The Writing on the Wall: A Novel Read Online Free PDF Page B

he enjoyed making. “I need a man’s job,” he would say, making sure he winked. And she wondered if maybe he was onto something there. She knew it was wrong to even think in those terms anymore, but there was something feminine about stripping wallpaper that appealed to her greatly. Not feminine in a girly-girly sense, but something deeper, so she too found what her friends said they found in taking up knitting, mending, or canning. Solace, or something close to it. Being in touch with the old ways and finding in them peace.
    I have wallpaper for comfort, she told herself. Dan has lies.
    Harsh of her, unfair, but it’s how she thought of things now. One second she would be concentrating on the latest, most stubborn piece of wallpaper, the boot of Italy or the north half of Britain, scraping away as if she didn’t have any other concern in life but that—concentrating, squinting, probing—and then suddenly the paper would lift off, and in the brief vacuum before she started on the next piece the thought would jump out at her seemingly from nowhere. My husband is held captive by lies.
    People had different ways to cope with pain, she understood that as well as anyone, and if Dan had decided to pop lies to get him through the months leading up to the trial, then fine, she almost envied him, and in any case they wouldn’t hold him forever, he was too smart for that, he had too much sense. For now, it helped him, words like “duty,” and “honor” and “patriotism,” and the gruffly unctuous types who swarmed around him with those and similar words always on their lips.
    Thinking of him made her feel guilty—she had kept her cell phone off ever since she arrived, and there was no other way he or Jeannie could contact her. Postcards and letters of course, the old ways, and she promised herself to write some when she had time. Her goal was to finish the white velvet half of the hall before the day was over, and by working straight through until dusk she managed everything but a final strip. She gathered up the scraps in her arms, carried them outside to the backyard, started a fire. Each scrap still held a residue of glue, so they burned very fast, and by the time she carried out another armload the first batch was already reduced to ashes.
    It was clear out, less humid. Crickets were noisy in the warmth, frogs croaked out in the meadow, but instead of the owls she had heard the first two nights came the warbly keen of coyotes.
    She walked around to the front of the house to hear better— in the darkness, she almost bumped into the car, the rental car she had parked there the first night and then forgotten. Jeannie had told her about a general store in the village, a library with free Internet, but she was too absorbed in her work to break away, and the thought of meeting anyone, engaging in small talk, did not appeal to her either.
    “Maybe I’ll take a break when I’m halfway done,” she had told Jeannie on the phone when they first made plans. “I’ll drive to some museums or state parks.”
    Even over the phone she could see Jeannie’s eyebrows shoot up. “Museums? Parks? Up there? You’ve got to be kidding!”
    There was enough beauty right there if she wanted it. Jeannie had stocked the pantry with another of her affectionate jokes— the cheap sangria they had pretended to like when they were teenagers. She poured some in her tea mug and brought it outside, laying down on the weeds near the dying remnants of the fire, her head propped against a rusty lawn chair that must have been new in 1960. By staring straight overhead she could make out the summer triangle: Vega, Altair and Cygnet the Swan, its neck pointing north, its wings flapping open toward lesser, fainter stars she didn’t have names for. They shone brighter than they did at home, which surprised her, since she always pictured Eastern skies lit garishly by shopping plazas and malls.
    There were no malls here—the stars, after her second