The Garden of Last Days Read Online Free Page A

her sunglasses and smiling face, her long shining hair. She carried a woven bag that held their towels and sand toys and probably a snack and water, and seeing her you’d never know she spent her nights doing what she did. Jean began to worry about her again. Both of them. What kind of life were they going to have, after all?
    At the gate they’d turned and waved at her, and that image was still behind her eyes when the pain increased and a sharp pinch shot up her arm into her shoulder and jaw. She was not ignorant of these things. Now a weight began to press on her chest and a cold sweat broke out on her forehead and upper lip. She let go of the nozzle and hose, dropping them into the tangled red of the ixora. She walked carefully through the shade of the mango, her eyes on the door ahead of her. Her door. A French door she’d hired a man to put in so she could better see her garden and let in the light. Now she saw the door so clearly, clearer than when she’d spent two days painting it; it no longer looked lovely to her but more like a cold and distant piece of machinery she would have to learn to operate to get help, and allthe love she’d felt that morning with Franny had now turned upside down inside her and become a terrible crushing weight on her chest.
    This was surely it. She would die as Harold had. Alone in his office back in Oak Park, Chopin’s nocturnes on the record player. She saw him as she’d seen him. Slumped in his favorite diamond-tufted chair, his nearly handsome face pointed downward and blue. Blue . His tongue stuck out stiffly and she’d felt a vague mortal disgust and sudden and permanent grief, but now it was her turn and she refused to go; she wanted to stay, stay with her two girls, who were not hers but should have been. Her survivors.
    Then she was inside, her door somehow behind her, the cordless phone she rarely used in her hand. Her plump, liver-spotted hand. She had a hard time breathing and a malevolent force was pressing a thousand pounds to her chest and it was terrible to die this way. To suffocate alone in the late-morning brightness, the lush and verdant brightness of her and poor Harry’s Sarasota home.

TINA’S OFFICE DOOR was slid all the way open when April came around the corner naked and barefoot. She was hugging her stilettos and balled-up jeans, her underwear and halter. The clapping had stopped and Wendy’s number came on, Wendy brushing by her in her negligee and heels. April clutched a wad of bills that should be thicker but wasn’t because there was no garter belt for customers to slip their money into and she had to leave her panties on so they’d use that, but most of them didn’t. And there was Franny sitting on Tina’s brown couch watching the TV, her pink flip-flops barely reaching the edge of the cushion. Tina’s desk lamp was off and in the shifting colored light of the screen Franny’s lips were parted, her cheeks glistened, she needed to blow her nose, and who the hell was looking after her?
    April hurried to her locker and dropped her clothes and shoes on the floor. The dressing room was empty except for the makeup artistat her perch in the corner reading a book. “Where’s Tina?” She kept her voice down. Donna didn’t look up. She was a big woman, her kit laid out on the counter under the mirror. She knew her stuff, though April never used her.
    “Donna, where’s Tina? She’s supposed to be watching my kid.”
    “She went to get her something from the kitchen. I’m watching her.” Donna went back to her book, a novel about vampires, and April knew she’d expect at least a ten now before the night was over.
    At her locker she counted her bills: eighteen ones and a five. The act was never where the money was, but still, if Tina had called her she could’ve gotten in early enough to dress right and make more. She noticed she still had her watch on. She took it off, picked up her jeans, and stuck her watch into one of the front pockets.