Free Death in The Life by Dorothy Salisbury Davis

do?”
    “I love Yeats. I would like to see them, yes.”
    “They make nice noise.”
    “When am I invited for?”
    “It opens Friday night. That’ll be a shambles. Come on Saturday. A few minutes before eight and I’ll walk you through.”
    “Thank you, Pete. I’m looking forward to it.”
    “Take care.”
    He had only needed one dime.
    She found herself listening to what seemed like the echo of her own words. Thank you, Pete. I’m looking forward to it. She thought of Mrs. Ryan standing on tiptoe in Mr. Kanakas’s wanting to be in on everything, but careful not to touch.
    Touch, touch, touch.
    “Dearest Jeff, I’ll talk to Doctor about Paris in June…” April in New York… April is the crudest month… They had honeymooned on an island off the coast of Maine. They had bathed in the rock pools… two different pools, his and hers. After dark they had made love, retaining a certain anonymity.

10
    J UANITA PLAYED IN FRONT of the shop so much of the time Julie wondered if Mrs. Rodriguez wasn’t psyching her into the baby-sitting role in spite of the cordon sanitaire. She often did find herself looking out to see how the child was doing. Why wasn’t she in school? Why, when other children in the block were not in school, wasn’t Juanita playing with some of them? The child hauled a cardboard box bump, bump, bump down the stairs and took her dolls out one by one and seated them against the wall beneath Julie’s window. That solemn little face was always bobbing up and down in the window as she went from doll to doll to punish each for an imaginary wickedness.
    Julie did more reading than writing, and a lot of watching; she knew she was waiting. Five days had passed since Rita’s last visit. She avoided Eighth Avenue, not wanting to see her there. If she was there. The rodeo was still in town, the trick from Wyoming. Now and then a seeker came for a throw of the Tarot, Friend Julie’s card in hand. Always women, bored, stuck, discontented women who wanted something about which they were calling to do nothing. They came for a fix. Julie had made seventy-four dollars to date. Seventy-four. Seven, four, and one were numbers that often recurred in her life. She lived on Seventeenth Street. Her childhood phone number had been 7714, Rita was going on seventeen, and Pete lived at 741. Whenever she doodled in numbers, it was with a combination of the three. And on the first of June Jeff was going to be forty-one, he had reminded her in his letter. She decided to invent a layout of the Tarot, seven, four, and one. At the moment it occurred to her to wonder if Juanita might by any chance be seven years old, she leaned back in her chair and looked out the window in time to see a sleek giant of a man stoop and roughly push the child out of his way. Both Mrs. Rodriguez and Julie responded. He looked up to the window above and down to the door, then up to the window again. Julie drew back without opening the door. He was a caricature, but of what? The cream-colored, tight-fitting suit with its braided lapels, contoured with muscles. Sulky good looks and wavy red hair that was almost orange, a dye job that must have curdled. He kept answering Mrs. Rodriguez back, his soft mouth curling into the shape of what Julie was sure were obscenities. Finally he took some coins from his pocket and flung them on the ground for the child to gather. He came into the shop, the scent of his male cologne like an emanation.
    Julie waited, her hands fisted in the pockets of her smock.
    He looked at her as though it was she who was ridiculous. “Are you Salvation Army or what?”
    “There’s a sign in the window. What can I do for you?”
    “They call me Mack around the neighborhood. Now do you know?”
    “I’ve heard the name,” Julie said.
    “I don’t like Jesus freaks messing with my girls.”
    “You got the wrong address, Mister Mack. I don’t think I could even call myself a friend of Jesus.”
    He sat down in the chair out