Free The Widower's Tale by Julia Glass

fish-processing plant in Gloucester. There were workers who spoke their language, not just Spanish. But as soon as Celestino arrived in the bus station, he'd taken the T to Harvard Square. Everything seemed shinier, more modern than he remembered--the subway train, the tiled platform, the escalator that carried him into the open air. Even the red brick sidewalks that were meant to seem ancient looked as if they'd been scrubbed. How had so much changed? How had the years passed so quickly? Yet the prosperity he saw made him hopeful. He looked for Isabelle as he walked among the college buildings, toward her family's house--where perhaps he would find her on the shaded porch.
    Nothing had changed in the elegant neighborhood where the Lartigues lived. Perhaps the cars, which seemed larger. And the young trees planted along the narrow street: they were taller, dense with leaves. Now he knew the names of these trees. Sycamore, linden, magnolia, spruce. From his time at Wave Hill, he could even identify the different magnolias that flourished this far north, the ones whose late flowers were rarely damaged by frost.
    The Lartigues' driveway was empty. The garage was closed. The front curtains--and with a jolt he recognized them, the same blue pattern of country scenes in France--hid the grand rooms within. The mailbox beside the door was stuffed with mail, as if no one had checked it for a couple of days.
    He'd stood on the street a long time before daring to walk around the side of the house. He looked about in every direction first, to make sure that no one could see him, call the police. His heart beat hard, warning him away.
    The gate, the brick path, the rhododendrons with their rubbery, almost tropical leaves: all of it the same. At the back of the house, he walked close to the edge of a window. The same green table ran from one end of the kitchen to the other. The same green cooking pots hung from a copper rack, like musical instruments waiting to be played. But now there was a dog, which jumped up at the window. It wasn't a menacing dog, but it started barking loudly.
    Celestino retreated quickly to the front of the house. He hurried back the way he'd come, back toward the Square. He could still hear the dog barking as he rounded the corner onto Brattle Street.
    After stopping to catch his breath, he had walked to the Charles River, a place that would always remind him of Isabelle. What was he doing? Was this folly all about her? He had been with other girls in New York. None for very long, but his life hadn't been suited to settling down, nor had he wanted to settle down. Not there. Unlike his cousin or the other chapines he'd met, he wanted more than a shabby apartment in Queens or the Bronx. He did not feel right in the city, and he certainly did not want to have children in the city. He could read the news, see what became of so many children born to people like him. For this reason, he could never completely trust the girls he knew. So many of them seemed to be prowling, like panthers scouting the shadows for mates. (Animal nature, hardly wrong.) The ones he liked, who did tempt him--eventually, they saw that he was not to be caught. A few raged and called him names. Sometimes he told them they were right. This he had learned from Isabelle, to know when you deserve someone's anger, even if you cannot choose to be any different.
    Standing by the Charles River, watching two sculls pass by, the rowers bending together like parts of a wooden toy, he remembered going to watch a crew race with the Lartigues. That was during his first visit, when he was fifteen yet felt, in this place, so much younger. They'd had a picnic on the green riverbank. They had introduced him to pate and capers and cheeses from France.
    He thought of going back to the house, waiting for Senora Lartigue. Why? To ask her forgiveness? He laughed. What would it mean after all the time gone by? Dr. Lartigue hadn't even left a will, nothing to show that