled your chair as they passed behind you, and the only difficult moment you could possibly have was choosing from among the twenty-seven different pastas on the menu. He’d discovered it his first year in California; he and a bunch of guys from work had landed there by accident one Saturday night, and his whole concept of Italian food had changed in an instant. He was looking forward to a plate of fettuccine Genovese, the kind with thin slices of potato mixed in with the noodles.
    “Dude.”
    He looked up and saw Mike Patterson standing in his doorway. Mike was big, maybe six feet five, with thick shoulders and arms—high school football, Brody was pretty sure. Mike was in marketing, where Brody himself had been for years; Brody’d been in on the hire, in fact. Mike was a good guy. Brody and Liz had done dinner out with him and his wife several times.
    “Who are you duding, dude?” Brody said.
    Mike grinned as he came into Brody’s office. “My brother put his foot down when his kids started calling their mother dude.”
    “Joe does that,” Brody said. “‘Mom, dude, will you make some brownies?’”
    “And Liz?”
    “Liz just laughs. You know how she is.”
    Mike had stopped at Brody’s bookcase and was looking at the tennis ball Brody kept on a stand there, a wild shot off Andre Agassi’s racquet during a practice session Brody’d happened by at the U.S. Open one year. Mike said, “I’m still shocked you stole this.”
    “‘Kept it,’” Brody said. “I ‘kept’ it.”
    “Sure you did, pal. So are you coming?”
    “Where would that be?”
    Mike mimed drinking something, and Brody looked at his watch: late on Friday afternoons the helium balloon that was Oiron’s usual corporate urgency started making its way to the floor, and to cushion the landing there was generally a beer bash in the cafeteria. “Whoa,” he said, “it’s later