The Taste of Salt Read Online Free PDF Page B

standing next to Sarah. He couldsmell her. Back home, before he came up north, it was mostly work and sweat, work and sweat. Didn’t have time to notice much else. But sometimes, just for a minute at the end of the day, the air would clear and he could forget about the work for a minute and it would smell sweet, the warmed earth all around him, sometimes the sound of a bird. She smelled like that. Sitting next to her gave him that same feeling of peace. Her hair was pressed with a hot comb, and it smelled a little burned and a little like Ultra Sheen, but he could still smell the sweet earth underneath. When it was time for the girls to leave, she slipped her number into his hand when Elizabeth wasn’t looking, before he could even ask. He didn’t know why she did it like Elizabeth wouldn’t approve. But he liked that, too. That she would give her number to a man in a bar, something a proper girl would never do. He liked that.
    H E DIDN’T WAIT TOO long to call her. He kept thinking about that smile, how it lifted him up. He kept thinking about her mouth. Her hands looked strong, like she used them a lot, taking care of people. She looked like a person who took good care. She had long, elegant fingers and smooth, perfectly shaped nails. He didn’t usually notice a woman’s nails but he noticed hers. Maybe because they made such a beautiful, light contrast to her dark skin.Skin he could imagine pressing his lips to. He was thinking about that as he called her, as they talked, as she agreed to have dinner with him.
    S HE WAS WEARING A light pink dress with a full skirt. It set off her skin beautifully, making it look warm and velvety. The sight of her struck him dumb—it seemed he was being offered everything he’d ever wanted. “Well?” she said, hands on hips, mock-annoyed, when he didn’t even say hello or stick out his hand to shake or anything.
    â€œYou look so beautiful.”
    She laughed. “Now, that’s what a woman likes to hear in the first ten minutes of a date.” She took his hand, unselfconsciously. “Come on.”
    So that’s how it started. They went out to a steak house not far from where they’d met. They talked and talked. Neither of them could believe how easy it was to talk to each other. Neither of them were virgins. But finding someone you could share your mind with wasn’t the same as finding someone you could share your body with. Sarah kept laughing, and after a while, would punctuate what she said with a light touch on his shoulder or his arm. Ray kept having this music feeling about her—the same joy he felt when he was in a club or at a concert and everything was perfect, the music was perfect, freeing something inside of him. He tookher hand after a little while. He told her about the shotgun shack where he was born, in a town near Mobile that was so small that it wasn’t on any maps. About deciding to follow a friend up north to a decent job after his parents died. There was no one left in Alabama for him by that time anyway—he was the last of three and ten years younger than his youngest sister—they were long gone to different cities up north and had left their baby brother behind as surely as they had left behind the red dirt of the South. She listened, fascinated. Then she told her story; it was very different from his. She was the daughter of one of very few black doctors in Chicago—she’d gone to Howard and, after that, decided that she wanted to help people in the same way her father did. He didn’t say anything while she told him all this. But his heart shriveled up a little—why would she keep going out with a man who had barely even finished high school? Who was working on an assembly line just to keep body and soul together. He was alone in the world; she had all the warm cushion that family and money could provide. What did she see when she looked at him?
    But her gaze never