Read Cop Town for Free Online

she was married, and she was alone.
    And then September 14th rolled around.
    What were the odds?
    Kate was helping her parents entertain when she heard the doorbell ring. Mary Jane was in the cellar because someone had asked for wine. Kate answered the door. Instead of party guests, two soldiers were standingon the front porch. Her first thought was how odd it was to see white men wearing white cotton gloves. They were dressed identically. They stood with identically straight spines. Their uniforms were wool, long-sleeved. The weather was unseasonably warm. Beads of sweat dotted their closely shaven upper lips, rolled down the sides of their thick necks.
    They both took off their hats in practiced unison. She almost laughed because the synchronization was so perfect. Only one of them spoke. He called her “ma’am.” Kate heard the words “regret to inform you,” then she found herself coming round on the couch with all the party guests gone. Their half-filled glasses and still-burning cigarettes were abandoned around the room. The soldiers left her a brochure entitled Death Benefits .
    “Such a phrase,” her grandmother had said.
    “An oxymoron,” her father had noted.
    Her mother had smoked a stranger’s cigarette from a nearby ashtray.
    Kate had no idea where the brochure was now. She didn’t really care. She didn’t need death benefits. She needed her husband.
    Lacking both, what she really needed was to get ready for work.
    Kate took off her robe as she walked into the bathroom. She checked to make sure her hair was securely pinned up before turning on the shower and stepping in.
    She gasped at the cold spray. The plumbing was menopausal, which was a funny joke considering she lived in a hotel exclusively for women. One minute the water was too cold, the next it was too hot. The stream fluctuated depending on how many women were using identical bathrooms on identical floors. If too many toilets were flushed too closely together, they were all screwed.
    Kate stared blankly through the translucent shower curtain as she washed. The view wasn’t much: her bed, and the wall on the other side of her bed. She closed one eye, then the other. Her vision was mottled by the green-tinted plastic curtain. She tried to remember what she had liked so much about this place when she’d first seen it. The anonymity? The sterileness? The beigeness of it all?
    That hadn’t lasted long. Her mother had swooped in with her credit
    card and her good taste, and now abstract art hung on the walls, a white shag rug covered the awful tan carpet in the bedroom, and Kate’s bed linens were more suited for a display window at Davison’s than a downtown hotel for single women.
    Honestly, Kate preferred the place the way she’d found it.
    She turned off the taps and quickly dried herself. The bedside clock had been playing games, flipping ahead almost half an hour while she stood under the water. She would have to stop letting her mind wander. The same thing had happened this morning on the way back from breakfast at the diner. One moment she was asking a man in the street for the time, and the next she was sitting on a bench, staring up at the blue sky, as if she had all the time in the world.
    Daydreaming was the old Kate’s luxury. She lived on her own now. She had rent to pay. She had to buy her own food and clothes. She could no longer while away the hours reading trashy paperbacks and drinking her father’s gin.
    Death benefits .
    Kate tore away the plastic dry cleaner’s bag and laid out her clothes on the bed. From the hallway came the hustle and bustle of girls on their way to work. She thought of them as the first shift—the office girls with their neatly bobbed hair and daringly short skirts. They were young and pretty and still worried about what their parents thought of them, as evidenced by the fact that, as audacious as it was to live alone in the big city, they did so in an establishment that strictly forbade any male