Wreath by Judy Christie Page A

property, creaked. Her tenant walked onto the landing, looked around, and went back in. Billy had mentioned that the woman was a good tenant. Other than that Faye knew little about her.
    The young woman stepped back onto the porch, and Faye moved into the shadows near the store, watching.

    Julia pretended not to notice her landlady, an aloof woman who seldom spoke and refused to do any repairs, in return for cheap rent, paid on time. Looking around the little porch for her running shoes, she felt like she was spying and went back in, glancing out the window. Mrs. Durham looked around the alley as though she’d never been there before.
    Distracted from her search for the shoes, Julia walked over to the calendar she had drawn for summer, reluctant to mark the big
X
on the previous day. The days passed too fast, and she had canvases to paint, pottery to fire, training to do.
    She scoured the tiny apartment, rewinding her memory to think where the shoes might be. Stopping to study her latest painting, still on the easel, she touched the canvas with a hesitant finger. An oil of a barn on the outskirts of town, it was framed in weathered wood from the falling-down building. The piece bored her.
    She wondered what the customer would say if she offered an impressionistic pastel of the falling-down building instead. She had painted that one for fun, for herself, and she liked the way it looked hanging on her whitewashed plank wall.
    Finding her shoes under the bed, next to a stack of other pieces of art, some finished, some abandoned midway, she got ready for her run. She was late and in a bad mood and felt an unreasonable resentment against her landlady. Must be nice to inherit a store like that and not have to work.
    Julia dreaded the ongoing continuing education course that would occupy most of her day and hoped the run might wear her out enough to make the class bearable. If it hadn’t been required to keep her job as a teacher at Landry High, she would have skipped it.
    In-service
, they called it on the official paperwork.
In-servant
was more like it. Why should she have to take a course, for no pay, during vacation?
    Julia longed to spend her months off creating. She wanted to teach students how to create, wished she weren’t stuck in a social studies class. She finished lacing her shoes and jammed her hair under a cap, all the while wondering what was worse—a social studies class or the artistic taste of the people who hired her to do paintings. She stepped onto the landing and waved at Faye, who was still poking around the alley. Irritated at life in general and determined to make the woman acknowledge her, Julia spoke. “Morning, ma’am. How’s business?”
    “Fine.” Faye made a show of inspecting the hinges on the old back door.
    “Is it my imagination, or is it unusually hot?” As she spoke, Julia paused to water the hanging basket at the top of the stairs, a pot of wilting impatiens in pinks, oranges, and reds. Her landlady kept her back turned, and Julia tried to think of something else to say. She was in no mood for this woman to ignore her.
    “Have a problem with the door?” she asked.
    “The door?” Faye looked startled, all dressed up and standing in the alley, as though she’d been dropped off at the wrong place.
    “The door there. Is it acting up again? Mr. Billy used to have problems with it.” She hadn’t known her landlord very well, but he was easier to deal with than his widow.
    “He did?”
    “All the time,” Julia said. “Sometimes he’d walk around the building to get out back. Said it wasn’t worth his trouble to get the darned thing open.”
    “That’s good to know,” Faye replied. “I thought it was just me.”
    “These old buildings remind me of my students. They’re a challenge, and you never know from day to day what the challenge will be.”
    “You teach school?”
    Julia was surprised her landlady didn’t know that. She had lived in the apartment for the whole two