Some Other Town Read Online Free Page B

still stares, considering. Then suddenly turning piercing, not to mention loud, “I knowed it!” she shouts. “Ben gone, and you’s why.”
    She scowls once more. Then dropping her head and shoulders, she withdraws again inside the red hood. She sits looking down, very still, and does not offer anything more.
    I see Mrs. Eberline is onto me. She has been keeping an eye on my house. She knows I’m the reason Ben left. But I have watched Mrs. Eberline with Ben Adams as well. There are things she could answer for too.
    Always, as in the rest of her life, Mrs. E overdid it with Ben. When she saw he was here, for instance, if she spotted him lying out back in the grass napping or tossing a baseball over his chest, she would race out of her house and straight back to her garden, from where she would beckon flagrantly to him. Almost always she would be in the slinky silk caftan, it would swish seductively below her red coat. Mrs. Eberline normally wears trousers to garden. It’s a wonder she found time to change.
    Ben would tell me about Mrs. Eberline’s chats, I would not have to watch them to know. When he’d come in at last, generally he’d be quiet and thinking them through.
    â€œPsst,” Ben told me. He would just be lying there resting and from out of nowhere he’d hear this loud psst. Psst. Psst. And if he did not sit up right away, give Mrs. Eberline a wave, he knew that when he opened his eyes, there she would be right overhead, throwing her shadow all over him, and peering down into his face.
    So always, he said, when he heard that psst he would get up and walk to Mrs. Eberline’s side. “Well hello again, Mrs. E,” he would say. “Those are some fine-looking asters you have there.”
    Ben did not know why, but generally Mrs. E would take off then straight into some long-festering grievance. Mostly related to me. “Please darling,” she would tell him, and point to my maple, “when you see that young woman next-door, please tell her shereally must move her tree. It simply ruins the view and shades my tomatoes and come August I shan’t have a single Big Boy.”
    Mrs. Eberline was not telling Ben the truth here. The reason my tree is shading her garden is that she has planted a good half of it in my grass. Mrs. E is not one for details, not one to worry over property lines. I must remind Ben of this one day.
    But that was not the part that concerned Ben. It was what would come next, when Mrs. E would drop back her red hood, shake out her hair, and look again up at him. “I’m an actress you know, dearest,” she would say. A sly smile. “They say I’m a star.”
    Always Ben would tell her he knew. “Yes,” he’d say. “They have told me.”
    And always then Mrs. E would look away. Stare, turn dreamy, look back.
    â€œThey say I am beautiful. They say men fall at my feet.” She would lift her chin, meet his eyes. Again her sly smile. “They say I’m myself fond of men.”
    Ben said he would never be sure how to reply. Yes? Yes, they have told me that too.
    Ben worried about Mrs. Eberline. She has no one, he would say. There is no one she can tell her stories to. He thought maybe she needed our help.
    Help, Ben? I’d say. Ben has not lived next door to Mrs. E as I have, he could not possibly know. But when I said no then, I did not think Mrs. E needed any more help, she was pretty good at helping herself, Ben just gave me a slow, sad smile. “It’s a hard thing, Margaret,” he said, “to find you’ve been left all alone.”
    And now Ben himself is no longer around.
    Mrs. Eberline sits in my front room, head down. For a very long time she just sits. And I start to prepare myself then. While I cannot see what it is she is thinking, I can feel in her stillness something brewing.
Calling Before Dawn
    Early the day of his flight, he cannot sleep. He rises quietly,