The Man on the Washing Machine by Susan Cox Page A

loss to explain his embarrassment.
    â€œSometimes,” he said, and wouldn’t be pressed further, all of which heightened my interest in Chinese medicine.
    I went home to take Lucy out for her bedtime walk in the garden. I wasn’t sure why, but for the first time in a very long time, I was sorry to be going home alone.

 
    CHAPTER EIGHT
    The street was shiny with mist, the streetlights haloed. The foghorns on the bridge moaned softly and an occasional car swished past but otherwise everything was quiet. I shifted the box of dog biscuits under my arm and shivered a little inside my jacket as I automatically put a little more effort into my stride coming up the hill. The city is like a gigantic, undulating staircase, following the hills to the ocean in one direction and San Francisco Bay in the other. I sometimes wonder what it will be like to be old, pulling a wheeled shopping basket behind me up these slopes. By the time they’re seventy, the old ladies around here must have legs like marathon runners.
    I walked past the window of Aromas to my front door. I was careful, as always, to have the keys in my hand, to avoid making myself a dithering target for any would-be assassin who might be lurking in the shadows. The ex-policeman who ran my defensive violence class taught us things like that. Because of him, I was in the habit of gripping my keys with the points protruding through the fingers of my hand, like a set of brass knuckles. Even so, I wasn’t sure I could work up the nerve to gouge out someone’s eyes with my house keys. He also suggested we carry a three-inch length of galvanized pipe in our dominant hand to add some strength to our punches. I suppose I could wear body armor and a helmet, too, but you have to draw a line somewhere, even in a country where it’s legal to carry loaded rifles into Walmart. I’d made peace with the keys but they were as far as I was willing to go along that road. I ran up the stairs calling to Lucy after locking and chaining the front door carefully behind me. Lucy jumped off the mattress (I heard her rotund little body hit the bedroom floor with a squishy thump) and swaggered down the hallway to greet me, yawning hugely. Having waited for me to scratch under her chin, she turned around and went back to bed.
    I made myself a cup of tangerine spice tea and ate a chunk of cheese with some bread to help dilute the gin and listened to my jazz playlist as I leaned against my kitchen counter. The kitchen was nearly completed, but it was littered with open-topped cartons of dishes and kitchen tools, left over from when I’d emptied the old green-painted cabinets to replace them with the pale maple ones Nicole had chosen for me.
    I folded a load of towels in the utility room and moved to a perch on a stepladder in the living room to drink my rapidly cooling tea. The flat, mostly empty and somehow starkly beautiful, seemed enormous. Accustomed to the tight quarters in the downstairs studio, I watched the watery shadows on my wall from the streetlight outside my window and felt as if Lucy were sleeping somewhere on the next block.
    I exchanged contact lenses for a pair of glasses and whistled for Lucy and then, because she ignored me as she always does, I went to get her. She snarled at me automatically as I plucked her off the mattress. She was still grumbling as we headed down the back stairs. The wooden steps were bare and it was difficult to be quiet. Haruto and Bramwell Turlough would have to lump it, if they were home.
    Stupidly, I left the utility room door open when I went down. I don’t know why I always do that when I’m so careful about the front door. I think it’s because the garden is so private and there’s no other access to the building at the back. The buildings in Fabian Gardens are shoulder to shoulder from the street side, but they have outside staircases about halfway back to give us all a second way out, in case of a