Honeydew: Stories by Edith Pearlman

head so violently that her glasses flew off—very smart narrow ones, she hoped they hadn’t broken—and her hair shook too, hair that had once been the color of an autumn maple leaf but had now faded to wood shavings. Here and there her expert hairdresser had striped it with the old maple color. “Wise,” Chris repeated, with one of his rare smiles. “Worldly.”
    Did he mean old? She sucked in her stomach, and her bosom swelled slightly. She was wearing a V-necked jersey blouse. It had captivated a number of elderly suitors, but paired with these jeans she’d bought yesterday, it probably looked ridiculous. When Chris had first seen the blouse, he turned his face briefly away…Did he think she was too noticeably available? She was still interested in men at seventy-two; perhaps that offended him.
    “And warm,” he finished, pulled by alliteration. “Can I have you?”
    “Oh, good Lord.” And she produced an exaggerated and somewhat tactless groan. “I don’t think so.”
    He picked up the fallen glasses and folded the earpieces inward without touching the lenses. Holding the bridge between thumb and third finger, like a ring, he handed them to her. Almost handed them to her, that is—she’d been told that her eyes without glasses gleamed like warning lights. And so, warned, he paused, and pressed his well-defined lips together into a grimace of disappointment—no, it wasn’t a grimace, he was preventing himself from saying please. Then he gave her the spectacles. “Maybe?” he said.
    Of course not, she thought. And then: Why not? A stone house instead of a stone city. An underfunded public library instead of that pretentious den. Rabbits on the lawn instead of monkeys at the zoo…
    “Maybe?” he repeated.
    “Maybe,” she echoed. But it turned out she meant yes.
      
    To slip away from her New York life…it was as easy as stepping on an escalator. Board members would hardly notice her absence; real decisions were made by three or four people who met in a broom closet. She leased her apartment immediately—one of her friends had a cousin from New Jersey eager to spend a season in the city. She gave herself a farewell party on Labor Day.
    The following morning, she visited Allegra. Allegra was not bedridden yet, but soon.
    “Don’t look mournful, Ingrid. You’ve seen me through a long illness. There are plenty left to help me die.”
    “I…should be one of them.”
    “Perhaps I’ll hold on.” They wetly embraced.
      
    And just like that, Ingrid returned offhandedly to her relatives, as if the visit would be the usual strict four days, not a lax three months. She took a plane from New York to a southern hub with a moving walkway that kept falsely warning her it was about to stop, a mini-plane to an airport thirty-five miles from the town, a bus. At the depot, the driver pulled her single large scuffed suitcase from the bus’s belly. “What an item!” Allegra had once said.
    “Fido? My second-best friend.”
    Lynne had wanted to give Ingrid the guest room she occupied during her quarterly visits, one of the three charmed rooms under the slanted roof—she’d been able to hear Chloe cry when the child was an infant, she could hear Chloe’s parents’ soft lovemaking now. The room would have been perfect for a second child, but Lynne’s hysterectomy precluded another child. Ingrid didn’t want that room. “I am no longer a guest,” she said. “I am an employee.” And indeed she was; Chris was paying her a salary; she was quietly depositing it in the trusts she’d set up for her daughter and for Chloe. “An employee of the woodworks, with household and child-care duties at home. I will sleep in Useless. Let’s find a bed, a bookcase, a dresser. Secondhand, please.” The four of them went right out and bought those items. What more did she need? Well, a mirror would be nice. Chris supplied one he had made himself, probably intended to sell, could sell, after she left. It was oval,