“You’ll have to excuse my bad manners,” he said. “Need to spruce myself up
for the day.”
He went to the table by the tree, lathered his face, and began shaving, his mouth stretched into a tight O. She would have been inclined to sit and watch,
but he glanced back at her so often that she felt obliged to continue reading.
After struggling through all ten pages, she straightened them into a neat stack and then looked up to see him standing at the foot of the steps, waiting.
“So what did you think?”
“Interesting,” she said. She studied him for a moment. When he told her the
things he knew about animals it was interesting, but he had a special talent for
dragging one tiny bit of information out into the ten most tedious pages she’d ever read. “You do discover a lot of fascinating things. But does this journal you
write for insist that it be so ... so...”
“So what?”
“So … I don’t know, formal.” She wanted to say so long and eyes-falling-out
boring. Since she was never going to see him again, she did allow herself to ask
what she knew to be a tactless question. “Does everybody over there at the
university have to write like that, like they’re trying to make it hard to
understand?”
“You understood it, didn’t you?” His body had grown visibly tense.
She had gone too far. She didn’t need him hating her. “Yes, of course. And your article is quite fascinating. I just meant that it’s so much more … vivid when you talk about it.”
He seemed mollified. “Oh, I plan to give lectures too. Eventually. You
hungry? I’m just going down to check my lines, see if there’re any fish.”
“Can I help?” The mention of food made Olivia realize how hungry she was.
Any resentment she felt for him faded away. He was quite a nice neighbor.
“You could get a fire going. I’m such a duffer. Didn’t notice I was setting the
coffee pot on a stone cold stove. There’s kindling and wood out back.”
Grateful to have a task to perform, Olivia brought wood and lit the stove.
Then she went inside to look for a rag to wipe the table and noticed the calendar
on the wall by the door, with the days marked off.
“Is that calendar in there right?” she called to Jeremy from the porch. “Is today Friday?”
He looked up from the fish he was gutting on a flat rock by the river and thought for a moment before shaking his head.
“No. Must be Saturday. I always cross yesterday off when I get up in the
morning, but I didn’t do that today, seeing as I got unexpected company and all.
You go ahead and mark it off for me, will you? And there’s some bread in there
somewhere, you feel like slicing it.”
She sighed with relief that it actually was Saturday and found a knife next to
the cutting board. She heard Jeremy come up from the river and set a pan of oil
on the stove, and soon the smell of frying fish made her feel faint with hunger.
She was arranging jagged slices of bread on a tin plate, her back to the door, when a hand grasped her shoulder and her mind went black. She shrieked and
blindly spun around, her clenched fist hitting the side of Jeremy’s head.
“Jesus!” he shouted and jumped back, hand to his ear. “What the …?”
Olivia blinked, disoriented. He staggered outside and fell into a chair on the