Read Street Symphony for Free Online Page B

manuscript from Higson, from news, from calls, from making up her mind. And she would try to drown out the sound of Aritha screaming, “I’ll kill you!”
    The week at The Grove had been another delaying tactic. Busy days. Nice surroundings. Healthy meals. Decent, searching people. “Beyond my competence,” she’d said to Anja before she went, but Anja had replied, “It’s all words. And you’ve seen plays. You’ve read poems. Go do it.” Four paying customers and one freebie. No one else applied. Hard financial times. Odd mixed bag. No surprise if they’d all asked for their money back last Sunday when they left. Instead, despite their minimum talent and her sparse encouragement, they’d all gone away satisfied if not exactly happy. Lives appeared to have been changed. Any day now though, light bulbs might flash on and they’d realize they’d been had. Aritha, fifty-something, crazy, falling over her own cleverness, might publish a few more stories. Keep your day job! Not likely to get rich soon.
    Well now. Woman enters, very chic, long blond hair, long black jacket, asks if she can share table. Bar crowded, orders bottle of wine. One glass. Gets out iPad. Won’t want to talk. Good. No telling, but she might have a manuscript in that costly briefcase. Nearly everybody has one hidden somewhere. Why did she not at least ask if I’m expecting someone?
    “Are you expecting someone?”
    “I was but I just had a call. He’ll be late.”
    Lies. Was chic blond going to drink that whole bottle alone?
    Jody sat back and tried to let her mind settle. This contained panorama was not the right place for concentrated thought. Better to have gone to Chez Laura. Always quiet there. So few customers, she and Bill thought it must be a laundry. Dirty dollars in, clean dollars out. So what had she come in here to think about anyway? Her long-term future, that was all. Three roads were open to her right now, but any one of them could be closed due to repairs by next week. The pattern of her life so far was always to choose the counterproductive sidetrack and follow the sign that pointed to Nice View This Way instead of continuing straight on to the main attraction. The job at The Grove, last minute because flu had felled the regular mentor, was another cul-de-sac. That cheque was hard-earned though. Poetry and drama! Iain on his way to Mexico now – or not. She’d rejected his invitation to share the journey maybe too sharply, but without emphasizing their age difference. His loneliness was apparent in the sad little note he’d left her. But she had, he wrote, given him a great idea for his play.
    The woman in the red dress slipped off the bar stool, put a scarf round her naked shoulders, picked up her large leather bag and left the two men to stare after her as she walked out.
    Roland’s goodbye hug had been strangely emotional. The old man was almost in tears and had thanked her as if she’d given him a million bucks. His story, if he lived long enough to write it, was a neat piece of history: the hope of the emigrant widower with kids that success would be ensured in the new land. The return of the failure. And how many men in the century before last had gone on that hard sea trip and returned sans cash, sans every damn thing?
    The waiter asked if she wanted another. She nodded and smiled. It was an upmarket bar and the man, no doubt an actor in his other life, expressed pleasure that she had come in on that particular evening and had chosen to drink their costly but ordinary wine.
    “Nuts?” she asked.
    “Certainly, madam,” he replied as he swept up the fragments of her napkin.
    The next glass would help her decide. Option two: travelling along the Trans-Canada to Saskatchewan with Marina Harchuk and her handsome, slim, blue-eyed brother, Jim. Telling tales of childhood and love, taking turns driving, they would keep going day and night. So why not take off eastward through the mountains and then the flat,