Free The Widow Waltz by Sally Koslow Page A

Flea or sweating in food trucks. She’d like to return to Paris, but at the moment she didn’t have enough saved even for a plane ticket. The best part of the job at S. Waltz would be that it would come with a salary—nothing major, but a step up from tying on an apron to become a barista, and she’d already been turned down for two bar-tending spots. As one employer plainly said when he reviewed her résumé, “Liking martinis and looking hot at a party don’t count as qualifications.”
    “If you apply yourself, I could teach you a great deal about our family business,” Stephan said, stirring his double espresso, which she noticed he drank unsweetened. “There’s a lot more to it than baubles and trinkets.”
    The word Nicola liked best in that sentence was
family
. For all his shortcomings, Uncle Stephan had never once suggested that Nicola was anything but a Waltz. That territory was exclusively inhabited by his mother. She looked up over her café au lait. The restaurant Uncle Stephan had chosen was small and winsome without being coy. He spoke to the waitress in French, and to Nicola’s ear his accent sounded authentic. This would have made Luey laugh, though Nicola took it as a sign. She needed a sign.
    “When would you like me to start?”

9.
    W ally has found nothing—I check with him every other day—and I am running out of places in the apartment to look. In my waking hours, I’m blurry around the edges yet keeping it together, trying not to act as if I am subsisting on a diet of cottage cheese and opprobrium. I stumble through my routines, reminding myself to floss, to take Vitamin D, to stock up on dog food, and to care for my plants—the bromeliads, the flowering maple, the hopelessly retro Boston ferns that wick away the humidity of my bathrooms, and the mistletoe fig and prayer plants that line my kitchen window. Other people can get their cardio workout hauling mulch and fertilizer as they grow organic vegetables. Except for my sometime servitude in Central Park, I am an indolent gardener. In the country we employ a landscape service, and in the city I exploit the advantage of my apartment’s enormous west- and north-facing windows.
    Since I have neither strength nor inclination to lift a blow-dryer, my hair shambles around my face in an animated halo—frizzy in spots, strangely lank in others, a mirror of my soul. When my standing salon appointment came do, I canceled it, and with Nicola assisting, I have tried hair coloring at home. My shade now hovers between margarine and mustard.
    It’s after dark when Ben rolls in like fog, crowding me, teasing me. His night shift begins after I turn off whatever Turner Classic has dished out, the warm milk that puts me into a coma. Tonight, Clark Gable was in zany pursuit of Myrna Loy.
    “Ben!” I groan in my sleep, as he thrusts, hard and demanding. My mate knows the history lessons of my anatomy and places his hands confidently on my hips as he pushes deeper. “Ben! I love you, Ben. Love you, love you, Oh . . .” I arch to meet him, luxuriating in the warmth that runs its intimate course between my thighs.
    I call out his name again and jolt awake to find that there is no Ben. At the foot of the bed, Sadie rolls over, snorts, and kicks a back leg reflexively as she wrestles with her own dream. I freeze into stillness for minutes, or maybe an hour, ultimately forcing myself to open my eyes. On television Myrna has become Claudette Colbert, and Clark, a long-faced, soft-jawed boy-next-door type. The pair is raising chickens in some godforsaken bump on a log. An actor is muttering about eggs. I see that I am wearing a T-shirt from a charity walk, not one of my Jordan almond–hued wisps of lingerie nestled in a drawer I haven’t opened in weeks.
    I remember: Ben is gone, yet I feel him in the room as I do every night, embracing me with arms kept strong by endless push-ups—my husband, the invincible gladiator who expected to live past one