The Other Widow Read Online Free PDF

a square of brown eye shadow and runs it over the few gray hairs near her part line. Samuel, Lily—they’re her life. The humdrum moments, the husband in a ripped T-shirt, the daughter laughing on a phone, the messy bedrooms and flat tires, the ordinary, everyday events that singly are forgettable but strung together constitute a life—these things she’s gambled she will fight to keep with everything she’s got.
    By the time she starts her car, the day has grown still darker and more ominous. Dorrie turns off the expressway and glances at the GPS. The clouds dip suddenly, closer to the ground, like cheesy props in a play. Beside the highway, pale buildings hunch together in the cold, the faded brick, the mix of old and new. Naked trees lean forward toward her car, and she speeds up. Their branches look like bones. Dorrie almost never goes to funerals. They bring back her mother’s death, her wrecked and ruined car on the six o’clock news, a can of peas rolling down the street, and a size-six shoe at the side of a snowy road. Her mother’s funeral, too, was on a freezing winter day. Standing at the cemetery, Dorrie held her father’s hand and watched her mother’s ghost perched on the hood of the Kellys’ old Pontiac in a sleeveless summer dress that billowed out around her in the February cold. Mom! Dorrie started to say. You came back, but her mother only touched her finger to her lips and smiled before she floated off and disappeared into the sky.
    The church is crowded, stuffy with bodies and heat. Dorrie stands in the doorway for a minute, lost in the ambience of incense, flowers, and ancient stained glass, dull and unbright in the sunless day, the muffled, shuffling sounds of heavy coats and boots.
    She slides in beside Jeananne and the others from work who sit in a rigid little clump in a back pew. Joe’s longtime partner, Edward, stands in front beside Karen, the two sons, the daughter-in-law, his family Dorrie doesn’t want to see, the one that contradicts everything Joe was to her. The priest drones on, the service hums and buzzes in the air, the day grows darker through the colored glass, and Dorrie closes her eyes, hears herself in some amorphous hotel room. I feel so free when I’m with you.
    The procession wends its way to the Mount Feake Cemetery, passes between two stone walls that edge the entrance. The wind blows hard off the river, scrapes across the naked trees, the crusty snow. Dorrie parks at the outer fringe of cars and stares through the windshield as tiny shards of ice begin to fall.
    Her phone beeps. A new message. She reaches over to play it back, noticing the caller comes up as unknown. She panics, pushes at the button, hoping nothing has gone wrong on Lily’s ski trip—impassable roads, difficult, dangerous slopes.
    But it isn’t Lily. “ Luck ,” she hears, and, “ yours .” The voice is shrill, tinny, neither male nor female. Not human. Goose bumps stand out on Dorrie’s arms. The two words hang in the front seat. She plays it again, and in the silence of the car, the voice is harsh and personal, as if the speaker is right there beside her; the eerie voice scratches at her brain. “ Everybody’s luck runs out, ” it says. “ Next time it might be yours. ” She plays it one last time, listens as it rips through her and steals her breath, a cold, cruel hand around her throat. It could be anyone. It could be someone at the grave or sitting in a parked car only feet away, or standing in a clump of mourners, watching her. Observing her. She looks around through windows fogged with cold. She stares at a plot of trees behind her car and a shiver runs along her spine.
    Was this about the other night—that she was lucky, then, to get away, but next time she might not be? Was this a threat? Her hands shake. Her teeth chatter. She blasts the heater, but she can’t get warm. She opens the car