The Evening Star Read Online Free PDF

the grandchildren.
    Yet she did summon them, but it brought her no smiles from Hector, when a few smiles from Hector was all she really hoped for.
    “Why won’t men smile when you want them to?” she asked Rosie. “Almost inevitably, they fail to smile just when one wants them to most.”
    Rosie was still hanging on Tom Brokaw’s every word, although now he was talking about something called the European community, a topic that didn’t interest her much.
    “Speak for yourself,” she said. “Mine’s got the opposite problem. All C.C. can think of to do is grin. If C.C.’s grinned at me once he’s grinned at me a million times.”
    “I have noticed that C.C. seems to have difficulty getting his mouth over his teeth,” Aurora said. “I suppose it would get old, being confronted with nothing but teeth, day after day.”
    “I keep pointing out to him that there’s ways to have fun in this life that don’t involve grinning,” Rosie said, getting up to inspect the gumbo. “You want some more tea?”
    Aurora’s mind was on the General. He was up there, as he always was, waiting for her to appear and entertain him. The likelihood of his being in a decent mood was very slim. In the hour before dinner he seemed to feel his age the most.
    “At least I don’t feed him off a tray,” Aurora said.
    A table had been moved to the patio with a tablecloth, place settings, candles. There were some things she wouldn’t give up. She herself did not intend to eat off trays, nor would Hector, even though it meant a lot of carrying for herself and Rosie.
    The phone rang, and Rosie took it. She listened a moment, looked at Aurora, shrugged.
    “Honey, stop that boo-hooing and get on over here,” she said. “I’ll take care of Bruce, if he shows up before you do. I’ll make him wish he was someplace nice, like in jail, before I’m through with him.”
    She listened a bit more.

    “We’re having gumbo,” she said. “Don’t run no red lights on your way over, either. That little one don’t need to be in any car wrecks.”
    “That was Melly,” she said when she hung up. “Bruce has been hassling her agin.”
    “I couldn’t have guessed,” Aurora said.

4
    When the evening news ended, Aurora rinsed her teacup and forced herself to go upstairs and change. She was urged on by Rosie, who flogged her with platitudes whenever her spirits sunk to threatening depths.
    Rosie considered that her floggings were mostly delivered out of self-interest: when Aurora’s spirits sank they often carried her own to the bottom with them. Aurora’s invariably floated back to the surface sooner or later, whereas her own were apt to dwell on the bottom for days.
    “Life has to go on,” she commented, as Aurora was rinsing her cup.
    “It seems to go on, but that doesn’t mean my mood has to accompany it,” Aurora said. “I wish I hadn’t invited Pascal to come by for dessert—now I’m not in the mood for him.”
    “It don’t take a Frenchman long to eat dessert,” Rosie said.
    “No, but it takes this Frenchman a long time to pay court,” Aurora said. “I wish Trevor hadn’t died. Trevor always favored the shortest distance between two points, and there were only two points that interested him, where human beings were concerned.”

    “Which two?” Rosie asked. Besides being interested in whether Aurora and the General still had a sex life, she was also curious about the sexual behavior of Aurora’s former boyfriends.
    “Which two would you suppose?” Aurora asked. “You should have been named Nosie, not Rosie.”
    “You didn’t answer my question,” Rosie pointed out.
    “The male point and the female point,” Aurora said, heading upstairs. Trevor had been a yachtsman—he was very old school. After forty years of yachting he had choked on a bite of lobster while dining with his eighteen-year-old girlfriend at a restaurant in New York. Aurora had almost married him once; sometimes she found herself wondering