Free Small World by Tabitha King Page B

you, Nick?’ he addressed a shiny new luxury automobile being huckstered by a Swedish tennis star. He cast a worried glance at Lucy, silent in her rocking chair. He didn’t have the slightest idea what had gone wrong, only that Lucy was unhappy and it seemed to be Nick Weiler’s fault. He liked Nick, but Lucy’s stolid misery provoked a strong displeasure with the fellow.
    ‘Turn it off, will you, Pop?’ Lucy asked abruptly. She stood up and stretched. ‘That’s all over.’
    The older man watched her walk upstairs, seemingly only tired. He wished he knew what was wrong. Vexed, mildly infected with her depression, he turned the volume down and settled in to watch the late night news.
    A few days later, he draped himself into a chaise and read a newspaper in the shade of his straw hat. Laurie and Zach played with a handful of neighborhood kids within sight and hearing. A transistor radio reported a ball game in progress from its perch on a nearby picnic table.
    It was all pleasantly somnolent, the sort of spring day he had come to savor. A small cloud hove into view in the shape of Nick Weiler’s tapping little Mercedes.
    Mr. Novick waved at Nick and took off his hat long enough to tip at the workshop. His speckled pate gleamed in the sun and then the straw hat came down firmly over it. He grinned a broad, dentured smile, and shook Nick’s hand in passing. There wasn’t anything much to say besides how-dos. He hoped, for the sake of a fine day, that they would make it up.
    Nick, walking around to the workshop, was struck with the thought that Mr. Novick was less than ten years his senior. Disability, alcoholism, and bitterness had aged Lucy’s father so that he looked and acted twenty years older. He had put even his failures behind him and lived in resigned contentment with what he had salvaged, a backwater life with his daughter. Nick supposed he was grateful for any kind of family at all.
    Lucy rarely talked about her father, or the disintegration of her parents’ marriage, which she was old enough to remember, or her own marriage to Harrison Douglas, Jr. How long had they been seeing each other before she would talk without apology about her kids? She was so tightly furled; he was only beginning to understand that what she held back, in reticence or discretion or her own need for privacy, weighed against him. He had not gained her complete trust. And he knew it was only partly her fault.
    He leaned against the doorpost silently a moment, watching her work. She looked up briefly, to see who cast a shadow over her, and acknowledged his uninvited presence with a sudden bloom of color over her cheekbones.
    ‘What do you want?’ she said abruptly. Her fingers pushed sandpaper over wood with a vicious grating sound.
    ‘A fair hearing.’
    ‘I’m busy,’ she responded. Fumbling among tools on the worktable, she seized an X-acto blade and began shaving the thin piece of wood before her.
    ‘I never would have expected this attitude from you, Lucy,’ he said quietly.
    ‘Really.’ Lucy didn’t look at him. The clutter on her worktable might have been the contents of a treasure chest, so riveted was she by it. ‘Evidently we don’t know each other as well as we thought we did.’
    ‘I thought you might be a little more mature—’ he was cut off by another savage attack on the wood with the sandpaper. It was almost a relief; he felt like he was saying all the wrong things, and couldn’t help it.
    ‘I don’t care about Leyna Shaw. Or Dolly. Any of those women,’ Lucy said suddenly, her voice high with anger.
    ‘Lucy,’ he said, hating the pleading in his own voice, ‘nobody was cheated or ill-used. I slept with some lonely women. Not even that many. They weren’t lonely for a while. Is that so bad?’
    ‘And you got money for the Dalton, or wherever you were working. Or something, a painting or a piece of sculpture or an invitation to the right party.’ The tools on the table clinked and clattered