Free First Avenue by Lowen Clausen

not see him from where she sat.
Maria
strained to listen to the radio speaker, for the voice of 1-David-4. There was no voice. Nothing had gone right so far.
    Maria removed a book of poems from her purse. She opened it to the back and looked for the hundredth time, for the thousandth time, at the picture of
Sam
Wright
on the worn paper cover. He was standing in his police uniform in front of an old brick building. There was a half-formed, half-gone smile on his face.
    In the book most of the poems had something to do with police work, but three poems were completely different. Those three, first in the book, were about her mother. Because of them, because her mother had read them to her when even her smiles could no longer hide the bad news,
Maria
had traveled all this way. She sat listening for a voice to come from a tiny box just as she had listened to her mother’s voice reading grown-up words she could not understand. For years the book had been hidden in the bottom drawer of her dresser. It was out now.
    She began to read the first poem, but something was terribly wrong. Something was missing. She looked up from the bench at the green walls on all sides of her. They were like the hospital walls where she waited for her mother to die. They were exactly like the hospital walls. They closed tighter around her, and she realized that she had lost the sound of her mother’s voice. Instead the words came up from the page in a strange voice. It was a voice she had never heard and it frightened her in a way that she had never been frightened before. She closed the book. What if
Sam
Wright
came and she had lost her mother’s voice? She stood abruptly and went to the counter and would have left without a word if the older policeman had not raised his head immediately.
    “I’ll have to come back,” she said.
    “Are you sure?” he asked. “Is everything okay? I can try to raise him again.”
    “No. Please don’t bother. I’ll come back later.”
    “All right. I’ll leave him a message.”
    “No. I’d rather see him. Where was it you said he was? That doughnut place?”
    “First and Pike, but there’s no telling how long he’ll stay there. Not long, probably.”
    “That’s okay. I just need to leave now. Could you tell me how to find it?”
    “Sure, if that’s what you want. You go down the hill two blocks. That’s First Avenue .” The telephone rang and the policeman put on his glasses. He looked toward the telephone and then back at her. “At First Avenue, turn right,” he said over the second peal of the telephone bell. “It’s six or seven blocks to Pike Street .” His hand was already moving toward the telephone.
    “Thank you,” she said. She was moving, too.
    He raised his other hand in a farewell gesture as he placed the telephone to his ear. She saw the green walls again, and her pace increased to the elevator. She pushed the down button twice, although it had lit the first time. It seemed as if she did not, could not, breathe until the elevator stopped for her and she was outside again. She breathed deeply there, inhaling the fumes from the buses that roared and shook and rattled as they left the curb in front of her.
    She walked down the hill from the police station in a daze. She could not go back there, to those walls that reminded her of the hospital. She would have to try something else. Would he still be at the Donut Shop?
    At First Avenue she turned right and began to pay attention to her surroundings. The street seemed to go slower than the others. Some people were not moving at all. She kept a count of the blocks as she walked and looked at each street sign far in advance. She looked for the blue uniform of a policeman and for the familiar face and strange smile.
    Instead she saw other men who looked strangely at her. Far up the sidewalk as they stood at the curb or walked toward her, they would begin looking at her. One time she returned the stare, and the man stopped and waited as