Maybe This Time Read Free Page B

listing the day’s schedule. The names and addresses were written in a hand that was not hers.
    On the side of the stove, arranged in a sort of cone shape, were several of the stones they had collected on hikes along the river or brought back from trips. He had often warmed his hands with them. One after the other, he held them and thought of the places they had come from.
    Photographs of children being hugged or kissed or held out to another adult were taped on the glass panes of the dresser. On the door out to the balcony, the angels painted by the previous tenant’s son had been replaced with beetles. They were no doubt meant to kill the flies.
    From the balcony he looked down on the street he had taken to get to work. In the distance a traffic light turned red, and he remembered how she had stood at this light and he had crossed it in the other direction so that he could turn around and watch her from a distance. The light had stayed red for a long time. She had waited, lost in thought, and he had said to himself, she’s the one.
    The bedroom door stood ajar. He closed it.
    Footsteps approached in the corridor, stopped and withdrew again.
    There was a pile of letters and some were from him and some of these were unopened. He opened them and laid them, unread, next to the others and near the pictures he had drawn of her when thinking about her or speaking with her on the phone.
    There was also a box of photographs. He rummaged through them and took pictures out of the box and returned them without looking at them. Then he took them out again and examined them more closely. The photos dated from their time together , yet he didn’t appear in any of them.
    The phone rang. He had his hand on the receiver when the answering machine came on and he could hear the sound of hesitant breathing.
    The more recent pictures were of people he didn’t know. They weren’t always the same people, but some reappeared frequently, showing their varying degrees of intimacy with her. Most were of celebrations – birthdays, Christmas, Easter – or were taken on holiday on different coasts, always in places that had once been theirs. They showed her leaning against a tree or with her head framed by the branches, at a concert or in an art gallery she had discovered. From the variety of places and people in the pictures, you could tell how much time had elapsed, and he noticed how much her face had changed. In many of the pictures he only recognized her after scrutinizing them carefully. But he avoided looking into her eyes. He remembered how he had once wanted to take a picture of her and how long he had waited for a moment when she didn’t look tense and how difficult he had made things for himself because the child in her arms refused to wait any longer and wanted to be photographed immediately. He put the photos back in the box and looked at all the pictures up on the wall, expecting to find himself in them. But only the same faces he had just encountered in the photos from the box looked back at him from the frames.
    He didn’t recognize many of the places, but some of them he did associate with her – a lake, a forest clearing, a meadow – places he thought were known only to the two of them. However, there she was, reclining or standing with others in these places, laughing and serious and mischievous, alone or with someone or in a group.
    He let his gaze wander, again and again, from person to person, looking for her or for the one whose eyes she sought. One picture showed the two of them in a group. They looked startled, as couples always are in such situations.
    Water dripped in the bathroom. He followed the sound and sat on the side of the bath.
    Drops fell from the shower head. She had taken a shower before leaving the house. He turned the tap on and off, and on again, and held his hand, and then his arm, under the stream of water. He looked at the dress she had worn to work and thought of a time they had gone to the zoo,