Orchids and Stone Read Online Free Page A

between them, but Daphne couldn’t make them out.
    Two teenage boys in Seahawks coats loitered at the curb, not far from the car. The old lady called out to them, making a high-pitched plea Daphne couldn’t hear but could imagine.
    “Almost there,” came the high, tense voice of the younger woman.
    The old lady begged the boys, on the verge of tears. “Help me, please.”
    “Mother, stop it. Just cooperate.” The woman in black kept the old lady moving to the car. The teens paid them no attention. Daphne ran headlong toward the two women as they reached the car.
    “I’m not your mother. Leave me alone.” The old lady’s wail was pitiful.
    “Look,” Daphne called, “is everything okay here?”
    The driver, a man in jeans and a black leather jacket, swung from the driver’s seat, ran around, and opened the car’s right rear door. The old lady balked at the gaping doorway, but the other woman overcame her feeble resistance and both women disappeared into the backseat. The man shut the door, ran around to the driver’s seat, and lurched the transmission as Daphne reached one hand up in a silent request for them to wait, her other palm slipping off the car’s trunk as they pulled away.
    If only the old lady hadn’t turned to stare at Daphne through the back window. If only Daphne hadn’t been there to absorb the wistful gaze, as sad as any that old Grazie gave when she sighed and kept her head on the floor instead of rising for her dinner or a walk.
    “Do you have a phone?” Daphne asked the kids.
    One glared and the other looked away, unfocused eyes keeping him apart from civility. Daphne decided they were the sort of scowlers people crossed the street to avoid. The sort who breathed up more of the city’s wet air than they deserved. They wore ear buds, the wires mingling with stringy hair before disappearing into their long dark coats.
    It was penance, Daphne decided. All of this.
    For a nonreligious person, she was a big believer in penance. Working through time and debts owed, not quitting—this was an idea that crystallized for her in youngest adulthood.
    She should have gone with Vic to take his kids back to their mother.
    He said he didn’t mind, so he got points for that. She thought she’d get points because she had been in the car to go with them at first. She just didn’t see it all the way through, didn’t finish doing the uncomfortable part.
    If I’d stayed with him, kept a smile on my face in front of the kids, in front of Cassandra, I wouldn’t be here.
    “Do you mind?” Daphne snapped her rhetorical question as she pushed by the boys to cut across the park. She hoped Vic was home, a loving, supportive face waiting. She hoped he was out, so silence could serve as peace.
    And leaving the greenbelt to cross Westpark Avenue, she saw the robin’s body, flattened into the pavement save a few wing feathers bristling in the wind.

CHAPTER 3
    “So, they just drove away . . .” Vic said, pulling food purchases from green canvas totes with the same aplomb he’d displayed throughout her breathless rush into the house and description of her encounter in the Peace Park.
    Daphne nodded, her mind pinging with the contrast of mental and physical stress while watching his methodical putting away of the groceries.
    Soup was on sale, she saw. And bread was two-for-one. Almost everything Vic bought wore an orange discount sticker.
    “Right,” she said, wiping sweat from her hairline. “I didn’t know what to do.”
    “You didn’t do anything.”
    “Right.”
    Vic grabbed a can of kidney beans before it rolled off the kitchen counter. “So this old woman . . .” Daphne gave him a sharp look and he amended, “This older lady, you think she’s really in trouble?”
    “No. Right? I mean, it had to be . . . nothing.” She shouldn’t get after Vic for referring to an old lady as an old woman.
    The woman had said her name, hadn’t she? Daphne squinted but couldn’t recall.
    Vic squeezed