Free Once a Widow by Lee Roberts Page B

herself being pulled slowly toward the hedge bordering the cemetery. Suddenly Coral was frightened and it was then that she screamed.
    She remembered Arthur Standish’s sad, reproachful voice. “Why did you do that, Coral…?”
    “I—I’m sorry, Arthur, I…”
    But he was gone, fleeing between the tombstones, as the excited potluck crowd emerged from the church and surrounded her. She told her mother and the rest a vague story about how she’d seen a prowler spying on the church, a tramp perhaps who had dropped off the 8:30 B. & O. freight, probably hungry. She was sorry she had startled them, she said. It had really been nothing, but seeing the man had startled her so. Reverend Morrissy had made a perfunctory search through the cemetery with a flashlight and someone had suggested calling the police, but no one did, and eventually Coral had found herself walking home with her mother in the summer night.
    When Coral went to the butcher shop a few days later Arthur Standish had smiled at her, as he always did, and had been very polite. It was as if the incident on the rectory lawn had never happened. Coral wanted desperately to remind him of it, in some casual way, but could not summon the courage. Maybe he did not even remember it, she thought. After all, he’d been, well, intoxicated. She did not blame him for that, in spite of her mother’s fanatical aversion to persons who drank spirits of any kind. But even if Arthur did not remember, she knew that she would remember always. Arthur Standish was still in her dreams. She awakened from them ashamed but excited, and bitterly sorry that she had screamed that night.
    On a Sunday afternoon, a week after the incident on the rectory lawn, Coral decided that she would remind Arthur Standish, laughingly of their brief meeting in the moonlight, and apologize for her senseless scream. She would do it on Monday afternoon, tomorrow, after work at the hospital. She would make it light, casual, and he would surely remember. Maybe he would smile at her and apologize and perhaps make a date for—for the movies, or something. There was not too much difference in their ages. He was a bachelor and no doubt lonely, too. It was just that he was shy, and ashamed, waiting for her to make the first move. On Sunday evening Coral went to bed happily and dreamed of Arthur Standish.
    It wasn’t until Monday morning at the hospital that Coral learned that Arthur Standish had been killed when he fell two stories from a fire escape during a Saturday night dance at the Beaver’s Hall. He had already been laid out in the Hoyt Funeral Home on Sunday afternoon when Coral had made her plans to remind him, laughingly, of the happenings on the rectory lawn in the moonlight. She had not attended his funeral, but she had gone to the undertaking parlor in the afternoon when few people were present and gazed briefly at the still white face and then turned and fled. Out on the street in sunlight she had sobbed a little as she walked home. But her eyes had been dry when she faced the sharp gaze of her mother and told her that Fox’s Department Store was having a sale on yard goods.
    Shortly after Arthur Standish’s death Coral began to see the pink fog. It appeared at odd times, swirling gently, and people moved in it slowly and happily. Sometimes the people waved and beckoned to her. At first, the pink fog frightened her, But she became accustomed to it and eventually began to enjoy it, especially when it appeared at night, when she was in bed. At such times she would imagine that Arthur Standish was out there, smiling at her. It was only a dream, she told herself, but she wished that it would not appear so often, as it had lately.
     
    It was almost five o’clock when Dr. Shannon left the hospital. On his way home he stopped at a delicatessen and bought buns, frankfurters, marshmallows and a bag of charcoal briquettes for the Sunday cook-out. In pleasant weather it was a ritual at the Shannon home