Annabel - Kathleen Winter [99]
Wayne bought a couple of pepperoni sticks and a box of chocolate graham squares and thanked Mr. Caines. The boy, Steve, came out with him.
“I can find it by myself.”
Wayne wondered if there was something about him that had made Mr. Caines think he could not find Forest Road by himself from a map that had been perfectly clear. He worried that Mr. Caines had thought he looked unintelligent. But when they got to the traffic circle on King’s Bridge Road, Wayne was glad of Steve, because the road turned crazy. It went five ways: down King’s Bridge Road, Military Road, Gower Street, Ordnance Street, and Fort William Place, leading to the hotel. Forest Road was just beyond this circle to the right, but without Steve, Wayne would not have found it. Steve told him his last name was Keating, and he wasn’t in school because it was after three o’clock. He couldn’t wait to be out of school for good though, because school was torture, and furthermore it was useless. Steve Keating said these things but Wayne could tell he was a smart kid. He could tell from the way Steve gave him his final directions, and because enthusiasm bubbled out of Steve Keating though he was only going back to Caines Grocery to stock Mr. Caines’s cooler with sandwiches and apple flips.
22
Fabric and Notions
THOMASINA HAD WRITTEN Wally Michelin a different kind of postcard from Bucharest than the one she had written to Wayne. By the time she wrote Wally’s card she had been in Bucharest for months. She no longer liked the chaos, the noise and dirt, or the old concrete-block buildings, and had decided to book a train and a boat to England.
“I want to go and sit in the park in London,” she wrote. “I can stay at the Cale Street Hostel for August and half of September for practically nothing, and when I get sick of the young Australian backpackers I intend to try and get room 118 at the Cadogan Hotel on Sloane Street. It will cost nearly a hundred pounds a night but I want to spend at least one night in the room where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and then I might go to another hotel near Poet’s Corner and go visit the monuments to my old friends the Brontë sisters, and Wordsworth. I wish they had a monument to Wordsworth’s sister, Dorothy. If no one is looking I might leave a small memorial to her in some old crevice or another. A petal from one of the Queen’s roses, or a violet from one of the gypsies in Trafalgar Square. Someone needs to leave something in memory of Dorothy.”
Wally Michelin had not loved Tim McPhail, the boy who had taken her to her high school prom. She had loved the French composer Gabriel Fauré, and she had loved her music studies. When she arrived in Boston to work in her aunt’s shop after graduation, her aunt had been kind. She gave Wally a room that had belonged to her grown daughter, and she had bought Wally her own record player and told her she could go down to the Berklee College of Music bookstore on Boylston Street if she wanted to buy books or records. It was at that bookstore, on the bulletin board, that Wally read about the Harley Street Voice Clinic in London.
Her aunt Doreen’s shop was a fabric and notions store on Brattle Street, and Wally liked it. She liked the precision with which she learned to cut yards of linen and jersey from big rolls, using a yardstick on the long counter. She loved it when her aunt taught her how to pull a single thread from the weave so that the line marking its absence became your guideline for cutting. That seemed like a neat, graceful trick to her. She also liked the wall on which hung a collection of mysterious tools: bobbins for Singer sewing machines, long pins, and pearl-handled awls for punching holes in paper to transfer patterns.