‘I was so scared!’
She looked so stricken that, forgive me, I yelled at her. ‘Well, get a grip!’
And God damn Davis, he just blinked, sticky sweet and bland as custard pie. ‘Scared, honey? Tell Daddy what you’re afraid of.’
What do you think she’s afraid of, you sniveling cheat.
I was furious at Davis, but that’s not who I hurt. ‘Go upstairs and get decent. You look like shit!’ She ran out sobbing even though I called after her, trying to make it right. ‘I bought you a great dress. Carter’s coming to the party, Sallie made him swear.’
Now she’s upstairs, crying in the tub.
Davis let loose as soon as she cleared the room. At least she didn’t have to hear her dad swearing and slamming as he stomped out through the Florida room and drove away. That’s the beauty of central air. We’re sealed up tight against heat and street noises and outside interference of any kind.
Except Bobby, waiting for somebody to answer the bell. I have to wipe my hand across my face and go to the door with a smile. Live in this town long enough and you learn how to do that in seconds, bump up the rheostat so nobody knows what just happened or how bad it was, and I will be charming. ‘Bobby?’
‘No Ma’am.’ Who is this
lovely man
?
Look at him! Good-looking in a blurred, messed-up kind of way, with such a hopeful grin that you just know he’s OK. I come to the door a walking shipwreck, and here he is on my doorstep, like a gift. ‘Mrs McCall?’
‘Nenna. It’s short for Genevieve.’ As if we’re already friends.
‘I’m Dan. Your daughter left her backpack and I . . .’ He hands it off like a calling card.
‘Oh, you must be from the school.’
He takes a little bit too long to answer but that’s OK, the poor thing is so rumpled and sweaty that his day was probably worse than mine. ‘I’m new. She left her bag at the . . . Um.’
‘Bus.’
‘Anyway, here it is.’ And here he is, lingering.
OK, so am I. ‘Well, thanks! She’d thank you herself, but she’s in the tub.’
‘Tell her I said hi.’ On any other day I’d close the door and that would be it, but he’s the first nice thing that’s happened in a week of terrible things. Besides, he’s so attractive and hopeful, leaning into our lovely, cool house,
yearning
– sort of like me, looking for inspiration in decorators’ model rooms.
‘She’ll be down in a minute. Come on in, you look dead beat.’
I park him in the Florida room with the kitchen island between us, although he’s way too flustered and grateful to try anything. I duck behind the fridge door so he won’t catch me smoothing my lipstick and fluffing up my hair. Then I fix two iced teas with crushed mint and sugar on the rims. He’s not the only one who needs a lift. When Davis comes back and I’m sitting here sweet as Jesus, laughing and talking to a new man, he’ll have to re-think the awful things he said at the end.
The trouble is, we aren’t what you’d call talking. He’s cradling that glass like a Magic Eight Ball, you know, if he stares long enough, the right answer will float to the top.
‘How long have you been at Fort Jude High?’
‘Um. I just got in today.’
‘New teacher?’
‘Not really.’ Why does he look embarrassed? ‘I’m um. I’m a reporter?’
‘Oh. I thought you were from the school.’
‘No Ma’am.’
‘Nenna.’
‘Nenna. For the
Los Angeles Times
? Here’s my press pass. I’m here on a story.’
‘Oh.’ I can’t read a damn thing without my glasses, so I pretend. ‘Writing up the school trip to Busch Gardens?’
‘Not really.’
‘Then where did you get Steffy’s . . .’
‘I knew she’d want it back, and I thought maybe you’d do me a favor. There’s this other thing I’m trying to . . .’
‘Favor?’
‘Look, Nenna. I need your help.’ He pulls out a snapshot that’s way too faded to read. ‘I was looking for this house?’
‘House.’ The thing’s a blur but I’d rather die than go groping for my bifocals, that’s such an old lady thing, and now that he’s here, I’m working my way back to being young, and if he wants to . . . Stranger things have happened. ‘What are you looking to find?’
‘It’s hard to explain. Um. My mother was from here?’ He’s doing that kid thing where the voice goes up in a little hook at the end. ‘Lucy. Lucy Carteret?’
God.
‘She’s your mother?’
‘Was.’
My God.
‘Oh!’
‘She died.’
I know!
‘I’m sorry.’
‘Did you know her?’
I should be saying,
Know her, I went to school with her
, but oh, this is so stupid, pretending I couldn’t be anything like that old. ‘I’m sorry.’
