The Last First Day Read Free

hand over her mouth just as she opened it. Then he had turned to face her on the pillow and smiled.
    He kissed her.
    I forgot what I was going to say, she said. Thanks a lot.
    Let’s play it again, he said.
    He got up and crossed the floor to the sitting room. He was so tall and handsome, Ruth thought, with his long legs and lean belly and broad shoulders. She’d watched him, admiring.
    There was that wonderful sound again, his breath on the needle. It was as if he had blown into her ear. The sensation sent chills over her skin. Then the music started.
    Peter climbed back into bed beside her. He pulled up the sheet and blankets, tucking them in around her shoulders.
    Fantastic, she thought, listening as the music began, closing her eyes.
    Rubinstein’s hands had moved like lightning that night in the concert hall. How
did
the music sound? What color was it? Black and silver, she thought. Like the ocean, its pennants of light, its adamantine swells, flooding into pools like mirrors along the sand.
    She had turned her head and slept then, her cheek on Peter’s arm.
    Those had been such lovely years.
    Now she brushed her hands free of crumbs, put her plate in the sink.
    As she did so, the music on the radio ceased abruptly. A dead silence fell into the quiet kitchen.
    Ruth turned away from the window.
    The radio was on a shelf mounted over the radiator. Three warning blasts blared from a siren, and then, after a moment, a computerized voice announced the threat of tornadoes in a distant county.
    A line of dangerous thunderstorms was moving eastward.
    On the radar maps that Peter consulted, such storms were conveyed as comic-book explosions of red and yellow and green.
    She glanced out the kitchen window again.
    The sky was empty, a formal ceremonial blue.
    She turned on the tap to rinse her plate.
    Years of living with Peter, whose interest in the weather Ruth considered obsessive, had acquainted her with the habits of storms. These would dissipate long before reaching them so near the coast, she expected, their force dissolved by the wall of warm air gathering offshore and advancing inland.
    She even knew, thanks to Peter, the name of this effect: the marine influence.
    She had never seen a real tornado, only the ones captured on television. How sinister they were, she thought, their scale so … biblical.
    But Peter would tell her not to worry now.
    She ran hot water and washed the mixing bowls, glancing up at the sky from time to time.
    She had always done the work herself for parties at the school. There had never been any extra money for help, and she wouldn’t have asked for it if there had been. The school hadmany other, more urgent needs. There was no skill to making cheese puffs anyway, as she’d told Peter when he fretted that all the labor fell to her. She’d made them so often she could do it in her sleep. She’d rather bake a cake—and eat one, for that matter—but one didn’t eat cake with gin, and gin was what they would all want at the end of this first long day of the school year.
    It was a private satisfaction to Ruth that those who had worked at the Derry School all the years that Peter had been headmaster had come to expect cake on their birthday. She made several kinds—lemon, coconut, apple, German chocolate, carrot—taking care to find out people’s preferences and keeping a list. Also, those who were sick or suffering trouble knew they could depend on soup and pie from Ruth. She was glad to have been relied on in this way. Such kindness was uncomplicated, easy to give. In the summers, too, she delivered to people in their offices bunches of the dusty purple grapes from the old arbor sagging behind the house. They were delicious, with an old-fashioned sweetness, and Peter hated to see them go to waste. The bees would ruin them if she did not give them away.
    He did not think of the grapes as belonging to them, in any case. Everything they had, including the house itself and most of its