The men left, holding the railing on their way down the stairs. David came out onto the second porch stair and watched them walk to their car. “We should do this again,” he called after them. Ted turned back and waved, tucked his wallet into his back pocket, and then waved again, opening the car door. Samson kept his back to the porch but raised his gloved hand to the window when he was in the car. David waved back and saw it all as a good sign.
39
AFTER HIS FRIENDS WERE GONE, David noticed that the woman from the salon was sitting on his porch. She had been sitting around the corner of the house, so Samson and Ted likely wouldn’t have seen her upon their departure, but David saw the corner of her salon apron, the cuff of her blue jeans. A thermos and a bag of pears rested by the chair. He walked down the porch steps and approached her from the lawn, eye level with her sensible shoes. “I showed myself a seat,” she said. Her lips were broad and pursed. He remembered how he had seen an ear within them, which seemed like a strange thought in the daylight but not fully outside the stone-walled boundaries of possibility.
“Aileen.”
She stirred the tea in the thermos with a tiny silver spoon, which she slipped into her apron pocket. She reached into her lap and held up a pear. The fruit’s colors seemed too bright against her hand, but he accepted it and placed it on the porch. “I saw you walking in the park earlier,” she said. “You seemed happy. It looked like you wanted company.”
The rocking chair she was sitting in had dug small grooves into the porch over the years, little imprints in the wood that made the chair rock on a track. It made it so the seated individual could rock back and forth within the track, but if he or she tried to shift the chair in another direction — to face the top of the street instead of the corner — the chair would find its groove again and slide back into place. “Who were those men?” she asked.
“Friends.”
“You should eat that pear.”
“Thank you. I just drank a lot of water, though.”
“They are delicious this time of year.”
“Too much water, really.”
She looked toward the driveway. “Frances’s car is gone,” she said, running her fingers along the upper hem of her salon apron at the point where it tied around her neck. “I brought you some pears,” she said. “You have a lovely home.”
He watched the mechanism of Aileen’s leg from his position beside the porch. “City took the car.”
“I’ve been thinking about Frances,” Aileen said. She rocked with one leg crossed over the other. The toe of her sneaker touched the ground. As she flexed and pointed her toe, David saw the calf muscle engage. “I keep thinking about Frances. We used to drink a cup of coffee before the customers showed up in the morning. She brought different types of nondairy creamers for us to try.”
David remembered his own morning routine at the dental office. “I miss her too.”
“Because I have a lactose issue.” She touched one of the pears in its bag with the tip of her sneaker. “It’s unlike Frances to go out the way she did.”
“I guess endings don’t always follow the story,” David said. “Some people don’t spend a day of their lives in a hospital until those last two weeks. Everything is different at the end in a way that hastens its coming.”
“Still, it was unlike her to go outside in the middle of winter, wearing what she wore.” Aileen pointed and flexed and sipped her tea. “She wasn’t wearing any shoes, right? She was out there barefoot, in the middle of January, snow on the ground.”
“How did you find that out?”
She waved her hand, scattering steam. “It’s all online. I was remembering the time I went out to get the paper in my slippers and they soaked through. I gave myself pneumonia. Right then. I could feel the virus enter my body through my foot. It was the worst feeling of my life, what I remember of it. Every day, if I was aware of my surroundings, I actively wanted to die. Frances brought me movies she rented from the library and told me to keep them as long as I wanted. She sat with me. And something got her out there in the snow without slippers on?” She held her face upward. “I’m messing up my face,” she said.
“She didn’t have pneumonia.”
“I know. Athlete’s foot, cedar allergy, hypothermia, wounds, but no pneumonia.” She saw his look. “Police files, online.”
“Why would the police release that information?”
“You’d have to ask them, David. Probably to get the national media involved. I figure we haven’t had a satellite truck in town since the last Harvest Fest. Now there’s a spectacle to get people interested, show the men and women of our police force frowning and shaking their heads. They have this video of your house all lit up at night. It looks beautiful. They keep showing it on a loop.”
“They’re filming my house at night?”
“It really does look beautiful, you should check it out. A real winter scene, cozy. Right at the end it shows you walking past one of the front windows.” She pointed. “That one, I think.”
David wrapped one hand around the porch rail’s column. He determined that with the correct angle of approach, he could reach through the columns, grab Aileen firmly by the sneaker, and pull her out of the chair in one motion. “This is an invasion of privacy,” he said. “They’re trying to smoke me out.”
“That would suggest you were hiding something, wouldn’t it?”
“I’m not hiding anything.”
“Well then, they’re only curious.”
“It doesn’t make sense that what they’re doing would change based on what I’m doing.”
“Smoke is in the eye of the beholder.” Aileen laughed. “I just came up with that. Would you believe?”
David looked at the bag of pears. They seemed different from the ones he had just bought, somehow smoother and more perfect, as if they had been created in a laboratory. He was worried that she would want to watch him eat one. He had his suspicions about Aileen.
“You have such a beautiful home,” Aileen said. “How much did you pay for it?”
“My parents dealt with some of the mortgage,” David said. “We were taking care of my father.”
“What a treat to live in a place like this.”
“We would rather have had our own house. It was good to help out when we could.”
“Well, I’m sure you were a big help,” Aileen said, standing. “I believe it’s time for my nap. I’ll leave you to your afternoon in your beautiful home.”
“Have a safe trip,” David said, watching the woman walk away. She left the bag of pears on the porch. He considered leaving them there but feared she might return and see that he had. He picked up the bag and took it through the kitchen and out the back door. One by one, he threw the pears overhand into the woods.
40
DAVID HAD CARED for every tooth of the ones he loved. When he visited his mother, he brought his dental tools in a leather bag and performed a cursory exam with her lying down on a couch in the common area. He could wheedle and plead and get his father in for cleanings every eighteen to twenty months, but Franny kept her yearly appointment. Her teeth were the healthiest he had seen, including gum-model sets in brochures he displayed in the office. They looked and felt stronger than the resin models on the shelf. He would observe her X-rays after she left, experiencing the keen sense of pride one might feel with a child. He considered framing them in the office, but he knew that other patients would feel envy toward the perfect teeth and might even blame David’s expert care for the sugar and neglect that brought them in to begin with.
His father’s teeth were a model of such neglect. A lifetime of dental abandon had started early, when David’s grandmother claimed that toothpaste was an unnecessary and vulgar expense. No matter how advanced the dental water jets and waxed flosses and prescription pastes David pushed upon the man, his father’s teeth aged poorly with him. David used to watch his father breathing through his mouth in the chair by the window, cultivating scores of bacteria in the deepening crevices, parts per million untold, the invaders shoring up in preparation to go to work that night when the man would lay his obviously unbrushed mouth on the pillow, smacking his lips, saliva rushing forth and infusing the mouth with the moist warmth of an incubator, the perfect environment for a healthy population of ruin. “The dental profession is a farce of control,” he said when his son tried to show him the problems.