‘Yeah. Me too. Well, thanks anyway.’ He has such a nice smile!
‘Don’t go.’ I put two fingers on his wrist.
Oh, this is embarrassing. Me, flirting with Lucy’s son but he’s so . . . I don’t want to be old!
‘Pink, much?’ Before anything else can happen, Steffy blunders in, twirling her skirt. ‘I look like a fucking shrimp.’
That ruffled dress looked much nicer on the dummy at Norma Jean’s Boutique and I go all Mom on her, instead of whatever I thought I was when it was just us together, him and me. ‘Don’t use that word in this house.’
Oh, she is scornful; she hasn’t seen him yet. ‘Or a fucking Barbie doll.’
Sweet man, he intervenes. ‘Hey Steff, I brought your backpack.’
‘You!’ She’s embarrassed – or something. ‘You told my mom?’
‘I would never do that.’
‘Told me what?’ I’m too distracted to follow up because I hear Davis rattling around in the breezeway, just back from wherever he went to sulk, the rat. I’m hurting so bad that I want him to come in on the two of us sitting close on the sofa, me and my new man. Then he’ll know who’s sexy, eat your heart out, you son of a bitch.
Steffy scoops up her backpack, glaring. ‘You didn’t say any . . .’
Something passes between her and this Dan Carteret but there are so many particles piled up in the room by now that I can’t read what he’s telling her when he says, ‘Nope.’
It’s the proximity – his young, lean body sitting
this close
to mine, and everything – the way my body feels this minute, how hard it was with Davis and how long it’s been – all piles up in me and meanwhile my girl Steffy stands there posing in the archway with her head lifted and wet lips like a model for something you want but are afraid to buy and then, damn, she gives me The Look! I saw it coming the day she was born, I just didn’t know it would be so soon:
Now
I’m
the fairest in the land
, and I have to be hard as nails.
‘Go upstairs and don’t come back until you find the right shoes.’ Meanwhile Davis slams the door and goes roaring off in that rattletrap without saying yes, aye or no, so much for that. He hates all these parties, he always has; God knows if he’ll even bother to come, and I’m damn well not going alone.
So I block what I’m thinking:
Lucy’s son
, and I say, all casual, ‘Want to come to this party with us?’
‘I’m sorry I . . .’
‘Come on, Steff and I would be thrilled.’ Then, my God, I take his hands. Did Davis see us together after all, and that’s why he burned rubber getting away? ‘
Tout
Fort Jude will be there, so no matter what you’re looking for, somebody at the party’s bound to know.’
‘I couldn’t.’ He shrugs, stirring up the gators on his tacky tourist shirt. ‘Not like this.’
‘Oh, no problem, Davis has plenty of jackets. You’ll need one from before he porked up.’ I sit there, willing him. ‘Hot
hors d’oeuvres
and an open bar.’
‘I’m sorry, I . . .’
‘And dinner.’ I was thinking,
He doesn’t look like Lucy at all.
Then he got up. ‘I can’t. There’s this thing I have to do.’
Bobby didn’t expect to be here, at the door to the Bellinger family fishing shack. Chape’s grandfather built it in the boondocks before he or Chape were imagined, when land was cheap. It sits alone on an inlet, so far out that whatever they did there, stayed there. No outsiders saw and nobody heard. Bobby would just as soon forget some of the stuff that went down when Chape brought him and his posse out here in high school, but here he is.
As instructed, he’s dressed for one more endless evening at the club. Chape phoned an hour ago. ‘We have a problem.’
‘Damn straight.’ Lucy’s son in a holding pattern, circling Fort Jude like an unanswered prayer.
‘Can you come?’
‘When?’
‘Usual place. Six.’ For a second there, Chape dropped his take-charge manner. ‘I need you, dude.’
Like it or not, Bobby is walking into his past.
He’s here because Chape was his best friend in high school and together they ruled. The guys he cared most about in high school will be inside. Well, all but Darcy, who wiped out at the end of junior year. Their names are carved in the unpainted door, along with the name of the one guy he ran with but never liked. If there is a call to accounting in life, this is the group he has to report to: living yardsticks, measuring him off. At another level, although he knew then that he was nothing like these men, Bobby Chaplin is thinking,
These are my people, and this is my place.
In spite of everything, it still makes him grin.
