Free The Widow Waltz by Sally Koslow Page B

hundred. Some nights I cry or curse or simply lie like a corpse myself, eyes open to the sooty darkness, and other nights are like this one—Ben and I make love, after which I pummel away his image with my fists.
    I kick off the duvet, which feels as heavy as a lead apron, and look at the clock. It is already tomorrow, three in the morning, that war zone infested by workaholics, parents of fretful infants, and, my own demographic, the freshly bereaved. I want to shout at Ben, but this might convince Cola and Luey to cart me off to some public snake pit of a mental institution, since the private, leafy variety is a luxury we can no longer afford. I keep my voice low, my whisper more plaintive than sneering, because I have not fully committed to anger or husband hatred.
    Perhaps animosity is what Ben deserves, but my heart argues for a postponement of sentencing, even an ultimate reprieve. Since my dinner two nights ago with Stephan, I’ve doubled my search efforts. “Give me a clue,” I say to the man who cannot reply. “Darling, you owe me an explanation. What is this insanity about a ring? And why did you empty our accounts?”
    I am answered by the wind whistling beyond the window, which is open, blowing a chilling mist into the room. I move one foot and then another, feeling a cramp in my lower back as I force myself out of bed. Floors below, a couple is letting it rip, and words carry into the still night. “Why the fuck did you do that?” a woman screeches. “Again! Every goddamn time!”
    Get away now, when you’re young,
I am tempted to shout back. Stick around and in twenty years you’ll be wondering if ghosts are real. I try to convince myself that this is fatigue talking, pull on Ben’s plaid robe and a pair of his warmest socks coiled on the floor where I let them fall last night, and wander into the hallway. A light shines. God forbid anyone in this family should flick off a switch.
    Nicola’s door is closed, as is her sister’s, but when I reach the kitchen, there is Luey, scrunched into the corner of the banquette, her back toward me, idly yanking a spike of hair with one hand, the other cradling her phone. She is speaking in a heated, breathy voice, saying, “I’m not kidding.”
    If I turn to leave, I may make a noise and she will surely accuse me of eavesdropping. I stop dead until she speaks again. “That’s a help.” This is followed by a lengthy silence, after which Luey slams down the phone so hard that she spills a mug of cocoa sitting on the table. She doesn’t mop it up.
    Except for when she visits the dentist, of whom she is terrified, Luey is not a crier. As a child, she would bite her lip to staunch the tears that any other small girl might shed as she would swallow a verbal clobber from a kid who was an even bigger bully than she. But in the lamplight, my daughter holds her knees to her chest and rocks, after which the sobbing comes in gasps. This is Luey very angry or very scared.
    I would not hesitate to run to Nicola’s side, but Luey keeps me at a remove. A minute passes. “Honey?” I whisper hoarsely.
    She looks up, though her arms stay in place. “You’re sneaking up on me now?” I expect a glower, but her face is open for business.
    “Can I help?” I ask.
    Crisis intervention is not my specialty. I’ve never gotten beyond offering balm for elementary boy trouble, if that’s what’s on the table. As far as I know, however, neither of my daughters currently has a boy, least of all a man, in her life. Luey releases romantic information on a need-to-know basis, pointing out that I have no need to know, and when Nicola’s last beau that I knew of started a PhD program in Iowa City, she paid the young brainiac exactly one visit. “Imagine, a college town where you can’t find crème fraîche,” she griped. “Not even a decent baguette.” A week later, she’d enrolled in Berlitz and bought tickets to Paris. Nicola has a way with foreign languages and American