Free October by Al Sarrantonio

"Hey!" and pushed Nick aside. Andrea continued to laugh.
    "All right, Davey!" Buddy said. "You got him good." Nick sat up, rubbed his cheek. "You're screwed, Putnam."
    "Get him," Brenda urged, then laughed.
    "Get him good," Andrea said. "Let's call the cops. Maybe we can wash their clothes."
    Nick and Brenda broke into laughter. As Davey and Buddy left, Nick fumbled a small Baggie of white powder out of his pocket, letting the girls crawl their hands over him to try to get it.
    "Jesus, Davey, I'm sorry I got you into this. You're in big trouble now," Buddy said. They left by the back door and made their way to the street.
    It was getting dark. The streetlights were on, like sour lemon lamps lighting the falling leaves. Davey's beer buzz was gone. He turned up his collar, put his hands in his pockets; far off, he heard the tentative, dying wail of a police siren that abruptly died.
    "Yeah," he said, "so what?"

6
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October 10th
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    As Kevin feared, Lydia answered the door.
    "Oh," she said, almost a tiny gasp.
    "I should have called."
    "No," Lydia said. She looked at her hands. "Actually, I thought you were Dr. Carpenter."
    "I'm sorry."
    She was still looking at her hands. "Come in."
    She had not changed. She still wore the kind of clothes Kevin remembered as "Lydia clothes," white-laced necks, long skirts, heavy materials. She was a thin girl who covered herself from neck to foot, navy knee socks, black pumps. It was a uniform of sorts.
    She walked quickly in front of him, leading into the sitting room. "Would you like tea?" It was early afternoon. Kevin had eaten lunch only an hour before.
    "Yes, of course," he said.
    The house hadn't changed, either. It never would. In Kevin's mind it was a shrine, a museum. It reeked of lemon polish, dark rubbed wood, Queen Anne furniture, amber illumination, coolness. He had come here often just for the atmosphere, as if willing himself into this world. It was just before Lydia's father had left that he had first come into the house; but even then, it was obviously a place that Eileen Connel had created, a place she owned, fostered, tended like a garden. The house itself was as much a creation of her mind as her writing.
    Lydia, too: was as much a creation of her mother as the house; indeed, she was so much a product of her mother's dominating vision that she had remained, a fixture in a house apart from the world, when her two brothers were long gone. Her mother's domination had become as oxygen to Lydia; like a gnarled root, she had taken her place among the Victorian knickknacks, the ponderously tolling clocks with slow pendulums, the dark wood, the dusty confines of small rooms and dim, sour light.
    "Do you still take sugar?" Lydia asked.
    "Yes."
    They passed through the narrow hallway, through the mahogany-framed doorway, into the sitting room. The polished ebony baby grand piano was there on the right. Its white teeth grinned at Kevin, yellowing Mozart sheet music propped on its brow. He danced his fingers over the high keys, let the tone of the piano make him remember this room, this sound.
    "Do you still play?" he asked.
    "Yes." Her pale eyes came up to meet his briefly; the brief, sad smile. "She likes to hear it in the evenings." A catch of laugh. "She knows the sound of the phonograph, I can't fool her."
    "You're expecting the doctor?"
    Again her eyes met his, pale, flat blue. Her gaze lingered, perhaps with the thought in front of her. Mother. "She . . . had a very bad night. Her mind . . ."
    "May I see her?"
    "I'll get tea."
    Lydia left him to the room. The furniture, damask, photos in gilded frames on the tables, Lydia, Eddie, and Bobby, the father absent. There had never been domestication in the house, Kevin knew; only living, and waiting for Danny Sullivan to leave for good. Eileen Connel had not hid her rejection of her husband; it had bled, with a kind of surety Kevin longed to understand, into the corners of the foundation and turned in on itself.
    In the end,