Free The Infinite Tides by Christian Kiefer Page A

concrete, her words punctuated by a short hop as if the sentence caused a physical reaction: “Will you be here later?”
    He wondered if her mother might intervene but Jennifer said nothing. “When later?” he said.
    “Mom, when?” Nicole asked.
    “Maybe it would be more convenient if we invited Mr. Corcoran over to our house for dinner,” Jennifer said. “That way you can ask him your questions and he can eat something and everyone’s happy.”
    “Yeah, Captain Keith can come over!” Nicole said.
    “What do you say, Captain Keith?” Jennifer said. “We can’t do tonight. Homeowners association. Maybe you’re going to that too?”
    “No, I didn’t know about that.”
    “You’re welcome to come, you know. You’re a homeowner, after all, even if you’re selling.”
    “Oh,” he said. “No, I don’t want to go to that.”
    “I don’t blame you,” she said. “A lot of busybodies mostly.” She giggled, the sound of a much younger woman, a girl. “I do like your honesty,” she said. Then she giggled again.
    He looked at the ground in embarrassment. No words would come.
    “How’s Thursday?” She looked at him and smiled and once again did not break the contact and he felt a short surge in his lower gut. The concrete felt warm under his feet even though the air around him was still cool and there was the faintest hint of a breeze. He could feel the little girl looking up at him but he continued to stare into Jennifer’s eyes and she stared back at him, her smile closing into a mischievous grin. He did not know if he should break the contact, knew only that he did not want to do so.
    “Thursday?” he said at last. “I think that sounds fine.”
    He tried to resume painting but the attention to detail that was nearly automatic when he had first begun the task had become difficult tofind, his strokes wobbling and sloppy. At first he was merely distracted because he was thinking of the woman who lived across the street. But there was something else too: a kind of intrusion that overlay those thoughts and would not be ignored. When his phone began to buzz and he looked at it and saw that it was Barb—her timing perfect as always—his irritation reached a pinnacle and he clapped the phone closed and returned it to his pocket. She had continued to call him every day or two, although he could not determine to what purpose. It had not been to share her grief, or at least if that had been her purpose it was unclear. Instead she would simply engage him in some variety of small talk, asking about his day, telling him about her own. At first, when he was still in Houston, he welcomed the calls because her voice was familiar and even though she had already told him that she had moved out of their home and would not return, he needed that familiar contact. Now, though, her telephone calls had come to feel like increasingly futile exercises. Why call him every day if only to remind him that she was gone and that it was, in some way he could not identify, his fault?
    “Shit.”
    He had dragged the roller against an outlet and stood there surveying the chaos of new paint on the living room wall, a ragged block of eggshell in a field of yellow. Guilt. That was what the intrusion was: simple guilt. It was as if his wife—or ex-wife or whatever she was now—was somehow peering into his thoughts, watching him as he secretly fantasized about the woman across the street. There was no logic to the feeling at all. She had been the one to leave, not him. He had asked her to stay long enough to at least discuss what had happened and how they might proceed into some future neither of them could imagine, but she would not wait for him to return from the mission. Her own return to the house—this house—would be only long enough to collect its contents into a U-Haul to drive back to the Atlanta suburb where she had grown up and where her mother still resided, and this she had done while he was still in orbit, two