A Window Across the River Read Online Free

It made her aunt seem magical.
    Billie’s head appeared in the window.
    “Hello, my dovecote,” she said. “Could you pick up my mail in the lobby? It’s the tiny key.”
    She lobbed the keys down to the sidewalk. They were on a chain with a lucky rabbit’s foot.
    Nora let herself into the lobby, got Billie’s mail, and made her way up the stairs, thinking she needed to exercise more. The stairwell smelled like boiled potatoes.
    As she climbed the stairs, she was thinking about how to cheer Billie up. Two weeks ago, Billie had found a lump in her breast. A biopsy had revealed a cluster of irregularly shaped cells, and she was going in for a lumpectomy in two days.
    She’d had breast cancer four years earlier; during the last six months she’d been starting to believe that she might have “beaten” it. But now there was this.
    Nora tried to be cheery on the first two flights; on the next two she tried to be resolute. She was telling herself not to cave.
    In three days, Nora was leaving for a month-long stay at MacDowell, the artists’ colony in New Hampshire. She’d never been to an artists’ colony before, but it sounded like paradise. She would get her own private cabin; a silent ghostly butler would leave breakfast and lunch at her door; and she’d have no responsibilities other than to write all day. Nora had applied on a whim—she didn’t think she’d have a chance of getting in. But she did get in, and now she couldn’t wait. With a month alone, with nothing to do but work, she might finally find her way back to writing short stories.
    She’d heard a rumor that Grace Paley was going to be there. Grace Paley, whose stories, when Nora read them in her teens, had made her want to be a writer. A month of writing all day and then having dinner with Grace Paley!
    Ever since Billie found out she’d need to have an operation, though, Nora had been thinking of giving up MacDowell. She was thinking she’d rather stay in the city and take care of her aunt. Now, on the stairs, she was telling herself not to do that. She’d be in New York for a couple of days after Billie’s operation, and after that she’d be in touch by phone. That was enough. You can take care of your loved ones and still take care of yourself.
    Billie was waiting at her door, in sweatpants and a sweatshirt. When Nora came forward to kiss her, she closed her eyes and offered Nora her cheek—receiving the kiss with a childlike intensity, as if she wanted to store it on her skin so she could recollect the sensation later. “I’m so happy to see you,” she said.
    She put her hands on Nora’s shoulders, beaming.
    “I always forget how tiny you are,” Billie said. “You’re like a pocket pal.”
    She hurried ahead of Nora into the living room, picked up a lint catcher—a plastic rolling pin with a sticky surface—and ran it over the easy chair. She performed the task with great enthusiasm but little craft; when she was done there were still wide patches of cat hair left untouched. Nora sat down anyway.
    “Would you like some soda pop?”
    “Sure. Thank you.”
    Billie seemed very excited. It was as if she was so happy to see Nora that she’d forgotten what was in store for her that week. She was humming to herself as she poured Sprite into a glass. She came out of the kitchen with the glass in one hand and a box of prunes in the other.
    “Prunes?”
    Nora declined the prunes.
    “They’re all I have to snack on. I tried to order cheese and crackers from the deli but they don’t give me credit anymore.”
    “Do you need some money?”
    “No—thank you. I got my Social Security check yesterday. I can cash it this afternoon.”
    Billie received monthly checks from her pension and from Social Security, and she lived in a rent-controlled apartment, but she was always broke by the end of the month. “I’m not a balance-the-checkbook kind of girl,” she’d once explained.
    When Nora was little, her aunt seemed to glide above the