Read Aurora 07 - Last Scene Alive for Free Online

married.”
    “I’m glad for them,” I said, not caring one little bit.
    “Aunt Barby has been keeping Regina’s baby for a week or two, while Regina and her husband are on vacation in New York.”
    While I was indifferent about Cindy, I actively disliked Martin’s sister Barby and her daughter Regina, who was on her second marriage. I was confident that Regina would someday be on her fourth. Probably she would have had a few more babies along the way.
    “Why didn’t you and Dad have any children?” Barrett asked me. The question came from out of the blue and lodged in my heart.
    “I can’t have children,” I said. “We talked about it a little, before we found out that I had some fertility problems. I sure wanted a baby, and sometimes he did too. But he was a little wary of starting a new family at his age.” I saw Martin, so clearly, leaning over Regina’s baby when I’d placed him beside Martin on our bed. Tears trickled down my cheeks. I lowered my face and wiped it with a napkin. “Can I get you some more coffee?” I asked politely.
    “No, thank you. I need to be getting back.” Barrett and I both stood up. He scrabbled through his pockets for the car keys, and looked uncertain, not a normal Barrett state of mind.
    He looked as though he were going to make some kind of pronouncement, but in the end, all he said was, “Thanks for the coffee.” It wasn’t until I watched his car turn onto the county road that I realized he’d never told me why he was in Lawrenceton.

    It didn’t take long for the other shoe to drop. While I was upstairs covering up the circles under my eyes and brushing my hair, it suddenly occurred to me that Barrett was in town because he had a part in the movie. I couldn’t imagine why I hadn’t made the connection earlier. He would be a natural choice for the cast, as the stepson of one of the real-life figures in our local drama. He’d even visited Lawrenceton before, when I’d been gone with my mother to a real estate convention in Orlando.
    I collapsed ungracefully on the delicate peach-colored chair in the corner of the bedroom and further considered this likelihood. Barrett was an up-and-coming actor, whose longest running part had been on a popular soap. I think he played a seductive chauffeur. Since I never watch daytime television, I’d never seen him in it—which, now that I came to examine my conduct, was just as much stubbornness as his refusing to come to our wedding—but several women who knew of our connection had told me how good he was. They’d had their tongues hanging out as they said it, too.
    I wondered what role Barrett would have. I wondered, for the first time, what the script was like; how close the movie would come to the reality.
    I wished I hadn’t hung up on Robin Crusoe.

    Moved by an impulse I didn’t even want to analyze, I decided to go shopping that morning.
    My friend Amina Day’s mother owned a women’s clothing store called Great Day. If I bought anything in Lawrenceton, rather than going to my favorite store in Atlanta, I bought it at Great Day. To my pleasure, Mrs. Day had a younger partner now, and the selection had really improved as a result.
    I had a closet full of good clothes already, but I needed something new, some voice deep within me advised. My coloring—brown hair, brown eyes, fair complexion—was pretty neutral, so my color field was wide open. As Barrett had noticed, I’d lost weight I’d never regained when Martin died, so my involuntarily smaller size was another excuse for shopping.
    As I got out of my car at the strip mall that housed Great Day, a cluster of people emerged from the Crafts Consortium next door. Homemade quilts, candles, and all kinds of “country”
    stuff formed the bulk of the store’s goods, and crowds were not something I’d ever seen there.
    The center of the group seemed to be a short, thin, very young woman with artistically disheveled blond hair who was wearing the highest heels