The streets and the shops along the coast are decorated in bunting and thin garlands of gold. He turns a chair to the window and sits and drinks the milk and eats the bread.
He pulls on his dirty jeans and pads back to the room in his bare feet, feeling better, hungry. He leaves the razor there and dresses in his old shirt and throws Ralph’s filthy white one in the wastebasket. Along the rim of the sink a line of ants ambles toward the scrap of soap Julius lays the razor in their path and for a few minutes watches them traverse it, their tiny bodies doubled by the steel flank, their confusion at its warmth. When he turns the razor along his jaw, the blade pulls away black freckles of blood. The train to Barstow leaves at six-fifteen and it must beĪlong his cheeks the bruise is noxious and dark. Love might be made of things that couldn’t happen or things no one knows or intends. And though Julius had stolen from her it was she who wanted his forgiveness and then she wrote his name and made the absolution he could not make for himself, and this might be the only way love ever is. She had wanted to give something to Lee, even if it was not the truth. She had been so lucky but she had not been content to keep only what was hers, the money and the house in Kansas. He thinks of what she must have seen there, and what she must have understood to leave a note for him, and how fearless she must be. He imagines her walking into the Chester Hotel and why she might want to go to a place like that and how she’d heard of it.
Julius thinks of Muriel’s secret and wonders if Lee knows all of it now, if they are together or if Muriel is somewhere else.
Past the bluff and the river, the horizon lifts from the earth in a band of yellow light. If beyond them both was a future they could share in this way. He wonders if his brother has also looked out across this river and this bit of sky and felt free. Because he had been free of his brother’s vigilance.
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