The Color of Water in July

The Color of Water in July Read Online Free PDF

Book: The Color of Water in July Read Online Free PDF
Author: Nora Carroll
dense wall of green that blocked out the light. For a while, they continued their task in silence. Jess and Mamie each sat perched on either side of the bed, ankles crossed neatly, folding pillowcases in the same precise way, and then stacking them between them on the chenille bedspread. “Miss Mamie,” she said finally, “you know the other cottage down around the other side of the Tretheway woods out toward Loeb Point . . . Any idea who lives there?”
    Mamie laid down the pillowcase she was folding and smoothed it several times before she answered. She prided herself on knowing all the goings-on around Pine Lake. Of course, nowadays, there were lots more condos and time-shares—people up from downstate—weekenders. Those people just didn’t count, didn’t mean anything, were basically invisible to the “real” summer people, ones like Mamie, who had spent a lifetime of summers along the piney shores.
    “The Painter family,” Mamie said firmly with a hint of distaste. “Not our kind of people.”
    Jess, in her mind’s eye, could see the boy in the red swim trunks paddling off toward the point in the red canoe.

CHAPTER FIVE
    M AMIE
    When I first visited Coventry Manor, three years ago, I was wearing my little mink jacket. It was a cool, bright Texas day. I had planned my first visit for January, when the weather is chilly, because I tend to think that there is no occasion that can’t be improved by dressing in mink.
    At the time, I was in quite good condition, except for my palpitations, and had dressed with care for the visit. I wanted everyone to know that I, Mrs. Mamie Tretheway Cleves, had choices about how I would square things away.
    The thick plate-glass front doors of Coventry Manor swoosh open as you walk through them. Inside, there are marble floors and various sitting rooms, furnished with Queen Anne–style mahogany chairs and stiff little velvet settees. I was going to move there before I needed to, before I became a burden to Margaret, when I could still install myself with pleasure into my new little home. Then, I knew how it went after that. At Coventry Manor, they would move you upward, closer and closer to the uniformed nurses and the motorized hospital beds. Up and up, closer and closer to heaven.
    Margaret, bless her heart, came all the way from London to help me move in, but I was the one who arranged the furniture and placed the cutlery neatly into the sideboard drawers. I had only lived in an apartment once before in my life, and oh, the pleasure of it. Not more than five steps to anywhere. I reveled in all the clean, gleaming surfaces, and in the order; no more than needed and no less, yet still pretty and pleasing to the eye.
    One of Margaret’s greatest failings, if I may say so, is in her housekeeping. That girl was positively piggish, right from the start, shoelaces untied, ribbons falling out of her hair, leaving her things in a tossed-off trail behind her, here a school paper, there a sock, and a few steps later, a shoe. It was just like that when she came to help me move into Coventry Manor. She sat on a sofa in the middle of the room, feet up leaving marks on the coffee table, saying to me in that ridiculous drawl of hers, “Now, Mother, you shouldn’t be straining yourself.”
    I was grateful, though, to have an opportunity to talk to Margaret about the cottage.
    “About Journey’s End,” I said to Margaret the second afternoon she was there. Margaret was sitting on my good green-brocade sofa, holding her cigarette so as to balance the long ash that was sticking out the end. I was anxiously eyeing the sofa, wondering if it would be ruined and whether my upholstery man was still in business or had already retired.
    Margaret looked at me blankly, a look that I knew well, a look that she had perfected as a child. Margaret looked right at me, and she said, sweet as can be: “Journey’s End . . . What in the hell is that?”
    It wasn’t her incessant cursing. I had long
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