Until She Comes Home Read Online Free Page B

has grown since morning, she kisses the rough cheek and frowns at his cupped hand. Shards of green glass sparkle in his palm. He jostles them as if they were a pair of dice.
    Two blocks down, where Julia lives in the same style three-bedroom, two-story redbrick house with a porch off the front door and a detached garage out back, she finds broken glass in the alley almost every day. Usually green, sometimes brown. She says that over the past few months the glass has become as regular as leaves in autumn. It’s a sign of their changing neighborhood, one no one talks about. Grace nods in Mother’s direction so James won’t say anything he’d rather not. He greets Mother, drops the glass in the trash basket, letting the shards tumble from his hand one by one, and excuses himself to bathe before supper.
    After a quiet meal, Mother gathers her purse and gloves. She’d just as soon not be caught in this neighborhood after dark, she says, and while James sees Mother to her car, Grace runs water to wash the dishes. Something begins to tug at her again. It might be the thought of those women on Willingham, but they are still a bus ride away, a safe distance from Grace’s life here on Alder. Or perhaps it’s the green glass. She has always assumed it was left there by the colored men who cut through the alley on their way to Woodward Avenue. She hears them during the day when James is at work and late at night when he is asleep and she is awake, nursing an aching back. The men always pass at the same time. They have a schedule. It must be the buses that drive their routine.
    “You’ve missed a spot,” Grace says, nudging James who has returned to help her with the dishes. Soapy water drips from her rubber gloves.
    “It’s time I do some checking, Gracie,” James says, setting the dish aside.
    “Checking?”
    “Not waiting until things get even worse. Time I get someone in here to tell me what this house is worth.”
    “It’s just a few bottles,” Grace says. “A little broken glass.” But she knows it isn’t.
    “I’ll find someone who can sell this place for us,” James says. “Someone who can get us a fair price.”
    “But what about our friends? I’d hate to leave Julia. And Mother is so close.”
    “Should be able to find something farther north with the money we make.” James wraps his arms around Grace’s round belly. His fingers are warm through her thin cotton blouse. “High time we face facts. Things are starting to add up in a way I don’t care for. No good to be the last ones standing.”
    Wearing a pair of her nicer heels, Grace is the perfect height to rest against the broadest part of James. His white undershirt is soft against her cheek and smells lightly of bleach. She wants to ask if he, like the ladies who wouldn’t come to her luncheon, is worried the dead woman on Willingham means something to them. “I have brownies,” Grace says instead, because she’s not sure she wants to hear his answer. “Feel like dessert?”
    James rolls his rough cheek against the soft spot at the base of her neck. She leans into him and lays her head aside so he can more easily kiss her there.
    “And ice cream,” she says, closing her eyes and inhaling the spicy cologne he slapped on after he washed up. “I’ll bet I have some in the freezer.”
    And then that nagging feeling, that certainty she had forgotten something or misplaced something, rises up. She drops her chin to her chest and shakes her head.
    “Oh, James. Today is Elizabeth’s birthday. She wore the lavender dress. Not the yellow. Because it’s her birthday. The ice cream, I bought it for her. How could I forget?”
    While Grace plates a dozen leftover brownies and grabs a gallon of ice cream from the freezer, James pulls the car into the driveway. It’s a short enough walk, but by the time they come home, it’ll be dark, so James insists on the car.
    When Mr. Symanski answers the door, his silver hair, usually smoothed straight