Free The Chrome Suite by Sandra Birdsell Page A

read the bright spots in her cheeks, her unusual silence when Bill came into the kitchen and they continued the card game, as concern for Jill.
    “Strange crew, those.” Reginald turns away from the window as Margaret steps inside the store.
    “Eggs, Josh’s sign?” Margaret asks.
    Reginald shrugs his lack of concern. “You heard from that man of yours?”
    “Due home tomorrow, why?”
    They’re interrupted by Garth, Reg’s middle son, as he bounds up from the basement, singing. Margaret smiles as she notices his shoes. “They’re blue all right, but not suede,” she says, “so they don’t count.” She tilts her cheek up for him to kiss.
    “My favourite aunt.”
    “Where in hell does that guy get his money, that’s what I’d like to know,” Reginald says, asking the question he has asked constantly since the opening of Josh’s shop across the street. Reg has stopped stocking televisions and radios because he can’t compete. Loyalty to a three-generation family business wears thin in the face of a bargain. He’s at the window constantly, shaking his head in disgust when he sees one of his old customers enter Josh’s store.
    “Have you heard the latest about the ‘strange crew’?” Margaret says casually and notes Reginald’s quick attention. Garth squats in front of a carton and begins unpacking it, listening, she knows. “Thelatest is that Adele is really Elsa’s mother. Not the older woman.”
    Reginald snorts. “You just figured that one out?” He goes behind the counter to a shelf and takes down a box of account books. He begins to lay out the individual books, each lettered with a customer’s name. “Think Tim will come in when he’s home and put something down?” Margaret is stung with embarrassment. “You want the real latest on that bunch?”
    “Sure.” She’s thankful for the distraction.
    “Adele goes into the city at least three times a week.”
    Garth abandons his pretence of work and adds, “She gets on the bus at night and comes back the next morning.”
    “So?” Margaret asks.
    “Dolled up, fit to kill,” Garth says.
    “So maybe that babe is bringing home a bit of bacon,” Reginald says. He winks at his son. “Plying the trade in the city.”
    “What trade?” Margaret asks.
    Reg laughs. “Guess.”
    Margaret’s stomach tightens with a picture of Mel in the front seat and the woman’s thigh rubbing against his leg. She senses Reg’s and Garth’s keen attention as they wait for her reaction. She reaches for the wall switch and flicks it on. The fan above their heads whirrs, stirring the air. “You’re full of prunes,” she says. “When it comes to gossip you’re an old woman, Reggie.”
    She goes down into the basement to the coffee room to set water to boil. As she passes through the dimly lit interior she immediately senses the presence of Bill. Then she sees him through a row of shelving as he stands against the far wall. She sees just his head, framed in a rectangle of fluorescent light. He looks down, absorbed in a task. She has watched him secretly as he rewired their house, up on a ladder, arms and face caked with plaster powder, whistling softly as he worked. She invented reasons to enter rooms where sheknew he was and realized by the stiffening of his spine that his tension matched hers. She painted the veranda’s wicker chairs white and carried them upstairs and set them on either side of a table in front of the bedroom window. From there she can see the light in his bedroom at night or his truck backing down the driveway in the morning. She began to drape her nightgown over the back of a chair instead of folding it and setting it back into her nightie drawer. She arranged perfume bottles on the table and set in its centre a tin of Chantilly dusting powder, the lid opened, the powder puff flecked with scented beige granules, as soft as skin.
Just as I pictured
. She’d thought that on closer inspection Bill would have seen more than he had