Small Change Read Online Free

snow and moon, Styrofoam and sun, nightshirt and frypan. I learned about the fire in a letter from Maureen’s older sister Jill.
    “We started out at opposite points,” Jill said to me once when we were talking about Maureen, “and now we’ve come together.” She meant that my liking had turned to dislike and her dislike had softened.
    Behind her glasses Jill’s eyes were tentative and on hold. She was the one who seemed to know so little, yet knew everything. She knew about Danny’s affair with Henry and his various flirtations, and she predicted how everythingwould end. What she predicted unfolded before her eyes.
    One Sunday morning in June she was drinking coffee while reading a book in a small café in the Village. Jill was always reading, a professional disease, she said, it goes with being a librarian. Her visits to the Village were to see her two troubled sons and her various doctors. For as long as I knew her, she was solicitous, stoical, and ill.
    Her table was beside a row of windows overlooking the street. For a moment she looked up, her eyes shifting past parking meters and cars, and saw Danny. He was at the corner with his arm around a pretty young woman. The light turned, they crossed the street and walked right past her window without seeing her.
    She had to smile. Danny had done the unpredictable by doing the most predictable thing of all. She said to me, “I felt the way a novelist must feel when her characters come to life.”
    Danny’s sweet young thing, as Jill called her, was a student painter who had gone to him for advice. Maureen reacted (I swear this is true) by taking up painting.

    She gets up early while the others sleep, makes chamomile tea and drinks it with honey, then sits down at her work table beside the window. This is easier to imagine than what she paints. I suspect she paints picture after picture of the same empty bed.
    Her skin absorbs paint. She takes to it as a dry wall, untouched for years, soaks up gallon after gallon of colour. Or a city in decline surrenders to the paintbrush and thenthe fire. Her hands go yellow, green, blue – a rainbow bruise extending up her wrists.
    One afternoon she puts away freshly washed laundry and notices drops of blood on the white sheets. She looks at her palms and sees on her fingers splits as fine as paper cuts. This hasn’t happened since she was a child. In those days she refused salves and creams, so every night her mother waited until she had fallen asleep, then snuck into her room and rubbed her hands with oil and her lips with Vaseline. Under her mother’s shiny fingertip, Maureen’s chapped lips moved like relaxed limbs. That was the first of the nightly Vaseline rituals.
    Let’s say it’s two in the morning. Let’s say the window is open and light from the street falls on the bed. Danny undresses. His face is all bone – teeth, nose, high forehead – but his body is shapely. Maureen has told me how fine his legs are, how fine his chest. His cock waves a little – uncertain top-heavy bloom – smooth and shiny tulip past its prime. Women scrub floors until their hands are the same colour and equally shiny.
    Her panic is almost permanent now. She is awake, she wants to talk, but he hushes her. She has the children, which she wanted; they are together still and she wants that. He lies down beside her. Again she tries to talk. “I have no friends. No one ever calls -”
    “Shhhh.”
    The only man in her life. The only man who has known her since girlhood and has witnessed her in her glory. The panic: not that there is nothing she can do (she works, she earns, she raises children), but that there is nothing she cando well. A form of amnesia has taken over and she cannot remember how it was that she ever excelled.
    She goes into Danny’s studio. She often goes in to look at his work and to see what he has in the small fridge in the corner. This time his notebook is lying on top of the fridge. In her hands it falls open to a