Desert of the Heart: A Novel Read Online Free

walking narrowed and steepened to block her view. Curious, she went on. At the top of the short hill, Evelyn stopped, oddly out of breath. The street fingered out from the main crossroad for just three short blocks of faded brick bungalows and no trees. At the end was the desert, sudden, flat, dull miles of it until it heaved itself upward and became the mountains. An irrational fear, as alien to Evelyn’s nature as heat lightning seems to a summer sky, struck through her body. For a moment she could not move. Then she turned quietly, refusing in herself the desire to run, and walked back to the house.
    Frances Packer was in the hall, but Evelyn refused the cup of tea she offered.
    “Would you like to take the paper up with you?” Frances suggested. “We’ve all finished with it.”
    “Thank you, but …”
    “Do,” Frances encouraged.
    It was little enough to accept; so Evelyn carried the unwanted paper up the stairs to her room. She glanced at the travel clock by her bed, picked it up and listened to it. She had not forgotten to wind it. It clicked at her ear with precise regularity. How could she have been gone only twenty minutes? She put the clock down impatiently and began to undress.
    Bathed and ready for bed, Evelyn stood by the window, looking out through the densely leaved tree to the sky, still transparent with the last, lasting light of evening. Safe now, the day like a door arbitrarily closed behind her, Evelyn could smile at herself. She could not remember a night in recent years when she had been in bed before midnight. Now, at not quite nine o’clock, like a summer child she struggled to keep sleep off until the darkness arrived. Why? She had every right to be tired. It had been a long day, this last day of the long sixteen years that had brought her here. Surely now she could sleep. There was no harm in it.

2
    A NN LEFT WALTER WITH the car and walked up the alley to the employees’ entrance. Inside, the stale heat of the day smelled of brass ash trays and sweat and shoes. But the night shift employees, crowded around the board, lined up at the punch clock, sitting in the cracked leather chairs, were fresh from a day’s sleep, newly shaved or powdered, in clean shirts, pressed trousers, and polished boots. Noisy with stories of the night before, because it had been Saturday, easy about the night to come, because it was Sunday, they relaxed together, the change aprons, the key men, the cashiers, the dealers, and the floor bosses.
    “We’re in the Corral again, darling,” Silver Kay called from across the room by the Coke machine.
    “Out of the dollar machines, thank God,” Ann said, joining Silver and taking a sip of the Coke she offered.
    “All very well for you. You’re on the ramp again. I’m on the goddamned floor.”
    “You like it,” Ann said.
    “I like it. I like it. You’ve never been on the floor.”
    “I’m not tall enough,” Ann said.
    “You’ll do. You’re noticeable enough, love.”
    “Thanks,” Ann said, looking up at Silver, who was over six feet tall in her heeled boots, hipless and brazen bosomed, her hair bleached almost as white as the ten-gallon hat that rode on her shoulders like a rising moon, “but I’m not in your class.”
    “Why don’t you enroll?” Silver suggested. “It’s reduced rates tonight.”
    “Is it?”
    “Umhum.”
    “Joe out of town?”
    “And I’ve got a bottle of your favorite Scotch,” Silver said, smiling.
    “I might be tired,” Ann said, but she felt Silver’s eyes trace a teasing and relieving suggestion from her throat to her thighs. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”
    “Sleep with me.”
    “You going down to the locker room?”
    “I’ve been.”
    “I’ll see you later then,” Ann said.
    In the basement Ann found Janet Hearle already there, the locker they shared open.
    “I’ve just been up to supplies and got you a better apron,” Janet said. “Here.”
    “Thanks. How’s everything?”
    “We’ve got