Ruby Read Online Free Page B

a young woman said.
    Olivia had yawned into the phone, closed all the shades against the day, and said, “Who told you that?” in a tone that was less than nice. She didn’t care. Even from the now dark living room, Olivia could see the mess she’d made of the wall where she had once planned to stencil the William Carlos Williams poem about plums.
    “Uh,” the woman said—stupidly, Olivia thought. “Your sister? Amy?”
    “Figures,” Olivia mumbled. Her sister, Amy, four years younger, bitter, divorced, a single mother, had been trying to take charge of Olivia’s life since David died. Amy was, Olivia had decided, almost relieved that she and David’s sudden romance and marriage had ended so soon and so tragically. “It’s time,” Amy kept reminding Olivia, “to grow up.”
    The woman took a big, impatient breath. “My name is Kim Potter-Franco and my husband is Joseph Franco,” she said, and when Olivia didn’t give her a how-do-you-do, she continued, “Anyway, my husband and I—we’re newlyweds, you know?—we’re renting over by the college, in the graduate-student apartments, and they’re just awful. So when I met your sister at the gym and she said you wanted to sell your house, or maybe even rent it first, I said, I just have to call. We’re both getting Ph.D.’s,” she added, her voice full of idealism and hope, “in literature.”
    Olivia could see it, Amy and this idiot side by side on treadmills, walking hard and fast and going nowhere.
    “This is our house,” Olivia said. “And it’s not for sale yet.”
    “These apartments,” Kim Potter-Franco said, lowering her voice, “are not so great. We moved here from Ohio and we had this darling little place. We just want somewhere nice.”
    “Our house isn’t nice,” Olivia said. One of the witches from the occult store next to the Rose Tattoo had given her a book on feng shui and some smudge sticks to chase out the bad spirits and bad karma here. “Bad spirits,” Olivia added.
    “It’s just that a house would be so nice,” the woman said, “what with all our new things—the wedding china and crystal. We’re newlyweds,” she said again.
    “We don’t want anyone in our house!” Olivia shouted. “It’s ours. We bought it so we could put our toes in the ocean whenever we wanted. We bought it so that we could grow old here. We don’t want anyone with a stupid hyphenated name living here with china and crystal and big dreams. Do you hear me, you stupid fucking newlywed? You happy person?”
    But Kim Potter-Franco had hung up already.
    Olivia jogged down the scenic route, careful to run on the side facing traffic, to stay close to the edge of the road. She jogged past blue hydrangeas and old stone walls and houses hidden behind large trees—weeping willows, evergreen, oak, and maple. She jogged until she reached the spot. Then she stopped, panting, and waited.
    The spot was on a curve. The policeman had called it “a blind curve,” had said it in a way as if to abdicate it of any responsibility. The policeman had seemed like a schoolboy, fresh-faced and awkward. So awkward, in fact, that Olivia had comforted him, placed her arms around his trembling shoulders, brought him a glass of water, told him she was sorry. Sorry that he had the terrible job of showing up at the little purple beach house that she and David had bought and telling her that her husband had been hit by a car on Route 1A and was dead.
    Olivia stood in the spot where it had happened and made herself think about all the details she had tried to forget over the past nine months. How she had made a big pot of coffee so they could take some in a thermos for the ride back to New York. How she had sat at the small green patio table with its wavy opaque glass top and looked out the window and wondered if she was pregnant. She’d let herself think of names for their baby, writing different combinations on a scrap of paper, the way in fifth grade she had written her