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Show 307 She had drawn her legs under her, and now suddenly stood up on the chair, her arms around his neck, crying into his collar. Lorin tentatively patted the small of her back with his left hand, her shoulder blade with his right. He felt the room tip sideways when he kissed her, but it was just that she had put all her weight on one foot, bending the other leg at the knee, and the foot had slipped between the cushion and the arm of the chair. Flashes of Sorenson safe in his hospital bed came to him. He remembered salient details of the large painting that had hung in the Coach and Seven, and suddenly knew how he would redo them now if he had the chance. Going down the hallway to the bedroom, feeling her small hand in his, he heard the furnace kick on behind the louvered doors on his left, and it struck him for the first time that the house had no basement, which explained why the washer and dryer were in the kitchen. The house he had shared with Yvonne had had a washing machine in the basement, but no dryer; a clothesline had run from the screened porch out to a grapefruit tree in the back yard, but it was so long that its unsupported middle hung a bare four feet from the ground when it was loaded, so their clothes had frequently picked up a coating of grit along one edge. He wondered if Gloriana did her own laundry or sent it out. Their clothes lay in piles on both sides of the bed, his dark suit, now showing wear, in three pieces across the room, one leg of the trousers pulled inside out; his black shoes and her new jeans lying together beside the magazine rack, his shirt and tie coiled up with her white cotton underpants in the seat of the rocking chair. His temple garments provided the only hesitation, both because they were hard things to get out of in a hurry and because she wanted to look at them, for she had never seen anything like them before in her life. |