Eden Close by Anita Shreve Page A

says. "They're small strokes, and there's medication that can be given. And I should have realized..."
    "It's not your fault," says Andrew. He takes a sip of iced tea. It has been made from a powdered mix. It has sugar in it, which he doesn't like. Now that his eyes are adjusting, the color is coming up on the walls: a pale green he remembers now, a green of hospitals or of government buildings. He recalls that this particular shade of green, reflecting off the walls, changed the color of your skin. Or was it his mother who said that, shaking her head critically, and he noticed it himself later, coming for Eden or to collect his weekly money? A sickly green, he thinks now, though the effect is muted without the light.
    The kitchen is like his mother's in its layout, and both
have the same rounded Magic Chef stoves, but there is otherwise little resemblance. There are no signs on the counters or on the table to indicate that anyone ever cooks here, or ever comes here—not a crusted sugar bowl, not a toaster oven with crumbs on the bottom tray, not a misshapen pot-holder made by a child. On the wall beside the fridge, where in his mother's kitchen there is a framed collage of snapshots—most of them Billy as a baby—there is only a plastic wall clock. And most disconcerting of all, though perhaps troubling only to Andrew, who has missed the intervening nineteen years of the evolution of this house, there is no sign that Jim was ever here—not a trace. Always, he remembers, there were coats and felt hats on the hooks at the back of the door, a row of heavy leather shoes by the stove, a pile of magazines on the table—
Life, Reader's Digest, Popular Mechanics
(this last a family joke in his own house)—and Jim's bowl of fruit, ready to be peeled, never empty. Not only is there now no fruit in the room; there is not a hint of anything edible at all. Perhaps it's different in the bedroom upstairs. He thinks of his father's dresser in his own mother's bedroom, kept intact, as though any minute his father might come back and need the items on the linen runner. The windows, he notices, have no curtains on them—just the shades. He tries to recall if this was always true.
    "You'll be selling, then," she says. She takes a sip of iced tea. He remembers this trait of hers: how she is able to conduct entire conversations without ever once looking at you. He forces himself to study her face, and in doing so sees again, in the dim light, as has been happening of late, the woman she used to be, the profile more defined, superimposed over the face across the table.
    "Well, I'll have to sell," he says, knowing his steady gaze is making her uncomfortable. "There's no reason now to keep it."
    "No," she says, touching her hair at the nape of her neck. "No, I suppose not. Though with new people coming..."
    She doesn't finish her thought. Andrew repeats what he has said earlier. "I'm doing some things to tidy up the place—not much; just cosmetic, really. It's no trouble to lend a hand here too, while I'm at it. The grass, of course. And your back stoop needs fixing. It's dangerous. You could break your leg on it. And I could put back that shutter that's fallen from the upstairs window."
    "Oh," she says, taken aback. "No. Not the shutter. I ... I haven't got it. And it's not necessary. The steps, if you like, yes. I'll pay you, of course."
    "I couldn't—"
    "I'll pay you," she says, cutting him off.
    Her face, her aged one, comes clearly into focus. Beneath a faint dusting of powder, he sees a delicate calligraphy of lines around her eyes. Her eyes are hard to look at, but he would say, in telling someone about her (which he thinks fie may never have done), that she is still quite handsome. It is not simply that she has aged well (she seems not to have the deep scoring that so changed his mother's face these last several years); it is, rather, a particular something she holds in reserve—her shoulders held