Read The Enchantment of Lily Dahl for Free Online Page A

wasn’t the twins’ truck, but an old blue Chevy with a bashed fender. The floor had left a yellow film mixed with dirt on her arm and Lily wiped it with the bottom of her T-shirt. Then, holding the bag of shoes behind her, she walked down the steps and paused for a second. She saw a dollar bill float over the grass as it caught the wind. I must have dropped it on the step when I fell, she thought. It blew further away. Lily let it go, and began to invent a story for the person driving the car, in case the person wanted to know why she had been sprawled in the Bodler’s doorway. She would say she was leaving money for a purchase and fell. It was true, of course, but also wasn’t.
    The Chevy stopped, and Lily watched an obese woman slowly ease herself out the car door. “Give your brother half of that one, Arnie, or I’ll smack you,” she said to the backseat. The woman’s hair had been bleached to a crisp. Lily stared at her enormous belly and thighs in double knit bermudas. She took three heavy steps and puffed. When Lily passed her, the woman said “Hi,” in a dead voice, and Lily said “Hi” back. She glanced into the car and saw two remarkably similar blond boys sitting in the backseat. One was clearly older, but both tanned faces were streaked with tears, snot and Oreos. Lily moved beyond the car, heard its door creak open and the woman say, “Truce, babies. Come and give Mama a hug.” Lily looked back for a moment to see the boys climb out of the car and fling themselves into the flesh of the now squatting woman. When the woman’s arms closed around them, Lily turned back to the road and started to run toward her bicycle.
    *   *   *
    Mabel’s room smelled of dust, perfume and the paper of old books. She owned hundreds of them, and they crowded the apartment, bulging from shelves that lined several walls in the living room, bedroom and even the bathroom. Lily breathed in that odor again when Mabel opened the door for her Monday afternoon. Stale and dry, Lily thought, like dead bugs. Mabel was talking, but Lily didn’t listen to her. Mabel’s living room had always made her feel funny. There were two things that didn’t seem to belong in the room. One was a miserable old table that Mabel didn’t dust. The other tables were dusted, but the rickety pine table with those old keys lying on it was never touched. And then there was a bird’s nest that was little more than a pile of refuse. If Mabel had not told her what it was, she never would have known. The rest of Mabel’s furniture was adorned with silk and velvet pillows and woven pieces of cloth. The floor was covered with a beautiful red and blue Oriental rug—the leftovers from her big house on Orchard Street. Lily remembered Mabel saying that she had kept only those objects that had “personal meaning” whether they were valuable or not, and that the apartment was a “storehouse of memory.” Once, Lily had mustered the courage to ask Mabel about the undusted table, and it was then that she had discovered that Mabel could answer a question without answering it. For five, maybe ten minutes, she had prattled on about Cicero and some other guy whose name Lily couldn’t remember, and when she stopped, Lily didn’t know a single thing more than when she’d first asked.
    “Lily.” Mabel sang the name.
    Lily looked at Mabel.
    “You’re lost in thought.”
    “Sorry.”
    Mabel brushed the sleeve of her black tunic. Expensive, Lily thought. She probably bought it in one of those stores in Minneapolis where they look you up and down before they let you in the door. I wonder where she got her money. Professors don’t make that much.
    Mabel poured Lily a cup of tea, her hands trembling as she held the pot in the air. The woman always looked cold. But the room was warm, and Lily had gotten used to Mabel’s tremors and quakes and her constantly moving hands. She wasn’t sick. She was nervous, so tightly strung that Lily half expected to hear