The Widow's Season Read Online Free PDF Page A

unattainable goal her body could never achieve. She thought she had managed the feat when her third baby reached fourteen weeks. Pulling a kitchen chair into the nursery, she had spread the wallpaper border like a celebratory banner. One week more and she was standing on that same chair, scraping at the teddy bears. Curettage, curettage, it sounded like ballet.
    How ironic it all seemed, to have spent so many years tending to her brain, memorizing the required facts, polishing her sentence structure, believing that if she were smart enough her life would culminate in some glorious fulfillment. And then to be betrayed by the lesser parts of her body, to fail in a task mastered by the most brainless of women, by drug addicts and child abusers and the dithering cheerleaders from high school. In the end, they had all outdone her.
    Now, as she looked at her enormous house, with its latticework and porch swing and white-pine rockers, she knew what any stranger would assume—that nothing could be wrong in a place like this, a structure so symmetrical, so clean and creamy. No one would guess that behind those walls each empty room represented an unrealized life, each window a gaping frame for an absent child who should have been waving to her at this moment. She could sometimes hear their voices in the upstairs bedrooms—the crying of an infant, the babbling of toddlers. “The pipes are noisy,” David would say. “The wind whistles on the tin roof.” But Sarah had assigned faces to every sound.
    With David gone, she had sealed off the upstairs, shutting the heat vents, closing the doors, and huddling in her bedroom with real estate guides, wondering if she should find a house with less space to heat, less grass to mow. All around her, life was shrinking into something small and hard, a shell into which she was retracting, newly invertebrate.
    Sarah gathered her letters from the mailbox and inspected the return addresses as she walked along the driveway. Bills, credit-card applications, and three more notes of sympathy; they kept trickling in from distant acquaintances around the country. She walked up the porch steps and over to the door, reaching into her purse for her key, but the knob turned in her hand. She would have to be more careful about using the lock.
    Leaving the mail on the hall table, she walked into the kitchen and put her pocketbook on a chair. Grace, her Persian, soft and gray as a pile of ashes, curled around Sarah’s legs as she opened the refrigerator. “Hungry, my love?” She pulled Grace into her arms and rubbed her nose behind the cat’s ear. The refrigerator’s depleted shelves reminded her of her abandoned shopping cart at the Food Lion. By now some resentful bagger would have reshelved her lin guine and oranges, her Cabernet and Zinfandel and Australian Shiraz. She took out a leftover bowl of tuna salad and placed it on the floor for Grace, then removed a half-empty bottle of Chardonnay. Taking a glass from the cupboard, she stepped out onto the patio and sat at the wrought-iron table.
    The yard was in its last gasp of autumn glory. A row of thick, burning bushes that separated her property from the neighbor’s privacy fence had turned a deep ruby red. This was the only time of the year when those bushes distinguished themselves. Her other shrubs were spring and summer bloomers—rose of Sharon, crepe myrtle, pink and white azaleas, all framed with ten inches of grass.
    She would have to learn how to use the Weedwacker. And the staple gun, the chain saw, the blowtorch. Despite all her talk of feminism, she had never changed a tire, never checked her antifreeze, or even lit a pilot light. There had never been a need; David had handled all the “men’s work.” The one time she had tried to use the Weedwacker, yanking at its starter cord a dozen times and yielding nothing more than a guttural cough, David had come outside and lifted the handle from her fingers. “It’s all right. I can do it.”