The Probable Future Read Online Free PDF Page B

fight. They had sunk so low that Jenny had flung a glass of milk at Will after finding a woman’s phone number in his jacket pocket. He’d responded by smashing her favorite platter on the floor. They’d stopped to look at each other then, panting, surrounded by broken crockery and white puddles of milk. Then and there, they knew the marriage was over.
    Will had packed up that night. He’d gone off, even though Stella had tried her best to hold him back. She’d begged him to stay, and when he wouldn’t, she ran to the window to watch as he waited for a cab.
    “He won’t go,” Stella had whispered hopefully, but hope fadedwhen the taxi pulled up. When it was clear Will was leaving, as it should have been for several years, Stella turned on Jenny. “Call him back.” Stella’s voice was perilously high. “Don’t let him go!”
    But Will was already gone, and he had been for ages. Jenny thought about the day when she saw him on the lawn; his dream had been her first taste of desire. But no matter how many nights they had spent together since, she had never again been granted access to his dreams. She was quick to pick up her landlady’s dreams, and the dreams of her neighbors; such things came to her unbidden, eclipsing what dreams she might have had on her own. There were the overheated sex dreams of the young man on the first floor, so feverish, Jenny had trouble looking him in the eye when they met by chance at the incinerator. There were the cool, spare dreams of the old woman at the end of the hall, images of Nile-blue landscapes from half a century earlier that always refreshed Jenny, even when she’d been standing on her feet at work all day. Walking through the Boston Common, she’d been privy to bits and pieces of the dreams of homeless men who dozed on the benches, dreams of warm woolen coats and turkey dinners, dreams of everything these men had lost, and everything that had been stolen from them, and all that they’d thrown away.
    And, yet, with her own husband, there was only emptiness, the blank space of an individual who could fall into slumber without a single thought, without a care in the world. Dreams as empty as Marlborough Street after he’d gotten into the cab on the evening he left, dark as the brown twilight of Boston that always fell so quickly, like a curtain drawn across window glass.
    “I hate you,” Stella had said that night. She’d gone into her room and closed the door and it had been that way ever since, much like the closed doors of Jenny’s childhood, only in reverse. Her mother then, her daughter now. Even today, on her birthday, Stella didn’t want Jenny near.
    “Do you mind if I get dressed, or do you have to watch me dothat, too?” Stella had her hands on her hips, as though she were speaking to an intrusive maid who couldn’t follow instructions, a poor fool she had to put up with until the day when she was finally all grown up and free.
    Jenny went into the kitchen, where she fixed herself a cup of coffee, then warmed a corn muffin for Stella. Jenny was of the belief that breakfast was the most important meal of the day, no matter what Stella might say.
    “I’m just fixing you a bite,” Jenny called when she heard Stella moving about in the hallway. “Just to keep your energy up.”
    Jenny grabbed the muffin and a tall glass of orange juice; she started for the living room, but when she reached the doorway, she stopped at the threshold. Stella had been rummaging through the hall closet, searching for her black boots, but she’d found something else instead. Now she sat cross-legged on the floor examining the box that had arrived from Unity. A very bad start to an enormously untrustworthy day.
    Jenny had thought she’d hidden the gift well, fitting the large packing crate neatly behind the jackets and coats. She had assumed there’d be no reason for Stella to look in the closet before Jenny found the opportunity to get rid of this birthday present, the way