From the Corner of His Eye Read Free Page A

he hadn’t expected her to be dancing. A fifteen-story fall all but certainly quashed the urge to boogie.
    From this height, he could not see any blood. He was sure that some blood must have been spilled.
    The air was still, no breeze whatsoever. The sentinel firs and pines stood as motionless as those mysterious stone heads that faced the sea on Easter Island.
    Naomi dead. So alive only moments ago, now gone. Unthinkable.
    The sky was the delft-blue of a tea set that his mother had owned. Mounds of clouds to the east, like clotted cream. Buttery, the sun.
    Hungry, he ate another apricot.
    No hawks above. No visible movement anywhere in this fastness.
    Below, Naomi still dead.
    How strange life is. How fragile. You never know what stunning development lies around the next corner.
    Junior’s shock had given way to a profound sense of wonder. For most of his young life, he had understood that the world was deeply mysterious, ruled by fate. Now, because of this tragedy, he realized that the human mind and heart were no less enigmatic than the rest of creation.
    Who would have thought that Junior Cain was capable of such a sudden, violent act as this?
    Not Naomi.
    Not Junior himself, in fact. How passionately he had loved this woman. How fiercely he had cherished her. He’d thought he couldn’t live without her.
    He’d been wrong. Naomi down there, still very dead, and him up here, alive. His brief suicidal impulse had passed, and now he knew that he would get through this tragedy somehow, that the pain would eventually subside, that the sharp sense of loss would be dulled by time, and that eventually he might even love someone again.
    Indeed, in spite of his grief and anguish, he regarded the future with more optimism, interest, and excitement than he’d felt in a long time. If he was capable of this, then he was different from the man he’d always imagined himself to be, more complex, more dynamic. Wow.
    He sighed. Tempting as it was to lie here, gazing down at dead Naomi, daydreaming about a bolder and more colorful future than any that he’d previously imagined, he had much to accomplish before the afternoon was done. His life was going to be busy for a while.

Chapter 4
    THROUGH THE ROSE-PATTERNED glasswork in the front door, as the bell rang again, Joe saw Maria Gonzalez: tinted red here and green there, beveled in some places and crackled in others, her face a mosaic of petal and leaf shapes.
    When Joey opened the door, Maria half bowed her head, kept her eyes lowered, and said, “I must be Maria Gonzalez.”
    “Yes, Maria, I know who you are.” He was, as ever, charmed by her shyness and by her brave struggle with English.
    Although Joey stepped back and held the door open wide, Maria remained on the porch. “I will to see Mrs. Agnes.”
    “Yes, that’s right. Please come in.”
    She still hesitated. “For the English.”
    “She has plenty of that. More than I can usually cope with.”
    Maria frowned, not yet proficient enough in her new language to understand his joke.
    Afraid that she would think he was teasing or even mocking her, Joe gathered considerable earnestness into his voice. “Maria, please, come in.
Mi casa es su casa.”
    She glanced at him, then quickly looked away.
    Her timidity was only partly due to shyness. Another part of it was cultural. She was of that class, in Mexico, that never made direct eye contact with anyone who might be considered a
patrón
.
    He wanted to tell her that this was America, where no one was required to bow to anyone else, where one’s station at birth was not a prison, but an open door, a starting point. This was always the land of tomorrow.
    Considering Joe’s great size, his rough face, and his tendency to glower when he encountered injustice or its effects, anything he said to Maria about her excessive self-effacement might seem to be argumentative. He didn’t want to have to return to the kitchen to inform Aggie that he had frightened away her