Читать книгу The Healer - Greg Hollingshead - Страница 9

Through the display board at her left hand, from directly the other side of it, Caroline Troyer could feel the man’s unease and the pull of his curiosity as he stepped deeper in to study the stairs to the apartment. She waited to hear if he would climb them, and when he did not she slipped off her stool behind the counter and crossed to the front window, beyond the door. There she waited again, until she saw his face, the face of a child, crinkled and ambered by the cellophane, craning into the frame as he studied the pictures, not idly and not as a buyer but in the more abstracted manner of someone working to assemble an understanding. And she saw his eyes close as he seemed to listen. Or maybe it was the warmth of the sun against his face that was causing him to hesitate this way, one hand, she imagined, flat on a gravestone—but she could see the print of fatigue, the habit of obliquity in the set of the mouth. And she saw a man, though not old, already half turned to the past. His energy accordingly devoted, his suffering consequent.

She walked back to her place behind the counter, and there she watched herself try to believe that this was not another one here for a story.