A Window Across the River Read Online Free Page A

normal rules of existence. Life treated her generously. If she arrived at the bank at three, just as the guard was locking the door, she’d smile at him with a sort of hopeful helplessness, and he’d let her in. If she didn’t have the fare for a cab ride, she
could charm the cabbie into taking her for free. When Nora was a girl, Billie’s life seemed to offer a glimpse of the magical possibilities of womanhood.
    “Do you know they’re not called prunes anymore?” Billie said. “They’re called dried plums now. The fruit companies think prunes have a bad reputation.”
    She removed one from the box and drew it toward her. “Don’t worry,” she whispered. “I’ll still call you a prune.” Then she kissed it, and then she put it in her mouth.
    Billie was the only family Nora had. Nora had no brothers or sisters, and her parents had died when she was still in her teens.
    “Are you sure you want to come to the hospital with me?” Billie said.
    “Of course I am. Of course.”
    “You’re a state-of-the-art niece,” Billie said. She picked up her lint catcher again and ran it affectionately over Nora’s knee.
    Nora didn’t feel state-of-the-art. She was feeling guilty: she hadn’t seen Billie in weeks.
    “How have you been?” Nora said.
    Stupid question, she thought, but Billie didn’t treat it as such.
    “Fine, except for this dumb lump. Keeping busy. It’s about all I can do to keep track of these babies. It’s like a full-time job.”
    The babies were her cats, who were far from babies now. Dolly must have been twenty, and Louie and Edwin weren’t much younger.
    “What else have you been up to?” Nora said.
    “I don’t know. Just waiting for the Romance Channel to arrive.” She laughed—a self-conscious, embarrassed laugh.
    “The Romance Channel?”
    “It’s a new TV station. They don’t have it in Manhattan yet, but they keep running these ads. If enough people vote for it, they might bring it here.”
    “How do you vote?”
    “You call this 800 number. I call it a lot. I put it on speed dial.”
    The Romance Channel. Billie had gotten married at twenty. When she and Nelson were in each other’s presence, they’d always seemed a little giddy, as if they’d each had a glass and a half of champagne. They had a crush on each other for twenty years. To Nora, they had seemed like Zelda and F. Scott Fitzgerald, presiding over their own private Jazz Age.
    Nelson died a week before their twenty-first anniversary. Waiting for the downtown E train at Forty-second Street, he’d had a heart attack and died on the platform.
    Something stopped working inside Billie after Nelson died. She stopped going to movies and museums; she stopped seeing friends—she just came home from work every evening, double-locked her door, and watched TV. Sometimes, when Nora saw a certain expression on her face, a sort of patient sadness, she got the feeling that Billie was still waiting for Nelson to come home.
    When she ventured into the outside world, Billie still relied on the old tools: she was still trying to charm her way through life. But now that she was in her sixties, her charm couldn’t take her very far. It didn’t keep banks open; it didn’t win her free rides. And Nora always found herself wondering—as she never had when she was young—
why
Billie could never get it together to get to the bank on time or pay the cab fare or remember to buy toilet paper or pay her bills.
    It was odd. Before her retirement, Billie had been working all her life—first as a dancer, then as a physical therapist at a children’s hospital—yet after Nelson died she seemed to be waiting for someone to come along and take care of her. And no one ever had.
    For Nora, Billie’s life remained a picture of the possibilities of womanhood—but it was a different kind of picture now. As much as she loved her aunt, it was a picture of what to avoid.
    Louie, a heavy Persian cat, made his way up to Nora’s lap. In his youth