A Wedding in December_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [37]
Agnes unpacked the orange duffel bag, laying out her clothes on the bed. Jeans and a hand-knit sweater. A rose-colored suit for the cocktail party that evening. A blue wool dress she would wear to the wedding tomorrow. She sat at the edge of the bed and ate a PowerBar. She knew the inn served lunch—hadn’t Nora said so?—but Agnes, on a tight budget, the budget made necessary by a modest salary from Kidd, had brought her own lunch, not knowing if meals were included in Nora’s generous offer to put up everyone in the wedding party. Agnes had not liked to ask.
As she ate, she thought about the tour she had had earlier of the inn, of the sitting room, austere and yet inviting, of the splendid kitchen with its new appliances, of the corridors with their fresh white paint. Had Nora had a designer, or did the decor represent her own aesthetic? It was a kind of cleansing, Agnes thought, as if the inn had been put through a washer and the wringer had spit out something new. Yes, it was the newness—an entity with weight and texture—that so unnerved.
But something else nagged at Agnes, a half thought she had had in the kitchen before she’d been interrupted. What was it? Though the kitchen was magnificent, something struck her as wrong. Agnes closed her eyes. Yes, that was it: the smell of meat. Delicious in itself, but foreign to the kitchen of old. Carl had been a vegetarian, a purist. Agnes recalled with a shudder the bars of homemade soap, slimy and sandy at once, in the tiny bathroom at the end of the hall.
The smell of meat in the kitchen. Carl Laski would turn over in his grave. Where was his grave, come to think of it?
Agnes, who had arrived in her best school clothes, not knowing if she’d immediately run into Jerry or Bill or Bridget, changed into the sweater and jeans and a pair of L.L.Bean boots, finished off the PowerBar, took a swig of water from a bottle provided by the inn, and slipped the gold key into her pocket. She hooked her backpack over her shoulder.
At the desk in the lobby, she found a trail map for hikers. She paused for a moment on the front steps, studying the map and trying to orient herself. She was hot in her sweater but reluctant to return to her room to change. Surely it would grow cooler as the afternoon progressed, and she might find herself in the shade of the hill. It was an extraordinary day, and she wanted to make the most of it. It was a novelty to be able to walk without the wind biting at her face, as it nearly always did at Kidd in December.
Agnes took off impatiently, anxious to exercise muscles that had tightened and complained during the long ride from Maine. She had an image of herself running up the side of the hill but found, as she went, that the path was steeper than it had first appeared. A gentle light sifted through the trees, the limbs creating a gauzy view of the inn and of the mountains in the distance. If Jim had come with her this weekend, he would not be with her on this hike. A contemplative man, he did not like to exercise. He could be cajoled into a walk, but he seldom seemed to enjoy it. Never, in Agnes’s memory, had Jim initiated a walk or a hike—something a wife, but not a lover, might begin to nag about, might learn to despise.
Agnes skirted a stone wall and followed the path, which grew steeper still. She was panting now, sweating inside her sweater (her own handiwork), and was cross with herself for not having worn layers, which she might have been able to peel off. Her unsuitable wardrobe was hardly her fault, though, was it? Who’d have predicted seventy-degree temperatures in December in New England? She leaned against a tree trunk, needing to catch her breath. Sweat trickled down her neck and under her arms, and it occurred to her that she might have forgotten to put on deodorant this morning. If so, she’d ruin the sweater. One could never get the smell out, not entirely. She glanced about her for signs of other