Free Evenfall by Liz Michalski Page B

strings.” His face clouds. “Unless you’re seeing someone. Is that it?”
    “No.” The answer pops out before Andie has a chance to think. “No, I’m not seeing anyone.”
    “All right.” He grins. “Is eight okay? I could pick you up then.”
    Against her better judgment, Andie nods. Cort’s grin gets wider, and he backs away, as if afraid she’ll change her mind. “Eight it is. See you then.”
    “Right,” Andie says, but Cort has rounded the corner of the house. He’s forgotten the empty beer bottles, and Andie bends to pick them up. She’s still holding them in her hands when the truck drives past. Cort honks the horn, and she raises a bottle in mock salute. The brown glass catches the sun and glints like a light on dark water.

Gert
    THE dress that clings to Gert’s calves is damp with creek water and heavy with the promise of coming rain. Of the three dresses she owns, this one—blue cotton sprigged with white flowers—is her favorite. Her mother hemmed it with tiny, precise stitches, her face tired under the glow of the kerosene lamp.
    She walks along the creek bank, the muscles in her thighs bunching and releasing smoothly. When she glances down, there are no age spots on her hands, and the braid that trails past her shoulders is thick and lustrous. She knows she has been walking a long time, but she is not tired.
    The air here is thick, a cross between water and glass, the type of air in which words or thoughts can hang, suspended, hidden, yet almost visible.
    “I thought you might not come,” he says, stepping out from behind the oak tree that grows just where the bank curves away. His face is smooth and unlined. He’s thin, but with the leanness of a boy, not the wasting that came later with age. His eyes are unchanged; the same blue, open-hearted gaze that makes her catch her breath each time he looks at her. At first, she wondered how no one else noticed the intensity of that gaze. In time, she realized that he looks at everyone in the same penetrating way. This is part of his charm. His eyes are slanted at the corners, like a cat’s.
    “It took a while to get away. I’ve been home such a little time, they’re still happy to see me,” she says. She does not apologize. There is no apology sufficient for what she is about to do. Even if there was, it would not belong to Frank.
    He doesn’t answer, just takes her arm, and so they wander together, dizzy with touch. After a month of stealing glances, of letting their knees bump under the table and their shoulders brush as they walk along, Gert expected their first stolen time together would be purely for the ease of their bodies. So she’s surprised when he begins telling her about the book he’s reading, a leather-bound edition of Melville he found in an attic trunk. He talks about high school and his plans to enlist this summer when he graduates; he asks her what she’ll do when she finishes nursing school. At first, she thinks he’s nervous, but when he asks after her father, the old man she’s left rotting in the shack she calls home, she understands. He’s being kind, giving her a chance to change her mind before they do any real damage.
    But Gert has walked the four miles to the creek knowingwhere each step leads. If she were going to turn back, she would have done so before this. She stops walking, takes her arm away, and sees sadness and resignation in his face, but no relief. That’s when she kisses him. Just as their lips touch, he dissolves into mist, the drops cool and wet upon her face.
    Gert wakes from the dream as hungry for that kiss as she’s been for any meal in her life. The loss follows her around all morning like a pesky fly, making her irritable and short-tempered. She’s late to the house again, and when she arrives Andie’s already started clearing out one of the spare bedrooms. The walls are papered with pink and yellow roses that climb from baseboard to ceiling, smothering the room in a riot of color.