She was the first girl to let him—invited him—the daughter of a butcher whose shop was just off Main Street downtown. They dated briefly in
college, her cherished mother having died of cancer a year before. They were closest on thin rugs on wooden floors, often sharing her Benson and Hedges Thins on the shabby holey Madras rug in the drear living room of her apartment in a rundown old house
on Elm Avenue, her head in his lap. One night he thought she was asleep and he watched her twitching eyes and bruised moving lips, her pinched child’s nose, the
scar under her left eye, tears falling away down either side of her face.
He saw
her not long ago, her hair nearly shaved, salty white, but her head
still tilted, her tiny brows raised, her smile still crookedly smart as if still seeing the world as
sad and silly like a child making up a story and slyly sharing the ending too
soon, her body, perhaps still thin and soft but long lost under the layers of a deep and thick nun’s
coverall.
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