Chapter 2
Two Months Earlier
Florence Greene sits up slowly, steadies herself at the edge of the bed, and regards the bright line of sunlight coming from beneath the shade. Another day. The wealth of it!
She walks over to the window and raises the shade to look out at her small and tidy front lawn, at her white fence lined with watercolor pansies.
Aren’t they ever something, she thinks. A paintbox in petals.
Here comes a young woman jogging down the street wearing shorts and a sleeveless t-shirt and a baseball cap, her ponytail coming out of a hole in the back of the cap and swinging like a metronome.
She has those white plugs in her ears that Flo thinks makes people look like aliens.
Three houses away, coming down the front steps, is a woman whom Flo has seen but not properly met; Flo doesn’t even know her name.
She looks like she’s about fifty, and the expression on her face is always earnest and a little bit sad, rather like that of a child who’s been chastised and has vowed to do better.
She’s walking quickly toward her car, parked on the street, carrying a large duffel bag over her shoulder.
Flo has heard of people who go to private homes to do hair; maybe she’s one of those.
It used to be that Flo knew all her neighbors, but the block has turned over, and most people keep to themselves.
At night, if you look in their windows, mostly what you see are TV screens so big they remind Flo of drive-in movies.
Well, she must get to it. She dresses in a blue shift and sneakers, washes up in the hall bathroom, and makes her way downstairs and into the kitchen, where she measures out coffee for four cups.
While it brews, she sits at the little round table where last night she put out a never-before-opened box of floral stationery and a blue ballpoint pen.
After she has her raisin toast and coffee, she’ll begin.
She wants to write to Ruthie, the woman who as a child grew up next door, and with whom Flo has kept in touch since Ruthie married and moved away.
They don’t write often, but they write honestly; even when Ruthie was a little girl she had never cottoned much to small talk.
When she was twelve years old, Ruthie had asked Flo, “Do we bare our souls to each other?” and Flo had answered, “I believe we do.”
“Fine, then,” Ruthie had said. “Because later on I have some important things to tell you.” She’d held up a finger in the air. “Important with a capital I.”
Now Flo thinks she has some Important things to tell Ruthie.
Where to start is the thing. Flo has a sudden image of herself backing into the kitchen one hot summer day many years ago, her arms laden with tomatoes and flowers from the garden.
Here she came, pushing through the screen door with her hind end, her husband, Terrence, sitting at the table with his newspaper and coffee, watching her.
“Why don’t you try coming in frontwards?
” he had asked, and she’d said, “This is just how I do.”
So then.