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The Odyssey Tree(continued) She stood up with him. "I've enjoyed your visit, Mr. Morrison," she said, earnestly, trying to make up for her lack of comments during his conversation. He smiled at her. "Me, too. And please call me Tom. I'm sure that we'll be running into each other all the time." After he left, Amelia took her time cleaning up, polishing each piece of china with a loving and careful hand. It had been so long since she had had such disarray in her apartment. She felt confused. He was such a nice young man. And he had stayed quite a long time indeed. He must have been enjoying himself. But that was nonsense. She was an old woman. How could he possibly like someone like her? They had nothing in common. She didn't even know what a computer looked like. What did they have to talk about? She did see rather a lot of Tom Morrison after that afternoon. There was the day that she was walking home from the market, with her small bag of groceries, and he stopped his new car next to her (and gave her quite a start, too) and gave her a ride home. One night he asked her down to his apartment for supper - spaghetti, it was, and terribly awkward as she didn't know how to manipulate the strings. He gave her a glass of red wine with the spaghetti, and she felt very daring indeed, and was flushed and warm all evening long afterwards. He came upstairs to repaint her bedroom, which didn't really feel proper at all, but he had been commissioned to do it by the landlord so she couldn't really say anything. He stopped by for tea in the afternoons, frequently, talking about his work and how lonely it felt after a divorce, about how he missed his children. Amelia didn't really approve of the divorce, of course; but she told herself that this Caitlin must have been a terrible person, and a very silly woman really who didn't know a wonderful husband when she saw one. He bought her flowers on her birthday, and when his children came to spend the weekend with him he brought them upstairs to meet her. She found them tiresome and tiring, but she smiled valiantly for Tom and felt that he was smiling back at her over the heads of the children, as though the two of them shared some secret. She was changing. She was only aware of it, herself, gradually; but when Mr. Phillips came by to collect her October rent, he commented on it. "You're looking nice these days, Miss Ford," he said; and Amelia smiled, startled, like a young girl. She had started dressing up during the day, just in case Tom might stop by, skirts and sweaters and sometimes a thin line of bright lipstick over her mouth.She started listening to Public Radio and taking books out of the library, so that she would be well informed and have interesting things to say. Mostly, she noticed, Tom wanted to talk about himself; but it didn't matter. She was ready for anything. She knew so many things about him. She lay in bed in the mornings and listened for the banging on the pipes, and knew that he was taking his shower. She watched through the white net curtains when he left for work, and she was watching and waiting for his return, a little after five o'clock. She saw him dragging out his laundry on Saturday mornings, and sometimes she peeked into his grocery bags when the delivery service left them in the hall, to see what things he liked to buy. Once in a while, when he asked her to, she picked up his mail along with her own, and she glanced quickly and furtively through his computer catalogues and bills and letters. She cleaned the Odyssey Tree every day, tenderly and carefully, because she had come to associate it with him. He always looked at it, whenever he came into the apartment; and when he was gone she smiled at it as though treasuring some secret knowledge. He went skiing in November, with friends from work, and she fretted the whole week he was gone. She imagined them, all young and strong like Tom, flashing down the brilliant white slopes; and she shuddered when she thought of the mishaps that might occur. Every day she looked eagerly into the mailbox, and when his card finally arrived, she found her heart beating at triple time. She told herself, often, that he couldn't really be interested in her; but he never talked about any other women, he wasn't out late at night - she knew that, she always listened for his car and crept out to the kitchen to watch him come in - and he seemed to enjoy spending a lot of time with her. Gradually she began to relax, and she told him to use her first name (she couldn't remember a time when she had told anyone to use her first name, not since Harriet, anyway), and kept baking him cakes and cookies, kept asking him to drive her to the library, once even invited him to attend church with her. It was all very exciting indeed.
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