Never Too Late for Love by Warren Adler Page A

was
more than simple inconvenience. For those who lived from day to day, it was the
fuel of life. Without it came the humiliation of borrowing from friends, or, if
pride meant more than hunger, foraging for scraps among the household
leftovers.
    She slipped the check under the candy dish. Wasn't she
entitled to inflict such punishment? she asked herself, knowing that the
missing check was already causing the woman anxieties. But look what she had
done to Sarah. Considering the crime, it was hardly the punishment for
twenty-five years of loneliness and humiliation. She could be honest with
herself now. It was lonely. It was humiliating.
    She made herself dinner and went out for her usual
Mah-Jongg game with her friends in the clubhouse cardroom. But she could not
concentrate. Her mind dwelled on the envelope hidden under the candy dish.
    "Whatsamatter Sarah?" Eve Shapiro asked. When it
came to Mah-Jongg, Eve was all business.
    "I got a headache."
    "You got worse than that, Sarah," Eve Shapiro
pressed as she exposed her winning combination.
    "You let her win, dummy," Ida Fine said, shaking
her henna red curls.
    "I'm not myself," Sarah protested.
    "Yourself is such a big deal?"
    During the night, she could not sleep, declining to take a
sleeping pill. Did the other Mrs. Shankowitz really deserve such punishment?
But the envelope beneath the candy dish loomed bigger and bigger in her mind as
the night wore on. She got up, made herself some tea, and sat sipping it while
she watched the candy dish and prayed for the swift end to night. In the
sunlight, she might find her courage again, she decided, knowing that remorse
was beginning to afflict her now.
    In a way, she was fortunate. She had worked for more than
twenty years. There were a few dollars put aside in the bank and, of course,
there was always her son, although she dreaded to ask him for anything beyond
the fifty dollars a month he usually sent her. But she had heard enough horror
stories over delayed or missing social security checks to blunt the edge of her
malevolence as the night wore on. Think of what that woman did to you, she
repeated to herself over and over again, charging her resolve. But by morning,
she was contrite. It was a monstrous thing to do, even to your worst enemy, she
concluded. And that was precisely the case.
    That morning, she dressed with care, although she had no
intentions, she assured herself, of doing anything more than putting the check
in the mailslot of the other Mrs. Shankowitz's apartment. That, and nothing
more. Then why was she dressing with such care, running the comb repetitively
through her hair, putting on faint patches of rouge, even powder. The mirror
taunted her as it did every time she saw her ravaged image in it. A
sixty-eight-year-old wreck of a woman. Where had her life gone? Secretly, she
hoped that the other Mrs. Shankowitz was ravaged beyond her years.
    The address on the check made it necessary for her to take
the open air shuttle bus, and she waited patiently at the stop, checking to be
sure that the check had been secured in her purse. She got on the shuttle bus
and nodded politely to the familiar faces, wondering how they might react when
they finally knew. She could imagine how they would suddenly drop their voices,
watch her as they whispered the story among themselves. No. She could not bear
that. She got off in the approximate vicinity of the address on the check and,
with beating heart and a sense of dragging in her limbs, she walked down the
path, following the sequence of the numbers.
    When she arrived at the correct address, she stood in front
of the door, rummaging in her purse, while, peripherally, she looked beyond the
transparent curtains into the apartment's interior. She saw the bluish glow of
a television set and the brief movement of a shadowy figure. Instinctively, she
knew she was being watched, which triggered a conscious desire to leave
quickly, although she felt herself rooted to the spot. The door