I see you everywhere Read Online Free Page B

wears a diamond the size of a peppercorn in his left ear, but he also has a tattoo—a blue cormorant—on the opposite biceps. Ralph’s run the Iditarod, and Hector, from Portuguese New Bedford, dresses like an off-duty fisherman—clean but hardly stylish. When Ralph asked if I wanted to go out and hear a new band, all I could think was that my prayers had been answered. I wrote Louisa a note and left to put in my grease-monkey time at the shop.
    Lucy liked my mechanical know-how. She treated me like a free electrician, plumber, you name it: an all-around Ms. Fix-It. This was her subtle revenge for my treating her like I was her probation officer, no matter how nicely. If I came home for lunch, I’d find a sandwich, a bottle of beer in a bowl of ice, and a note that said, Clement dear, the drain in the sink seems a mite sluggish; could you give it a thorough snaking? or Do you rewire? The tasseled lamp by the pink chesterfield has a new habit of winking. Lucy would be asleep in her room, so she never asked me in person. I could have stayed in town all day, but the weird thing is, I began to look forward to going back at noon: I liked the green breezy silence on the porch, liked finding that beer, liked peeking through Lucy’s bedroom door to make sure she was breathing. Maybe this was the closest I’d ever come to having a child.
    But nothing surprised me more than how much I got into the afterdinner shopathons. By early July, I was an ace chauffeur and personal shopper. At first, we just hunted down gadgets: man, was she obsessed. Like the juicer, which I tried to talk her out of. She had to ask me what it was for, and when I explained how it was mostly for health fiends who live on carrot juice and have orange skin on the bottoms of their feet, she said, “My carrots will never be anything other than boiled.” But she put her hands around the barrel of that thing and said, “Don’t you adore its sheer presence? So exquisitely masculine! A stevedore. A gigolo !” In her mouth, that word was a delicacy, a chocolate-covered cherry, and she gave me a new smile—hardly the smile of a maiden aunt—so I overrode Glas_9780375422751_3p_all_r1.qxp 7/2/08 10:21 AM Page 19 I See You Everywhere
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    my own veto. (Things I did veto: a pasta maker, an electric corkscrew, an automated shoe-shine.)
    Her obsession sent us back to the same three stores again and again; after two weeks, she’d seen everything there was to see. So one beautiful evening—dry spruce air off Lake Champlain, sunset scorching the water flamingo pink—she steers me down a street of hippie boutiques, those places where simply stepping inside to browse makes you smell like a swami for days. I figure she must sense this because at first she just peers through open doors, makes disapproving remarks (“Clutter, clutter” or
    “Whose attic exploded here?” or a tart “Re mark able”). But then she says,
    “Here we are!” like she’s a regular, and pulls me into a pack rat’s trove of gauzy dresses, earrings like chandeliers, and a million doodads for smoking pot. I’m nervous she’ll ask me what all the bongs and pipes and clips are for, but she’s staring at the ceiling—a fleet of Chinese kites. She points to a black one, a twisting dragon with scales painted in gold. It’s incredibly cheap for something so cool, so handmade, I guess because the paper’s fragile and it isn’t expected to fly. I warn Lucy, but she says she’s too old for flying kites; she wants to hang it over her bed. (We know who’ll get to do that.)
    While the salesgirl wraps it—in a slo-mo dream haze and I know, or smell, exactly why—Lucy wanders around the store. “Is this la mode these days?” She pulls a minidress, all tiny brown paisleys, off a rack. Then she turns toward a mirror and holds it against her chest. Her laugh is soft and husky. The dress does look silly against her navy-blue dowager special, a tailored thing from about the year my