What Was Mine: & Other Stories Read Online Free PDF Page A

fall asleep. Although it was not a conscious thought, something was wrong—something about the ring bothered her, like a grain of sand in an oyster.
    In time, his breathing changed, and hers did. Calm sleep was now a missed breath—a small sound. They might have been two of the birds she so often thought of, flying separately between cliffs—birds whose movement, which might seem erratic, was always private, and so took them where they wanted to go.

E lizabeth’s next-door neighbors were having a barbecue. Though Elizabeth and Henry had lived in the house since his retirement three years before, they had only once eaten dinner next door, and the neighbors had only once visited them. After Henry’s car accident, the Newcombs had called several times, but when Henry returned from the hospital, they again only silently nodded or waved across the wide expanse of lawn when they caught sight of one another through the scrub pines that separated their property. Mrs. Newcomb was said to be an alcoholic. The boys, though, were beautiful and cheerful. When they were not joking with each other, their expressions became dreamy. The way they wore their hair, and their direct gaze, reminded Elizabeth of Clark Gable. She often saw the boys in Bethel. They were inseparable.
    Though Elizabeth was repotting geraniums, her mind was partly on the boys next door, partly on her daughter, Louisa, who lived in Atlanta and who had had a baby the week before, and partly on Z, who had phoned that morning to say that he would stop by for a visit on the weekend. Her thoughts seemed to jump between those people in time with the slap of the softball into the catcher’s mitt next door. As they tended the barbecue grill, the brothers were tossing a ball back and forth. The air smelled of charred meat.
    The day before, backing out of a parking space next to the market, Elizabeth had hit a trash can and dented the side of Henry’s car. Louisa had not wanted her to come to Atlanta to help out. Z’s fiancée drank a bit too much.
    Elizabeth forced herself to smile so she would cheer up. Wind chimes tinkled and a squirrel ran across a branch, and then Elizabeth’s smile became genuine. It had been a month since Z’s last visit, and she knew he would be enthusiastic about how verdant everything had become.
    Verdant? If a dinosaur had a vocabulary, it might come up with the word “verdant.” She was almost forty-five. Z was twenty-three. After Z’s last visit, Henry had accused her of wanting to be that age. She had gotten a speeding ticket, driving Z’s convertible.
    Henry suspected the extent of her feelings for Z, of course. The attachment was strong—although she and Z never talked about it, privately. She often thought of going to see the remake of Reckless with Z at a matinee in New Haven. They had shared a tub of popcorn and licked butter off each other’s fingers. Another time, they brown-bagged a half-pint of Courvoisier and slugged it down while, on the screen, Paul Newman drove more crazily than Elizabeth would ever dare to drive.
    A few days ago, returning from the train station, Elizabeth had come to an intersection in Weston, and as she came to a stop, Paul Newman pulled up. He went first. Rights of the famous, and of the one who has the newer car. Although convertibles, in this part of the world, were always an exception and went first.
    Next door, the boys had stopped playing ball. One probed the meat, and the other changed the station on the radio. Elizabeth had to strain to hear, but it was what she had initially thought: Janis Joplin, singing “Cry, Baby.”
    The best songs might be the ones that no one could dance to.
    On Saturday, sitting in a lawn chair, Elizabeth started to assign roles to her friends and family. Henry would be emperor … The lawn sprinkler revolved with the quick regularity of a madman pivoting, spraying shots from a machine gun.
    Henry would be Neptune, king of the sea.
    A squirrel ran, stopped, dug for