gait casual, disdainful. It seemed that everyone on the block stopped to watch its hollow haunches pass by. Pigeons cooed, roosting in the plane trees. The evening fuzzed, as though molecules of air had thickened to hold the last of the light. Over to the west, laky streaks lined the sky, and the hills in the distance were the colour of morello cherries.
‘There was a man here yesterday. I wondered if I might know him. He was standing where you are just now, and looking – up there.’ Saying ‘at my apartment’ seemed impossible, would seal the impression that she was delusional, or paranoid.
The locksmith shrugged. ‘Yeah? I don’t remember.’
‘Yeah. I thought – maybe – never mind.’
‘I can’t give out the names of clients.’
‘No, of course.’
Back in the apartment, she ate another biscuit and thought about the young man who looked like Donald. That story of her mother’s – the lost son in the driveway. He was her sign. Her young man, appearing through the window. Her message, her past mistake. She sat for a long time while the light melted from the room. One phone call. Not to interrupt his life or ask for anything. One phone call, just to hear his voice.
From the kitchen drawer, Dorothy took the softened, split-cornered card that carried the last phone number she’d had for Daniel. It was morning in Spain. She switched on the overhead lamp. With the phone pressed hard against her ear she leaned forward, head on her forearms and elbows on the bench, in the posture of someone waiting for seasickness to pass. The dial tone was a single metallic note that could have been a fault. She didn’t know whether or not to hang up but then a woman answered. Dorothy was embarrassed by her lack of the language. She had to blurt straight into English. ‘Excuse me . . .’
The woman said something in Spanish.
‘Do you speak English . . . is this still the right number for . . .’
‘Hello,’ the woman said, with a heavy accent. ‘How may I help you?’
‘I’m looking for an old friend . . .’
‘Daniel doesn’t live here now.’
‘Oh. I’m so sorry to bother you.’
‘He is back in New Zealand.’ And the woman, who might have been his wife, gave her Daniel’s number.
They agreed to meet in the park, and to rearrange on the day if there was rain, and now it was showery in bursts, and Dorothy wasn’t sure whether or not this counted. She could manage a raincoat, carry an umbrella, but the shoes were a problem, she had never in her whole life solved the question of what shoes to wear in the rain. Anything nice would be ruined, and nowadays if her feet got wet she invariably came down with flu, ached all over, oh my knee etc, but the shiny and water-resistant trainers the kids had given her last Christmas to encourage her fitness, love it or lose it, Donald had mumbled, were criss-crossed with hideous pink and silver stripes and lay unworn in the bottom of the closet. Not that she wasn’t grateful. Perhaps she had never been nice enough about receiving presents, feeling too often that the object was hard evidence of how little the giver really knew her. Getting older had made Dorothy more mindful of her flaws, and that there were many more than she would ever know. Self-improvement had its limits. She took knee-length rubber boots from her sack of redundant gardening kit, scrubbed the dried clumps of dirt off them with a steel brush and pulled them on.
Over the phone she’d told Daniel about the end of her marriage. After a long pause, during which she walked from the living room to the bedroom and back again, he asked, ‘Why didn’t you say anything?’
‘You’d only just got married,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to be a downer.’
‘A downer? For fuck’s sake, Dottie. A downer?’
She couldn’t help but laugh. ‘Bad timing, it was bad timing. And then once I was on my own – I don’t know. It seemed important, to be on my own.’ The words came unanticipated, but she realised they were true. ‘It took me a while. But I like it.’
On the way to the park she noticed moss growing between cracks in the pavement, and the plane-tree branches budding with pale leaves. The light was indecisive, shifting between bright and low, and it disoriented her, made her hurry in case of being late, so that when she