Free The Glass Butterfly by Louise Marley Page B

Surely he must know by now that any argument could set off one of Elvira’s tantrums. Even at this distance she could see the signora ’s face darken, her eyes contracting like those of an ill-tempered crow. Doria tried to hurry around the side of the house, toward the kitchen door, but it turned out that, too, was a mistake.
    â€œWhere are your shoes? Your stockings? ”
    Elvira sounded like a crow, too. She screeched and cawed and quarreled, and once she got started, nothing would stop her. Doria stopped where she was, and held up her single shoe and the wad of her stockings. “Here they are, signora.”
    Puccini laughed, and Doria thought he was trying to lighten his wife’s mood. “Look, Elvira, Bica has the other shoe! I think she’s trying to kill it.”
    Elvira said, “I won’t have anyone in my house running around barefoot like a common village slut!”
    â€œI—I was just reading in the garden—”
    â€œWhat are you doing with my husband?”
    Doria turned to the maestro, hoping he would explain, but Puccini had evidently comprehended what was about to happen after all. He slipped quietly in through the iron-and-glass bow window that connected the garden to the house, and disappeared. Even the two dogs abandoned her, trotting after their master. Doria felt a flush of resentment burn in her cheeks. She stared at her long toes, afraid to show her angry face. “Nothing, signora,” she said. “I wasn’t doing anything. I was asleep on the bench when the signore came home.”
    â€œHah!” Elvira said, and slammed the window shut with a bang.
    Â 
    â€œHah!”
    Tory jerked awake. It was still dark, and cold. Only the faint ghost light of the sea found its way through her open bedroom door to shimmer on the mirror above the bureau and sparkle faintly on the gold butterfly in the paperweight. She lay a moment, rubbing her eyes, trying to orient herself. She put her hand to her chest, and found her skin hot, her nightgown damp with perspiration.
    There had been new people in this dream: a mother, and a man who seemed vaguely familiar. Thinking of him made her uneasy for some reason she couldn’t identify. It seemed if she could just concentrate long enough, remember what she had dreamed, she might know who he was, or at least who he represented in her psyche.
    But then, the dream would evaporate soon enough, as dreams did. Sometimes her clients had felt their dreams were significant, that they held clues to their waking lives. Tory, though she listened and encouraged the lines of thought they created, had never been convinced. For her, a cigar was always just a cigar. Or so she had thought.
    She threw back her blankets and put her feet on the cold floor. So different from the warm, patchy grass in the world of her dream. She was cold here, even in the daytime. Perhaps her dreams were just her suppressed longing for a warm, sunny climate.
    She had found a long zippered sweatshirt on the remainder table at a little shop on the main street of the town, and decided it would work as a bathrobe. She pulled it on, and zipped it, letting the hood hang down her back. She put on a pair of thick socks, and padded out to the kitchen to fill the teakettle. The stove clock read four A.M. Too early to go for a walk, too early to eat breakfast. Too late to try to go back to sleep.
    She turned on the radio—early music, Hildegard of Bingen, she thought—and carried her teacup into the living room. It was becoming a habit, she feared, waking on East Coast time and sitting in the armchair watching the tide creep up the beach. Solitude was becoming a habit, too. She tried to think when she had last spoken with anyone other than the clerk at the market, which was hardly conversation, or the station attendant who pumped gas for the Beetle.
    It was time, she told herself, to do something different. Idleness didn’t suit her. She needed to go