Excerpt from Honeydew by Edith Pearlman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

The days got shorter. Paige's last customers walked under dim streetlights and entered a brightly lit shop. One dark afternoon Bobby saw the red-cheeked chemistry professor and his wife side by side on the chairs as if driving to the movies. Paige, gently kicking her stool, moved from one to the other.

Down in his study Bobby took off his own shoes and then his right sock. He had stopped attending to his feet after the accident. Now, how appalling the linty corned toes, how dis- tressing the jagged toenails. No wonder all his socks had holes. He took off his left sock and rested the left foot on his right knee. His heel was scored with lines, as if it could reveal his for- tune. Still barefoot, he returned to his unlit turret and looked out of the window. Bent over the chemistry professor's tootsies,

Paige personified hard work, like Renée bent over her briefs. Back in New York, Renée had moved inflexibly toward her goal?—?she wanted to be made partner?—?whereas Bobby had practiced indifference and inattention, writing careless reviews for short-lived arts magazines, making off-the-cuff attributions for the galleries he consulted for. This difference in attitude had led to arguments.

After her last customer left Paige often came out and sat on the store's single broad step and lit a narrow cigar. Bobby used the toilet, reading by flashlight. He turned off the flashlight and watched her smoke. Around midnight she went to bed. He did too.

This went on for a while. He thought of buying binoculars, but she wasn't a bird. He thought of dragging out his opera glasses, but she wasn't a soprano. He thought of employing his loupe, but she wasn't a work of art, and even if she had been a painting he was too far away to examine brushstrokes. After the first snowfall she wore a parka outdoors, and a fuzzy hat. She needed a fur coat?—?otter, maybe, like Renée's?—?but the animal-rights students would put her in the stocks. Anyway, she probably couldn't afford a fur coat. How much did you collect for a dead Marine? And even a flourishing pedicure business couldn't make a big profit. She could always go to work in the local pharmacy, he supposed. She'd studied pharmacy, she told him once; but she preferred this work?—?she was her own boss, and she ministered directly to people.

Spring at last moistened the town. Impasto leaves replaced pastel buds. He considered self-improvement. He might become a vegan. Let the mouse have his cheese. "So how much does it cost?" he blurted one afternoon. They'd met in the health store, he holding a jar of prune extract plucked in a hurry from the shelf, she examining something in a bottle.

"This is a dollar an ounce. But for efficacy it has to be mixed with?—?"
"Not the snake oil. A pedicure."
She looked up. Her eyes in her lightly wrinkled face were the blue of a Veronese sky. "Fifty dollars. Ten more for polishing. Tipping not allowed."
"Oh. Can I have one?" "Sure."
"When?"
"Friday at eight."
"Eight? My cubism seminar is at eight thirty . . ." She smiled. "Eight in the evening."
"Oh . . . I'll see you then?" "See you," she assured him.

Friday night he scrubbed his feet. He put on clean socks. He snatched up a book he wasn't reading, The Later Roman Empire.

He took the left-hand chair. When he tipped his head sideways and raised his eyes he could see the window to his bathroom, its light carelessly left on, wasting his landlady's electricity.

While Paige was filling an oblong wooden tub with hot water and a swirl of thick white stuff, he took off his shoes. She her- self removed his socks, folding them onto the top of the table between the chairs. In the old days Renée had picked them up from the floor, stuck out her tongue at him.

"White, red, or tea?" Paige asked.

Excerpted from the book Honeydew. Copyright © 2015 by Edith Pearlman. Reprinted with permission of Little, Brown and Company. All rights reserved.