Tiny Little Thing Read Online Free PDF

around his doggy shoulders. Frank, still whistling, slips on his deck shoes and slides his belt through its loops.
    Don’t settle for less than the best, darling
,
my mother used to tell me, swishing her afternoon drink around the glass, and I haven’t, have I? Settled for less, that is. Frank’s the best there is. Just look at him. Aren’t I fortunate that my husband stays trim like that, when so many husbands let themselves go? When so many husbands allow their marital contentment to expand like round, firm balloons into their bellies. But Frank stays active. He walks to his office every day; he sails and swims and golfs and plays all the right sports, the ones with racquets. He has a tennis player’s body, five foot eleven without shoes, lean and efficient, nearly convex from hip bone to hip bone. A thing to watch, when he’s out on the court. Or in the swimming pool, for that matter, the one tucked discreetly in the crook of the Big House’s elbow, out of sight from both driveway and beach.
    He shuts the wardrobe door and turns to me. “Are you sure you won’t come out on the water?”
    “No, thanks. You go on ahead.” I rise from the rug and roll Percy’s silky ear around my fingers.
    On his way to the door, Frank pauses to drop another kiss on my cheek, and for some reason—related perhaps to the photograph sitting in my drawer, related perhaps to the key in Frank’s suitcase, related perhaps to my sister or his grandmother or our lost baby or God knows—I clutch at the hand Frank places on my shoulder.
    He tilts his head. “Everything all right, darling?”
    There is no possibility, no universe existing in which I could tell him the truth. At my side, Percy lowers himself to the floor and thumps his tail against the rug, staring at the two of us as if a miraculous biscuit might drop from someone’s fingers at any moment.
    I finger my pearls and smile serenely. “Perfectly fine, Frank. Drinks at six. Don’t forget.”
    The smile Frank returns me is white and sure and minty fresh. He picks up my other hand and kisses it.
    “As if I could.”

Caspian, 1964
    H e avoided Boylan’s the next day, and the next. On the third day, he arrived at nine thirty, ordered coffee, and left at nine forty-five, feeling sick. He spent the day photographing bums near Long Wharf, and in the evening he picked up a girl at a bar and went back to her place in Charlestown. She poured them both shots of Jägermeister and unbuttoned his shirt. Outside the window, a neon sign flashed pink and blue on his skin. “Wow. Is that a scar?” she said, touching his shoulder, and he looked down at her false eyelashes, her smudged lips, her breasts sagging casually out of her brassiere, and he set down the glass untouched and walked out of the apartment.
    He was no saint, God knew. But he wasn’t going to screw a girl in cold blood, not right there in the middle of peacetime Boston.
    On the fourth day, he visited his grandmother in Brookline, in her handsome brick house that smelled of lilies and polish.
    “It’s about time.” She offered him a thin-skinned cheek. “Have you eaten breakfast?”
    “A while ago.” He kissed her and walked to the window. The street outside was lined with quiet trees and sunshine. It was the last day of the heat wave, so the weatherman said, and the last day was always the worst. The warmth shimmered upward from the pavement to wilt the new green leaves. A sleek black Cadillac cruised past, but his grandmother’s sash windows were so well made he didn’t even hear it. Or maybe his hearing was going. Too much noise.
    “You and your early hours. I suppose you learned that in the army.”
    “I was always an early riser, Granny.” He turned to her. She sat in her usual chintz chair near the bookcase, powdered and immaculate in a flamingo-colored dress that matched the flowers in the upholstery behind her.
    “That’s your father’s blood, I suppose. Your mother always slept until