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now he pulled the belt of his robe a bit tighter and ran a hand across his
grizzled hair.
"Can I help you with something, er, ma'am?" he asked uncertainly. "What
apartment number were you  ' The figure before him reached a gloved hand up to
the helmet strap, bent over to remove it, and straightened up, shaking her
hair out of her face. Even then, for a split second he failed to recognize
her; she had more life in her face than he'd ever seen there.
"Kate!" She grinned at him, glowing with enthusiasm and exuding waves of fresh
air. He ran an eye over her, new boots, new gloves, old leather bomber jacket
a bit snug around the waist, the massive new helmet under one arm. "Let me
guess," he said, stepping back to let her in. "You bought your new car. What
kind?"
Jules came out of the kitchen behind him and stopped dead. "Why are you
wearing that outfit, Kate?" she asked, but Kate answered her partner.
"A Kawasaki."
"Kawasaki doesn't make an automobile," he said, studying her leather jacket.
"By God, the man's a detective."
"You're not thinking of taking Jules out on it?"
A cry of protest rose from the kitchen door, but Kate ignored it. "Of course
not," she said, and her grin became even wider. "Can I borrow the car keys,
Dad?"
OCTOBER,
NOVEMBER
FIVE
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October came. Jon arrived back from Boston and London, flitted around the edge
of Kate's vision for a few days, and, before she could catch hold of him, was
off to Mexico with his friend. Short letters from Lee: She was well, getting
stronger. Yesterday she'd dug clams for dinner; had cut a cord of stove wood
already, could Kate believe that? And the trees were so beautiful, so calming.
Finding herself, yet still filled with confusion, and sorry, so very sorry, to
be putting Kate through all this, but&
But she still couldn't say when she'd be home.
In October, Kate's baffled anguish began to turn, to harden. Her letters north
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became shorter, sharper. She bruised her thigh once too often on Lee's chair
lift at the top of the stairs, and in a fury at two o'clock one morning she
took a wrench to it, dismantled it, and heaved the seat, followed by the
wrench, into Lee's room, the room that had once been theirs. The next things
to go were Lee's books in the dining room, again into Lee's room. She began
deliberately to leave the dishes in the sink overnight, for two nights, a
thing neither Lee nor Jon could have tolerated. She even began to leave the
bed unmade and the cap off the toothpaste.
October settled into a pattern of work and home. Her new form of transport set
off another flurry of raucous comments and irritating harassments from her
co-workers, and she lost count of the number of Xeroxed articles about Dykes
on Bikes she had found on her desk or tucked into the cycle, but she had,
after all, expected something of the sort, and if her teeth ached from being
gritted, at least she did not show that any of it bothered her.
She told herself that it would pass, and concentrated on the pleasures of a
motorcycle in California. The fall weather held, a whole month of Indian
summer, and she took long rides north into the wine country and the
mountainous land behind it, glorying in the nearly forgotten freedom and sweet
spark of risk that two wheels brought. When she needed four wheels, she hired
the neighbor with his immaculately restored 1948 Chevy pickup, or she used
Al's car. Even the house on Russian Hill did not seem quite so aggressively
empty as it had; merely quiescent.
By the end of the month, the pleasure of her minor rebellions against the
absent householders began to wane, when she found an unmade pile of sheets and
blankets an unbearably slovenly greeting at the end of a long day, and found,
too, that leaving the cap off the toothpaste tube made the contents go hard
and stale. Still, she allowed the dishes to accumulate until she had no clean
ones, vacuumed and swept only when her feet began to notice the grit, and ate
when and what she felt like, rediscovering the illicit joys of pizza for [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]