She watched Purdy talking to a very old woman, helping her to a small table in the middle of the restaurant. The old woman said something and they both laughed. He seemed like such a nice man. Yet, there was something about him that gave C.C. a certain unease.
‘Ceece? You okay?’ Shelly was snapping her fingers, mid-air. She and Meg were both looking at her.
C.C. nodded, picked up her mug, raised it toward the middle of the table. The other two lifted their mugs. ‘Here’s to the Great Escape, and–’ in unison, they added–‘to friendship,’ with a tender clink of their mugs.
Shelly pulled the pillow into a tight crescent around her ears, willing herself back to her dream, uncertain what had woken her. She’d been dreaming something about a castle. In England? Ireland? She couldn’t remember, but it was fabulous–gold faucets, jeweled chandeliers, thick, pillowy beds with equally thick and pillowy comforters, huge colorful rugs across vast stone floors. She drifted back, sliding into sleep again like Alice down the rabbit hole. What a beautiful room! A living room, or maybe a library. For a giant. Huge brocade couches and massive French wingback chairs, all with thick, carved figures in their wood trim, leather-spined books floor to ceiling on the back wall, the furniture circling a roaring fire in a fireplace so big you could park a small car in it. She stepped around the huge, high-backed chair, easily three times her height. Startled, she jumped backward, stumbling. A giant chicken was sitting in the chair, roosting on an enormous egg. Shelly immediately wanted that egg. She couldn’t help herself. She knew she shouldn’t, knew that this gargantuan bird could really hurt her, peck her to death, or get its claws into her hair, carry her off to its lair. But she was driven by an uncontrollable urge. The chicken crowed. Could hens crow, dream-Shelly wondered, despite her fear. Her heart racing, she stepped toward the chicken, wanting desperately to retreat but feeling possessed. She reached for the egg. The chicken screamed at her, wings flapping, feathers flying. As she jumped back again, she screamed, but no sound came out. All she could hear was the chicken crowing as she fell into blackness.
Her eyes jerked open. Her fingers dug into the mattress. She was caught in the tug of war between dream and adrenalin, both pulling her hard to their reality. Adrenalin won. Her heart pounding, she glanced left and right in the dark room. Nothing looked familiar. Finally, she made out the other bed, Meg and C.C. asleep in it. A loud staccato crowing from outside their window broke the dark morning stillness.
Shelly took a moment to wade mentally through the webby remnants of sleep, weighing what was dream, what was real. Finally, she muttered, ‘Is that a fucking rooster?’
Somehow, neither the rooster nor her mumbling woke her friends. How she envied their ability to sleep so deeply! She untangled herself from the twisted bedcovers, threw them off and stood, stretching her hands over her head, then rubbing her upper arms vigorously, urging some blood to start circulating through her body. She looked at the red numbers of the digital clock on the bedside table: 5.18. Shit. No normal person should be awake at this hour. She lifted just the edge of the orange window curtain and peered out.
The sun had little more than peeked above the eastern horizon, just enough to streak the few clouds in the sky with shades of purple and pink, casting a hoary light upon the town. Down the road a bit, Shelly saw something moving. It wobbled into a yellow-orange circle of light from a lone streetlamp. A rooster. How fucking bucolic! He was strutting down the dirt road, as officious as a rabbi headed to temple. He stopped, ruffled his wings slightly in the light, as if spotlit on a stage. He pointed his beak skyward and let loose again. She would have laughed if she hadn’t shuddered. He was nearly exactly in the middle of the circle of light. She surmised that he must have come from the other direction, worked his way past their window, and on down the street. He finished his crow in the spotlight, and strutted off again, same direction. Still holding the corner of the ugly curtain, she wondered if maybe it was his job, waking up the town. That he’d worked out some sort of deal with the Tupper officials that he would walk down Main Street (which, frankly, she was surprised wasn’t called Purdy Street) and wake everyone up in exchange for–what? Maybe for being fed and not eaten. And maybe let into the coop with the hens every now and then. Shelly’s lip curled as she took a last look at the bird, then shuddered again, as if she’d just swallowed down a particularly vile substance. Birds of all kinds gave her the willies.
She sat heavily back on the edge of the bed, rubbed her face, collapsed sideways onto her pillow. She ached with fatigue. Or cold. Or age. Fifty was not old, Shelly knew (she’d been fifty for almost three years now), and she had spent a lot of breath reminding her two friends of that fact, who you’d think had one foot in the grave the way they complained about their age. Meg was only two years older than she, C.C. was only forty-nine. In Shelly’s opinion, it was a bit of a cop-out to succumb to the minor aches and pains of middle age. Wait till old age. There’d be plenty of time for complaining then.
Shelly closed her eyes, but sleep was gone, so she opened them, stared upward. C.C.’s nightlight (so she could find the bathroom) provided just enough of a glow for Shelly to make out the brown water stain on one of the ceiling panels above her. She stared at it for a minute, its dark brown edges making her crave a cup of coffee. She looked over at Meg and C.C., still and silent in their bed. They’d said they wanted to share a bed and gotten no argument from her. She knew they were being generous. They were well aware of her need to sleep alone. It was hard enough for her to share a room, let alone a bed. Even with men. Especially with men. Men made too damn much noise at night–snoring, sputtering, farting. Breathing. Then they woke up at some ungodly hour, all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, snuggling up and grabbing her, ready for some more action, right when she felt like she’d finally just gotten to sleep. No, sir. It’d been years since she’d allowed a man to spend the night in her room. Down the hall, maybe. Better they should go to their own home and sleep. After her second divorce she’d vowed she would remain single and not even cohabit for the remainder of her life. That had been the one vow she’d kept. That, and not speaking to Nina.
Shelly sat up again, looking at her friends. She shook her head in dismay. They were both on their backs, C.C.’s hands neatly on the fold of the sheet over the blanket on her protruding chest, fingertips over fingertips, as if she’d been posed by a mortician. Meg was also on her back, but her hands and arms were under the covers. Probably cold. The poor thing had no meat on her bones anymore. On the table next to Meg’s head was an envelope addressed to Grant, at their house. Meg must have written it last night. Yet another letter to the asshole.
Shelly sighed, gazing at her friends. They looked like two pens in an engineer’s pocket protector, both of them trained by years of habit to sleep in exactly one-half of the bed. Or less.
Not her, by God. Not Rochelle Hannah Kostens. Never again. She flopped back on her bed, spread-eagled, taking up the whole bed, just because she could.
Twenty minutes later, showered, her curly hair (‘salt and cayenne pepper’, she called it) pulled back in a short ponytail, her face without makeup, Shelly stepped out into the buttery morning light. The clean smell of moist earth and the slow unfurling of spring made her inhale twice, deeply, relishing the scent of possibility. She admired the sky: the clouds were gone and that dusky blue of dawn, not night but not yet day, domed the earth. She checked her watch: 5.56. She had asked Purdy last night when he would open the restaurant for breakfast; she did not like to wait long for that first cup of coffee. ‘Six a.m. sharp, ma’am. Coffee’ll be fresh-brewed at six a.m.’
She strode down the street, watching for the rooster, not wanting it to sneak up behind her and crow. She didn’t see the bird anywhere but walked faster, feeling like she could be attacked by uncooked poultry at any moment. Her distaste for birds came, like so many things, from her youth. (Funny, she thought, how more and more years now qualified as ‘her youth’.) But she really had been young when the Tweety Incident happened. She was ten, at her friend Rachel’s house. Rachel had a new parakeet she’d rather uncreatively