A Beauty by Connie Gault Page B

up each time and made him remember the other times she’d said it. He thought of them now, not the individual times, but the glint of them, stretched like beads through his childhood. He remembered Elena’s pale face gleaming from the Lincoln that first night, in Addison, while they waited for the hotel owner to open the door. That was happiness, that girl in his car. He felt as if someone had snatched his life away. He started the Lincoln, shaking his head to clear his vision. He looked back a last time. She wasn’t walking fast, couldn’t, he realized, in thepumps he’d bought her, of soft light brown leather with a strap near the ankle, shoes that fit her like a glove. She was ruining those shoes by walking on gravel. That was one thing she hadn’t considered. He didn’t notice she’d forgotten her bag, or he would have heaved it out into the ditch.
    She heard him gun the motor and take off, and turned to watch him go. The empty feeling, which he’d dispelled during their few days together, came back, familiar and almost comforting. Soon she couldn’t see the car anymore, only the trail of dust it left behind, and when the dust from his leaving had died down, she was surprised to see that the sky above the highway continued hazy. A whole minute after he’d gone, she was still standing there staring at the spot where the roadster had stopped. Surely, the air held way more dust than one vehicle could have raised. It was unnaturally white dust, too, hovering like a low-hanging cloud over the road and the fields. Then she saw that the cloud hung all around her, and was all lit up, as if each particle was glowing from within. And when she turned to continue what she’d started, she saw that the little hamlet down the road, sitting pillowed in silvery grasses, knee-high foxtails and things like that, shimmered in it like a mirage.

GILROY
    I was the one she saw. I was that girl walking along the railway tracks, looking lonely. I didn’t see her arrive because I had my back to Gilroy. It was such bad luck. I was facing away from the intersection where Bill Longmore stopped his car and Elena Huhtala got out and left him. I was trudging along between the rails, inhaling the hot black creosote smell of the ties. I loved that smell. Just thinking about it can make me feel like a kid again, with summer all around me. That day I was mooching along, wishing I could live in someone else’s house – wasting my time on wishing, when I might have been looking and seeing, when I might have been experiencing what I could only, from evidence painstakingly gathered later, imagine. And I have often imagined it since; it was of such importance to me, the moment of her arrival in Gilroy, that liquid droplet in that pearly day, the car door opening, her wavy, honey-coloured hair, one bare, tanned leg then another as she placed her feet on the running board and looked up to find a pale sun in the sky, the size of a coin tossed high. Her brown dress clinging to herthighs as she stepped down to the gravel and the spurge at the side of the road.
    As for my wishing, and the house I wanted to live in, that house existed. It had pictures on the walls and shelves full of books and other attributes I hadn’t yet seen or guessed at. It was a small bungalow at the edge of town, where I thought I could have a room to myself, a cool, quiet room where I could be alone. I had chosen the house, but I hadn’t been invited in.
    Probably I was conscious of looking lonely, out there alone on the bare prairie, moseying along on a hot day when anyone with brains bigger than a grasshopper’s would have found some shade; probably I was hoping to make the impression of loneliness if anyone went by and noticed me.
    I’m sure it was the very moment Elena Huhtala stepped down from the car that I looked up in the opposite direction, and got stopped. I had to stop because way down at the end of the tracks, where they met at the horizon, a big whiteness was