They used to hide out in Chape’s shack on the inlet; all through high school they got wasted on the Bellingers’ booze. In a town where everybody knows everybody’s business and your friends’ parents know you well enough to call you down for bad behavior, it was the secret place in their lives. Out here where the scrub pines give way to mangroves they could do anything, and Fort Jude would never know. It was all about whiskey, weed and pipe dreams: five kids too young to drink and barely old enough to drive, kicked back around the keg mainlining Jack Daniels like good old mountain boys, the only thing missing was the coonskin caps.
Even when you look happy you aren’t, really, he thinks. Even though outsiders can’t see it, there’s always something wrong.
They still got together here during college breaks but they were coming from different places in their heads, and that bad last night of houseparties pushed them over the edge. They landed in a new place and nobody could say which ones stood on which side of the rift, although Bobby knew that wherever he landed, he would stand alone.
The rift widened as the four of them solidified, like puppies growing into their feet. Whatever they used to be in common was no more. Chape was always going to be a lawyer like old Judge Bellinger, but until he grew into his father’s face, they could pretend. Stitch Von Harten’s dad set him up to take over the printing business. His family started it in Fort Jude during the Depression, so Stitch could forget the dive shop and the fishing boat, whatever he really wanted, although at that point, he still believed. By the time they were twenty his head was settling into that thickening neck; he didn’t look quite like old Mr Van Harten, but it was only a matter of time, and the twins? Doomed to take over Coleman Chrysler, no wonder Darcy rammed that tree and bled his life away on Route 19. Second and third-generation businesses, Bobby thinks uneasily. That’s what makes this city great. It explains a lot.
None of which explains the problem of Brad. The Kalens had him when they were too old, and spoiled the crap out of him because they didn’t know what else to do. By the time he hit Northshore Elementary he was a gorilla; even teachers cringed. Old Orville Kalen used to go to the club in that white suit with a gold chain across the vest and if you ran into him it always came up in conversation that the watch fob was his Phi Beta Kappa key, he graduated
magna cum
from Yale. Brad got kept back in first grade, so he was seven when they started. They found this
big kid
slouched in his seat with his feet on the desk like a hard timer when their moms brought them in on the first day. He glared and showed his teeth, like,
watch your back,
but they did what you had to, and made friends. They used to play over at Brad’s because the house was so big that nobody cared what they did and his folks were too old to do anything about it when and if they found out. Brad’s mom kept cold Dr Pepper and a freezer full of Dove bars and there was an attic where she never came; ‘please don’t make me climb up all those stairs.’ He had a toy race car you could drive around in and a Noah’s Ark with thirty hand-carved animals that were supposed to be paired off on the gangplank, which they never were. Most of them were missing tails or legs and half of them were smashed because Brad used to make his animals fight and kill each other; Bobby saw it once, so he was never easy with Brad.
Kalen grew up handsome and stupid wild. He was an ugly drunk but they hung with him anyway because he was the first to turn sixteen and get his license, and until Judge Bellinger bought Chape the Jeep in their senior year, he was the only one with a car.
Six friends. Well, one’s dead now and another’s an alcoholic, and Bobby? He’s been better. Still, he feels the same pleasure, going in. It’s like slipping into a pair of hightops you’ve worn for so long that the canvas is like part of you, softened by wear and ripe with thirty years’ accumulation of foot smell.
He opens the door, making a big smile for them.
But Chape is alone.
‘Where is everybody?’ He knows Chape has an agenda; he always does. Why else would he call? ‘What’s up?’
‘Long time no see.’ Of course Chape won’t show his hand right away. He never does. He’s set the ritual bottle of Jack Daniels out on the crate with a bowl of Cheetos and some weed, a gesture to the past. Chape is drinking Diet Dr Pepper out of the can but he greets Bobby with the usual: ‘Hair of the dog?’
Bobby says the usual: ‘No thanks, I’m driving.’ Har har. Cheap, but it’s the easy way in. They can jump cut to the present without stumbling over the years between then and now.
‘Beer?’
‘No thanks. You called?’
‘We have a problem.’
‘You said.’
‘It’s not what you think.’
His best friend from high school is touchy. They both are. What stands between them is the thing they never talk about. It’s tacit. They never did. They’ve spent their lives since that night avoiding the matter even though, walking away, silent and dumbfounded, they recognized it as a central event. In a way, it would be a relief to get it out and get it over with. Chapter and verse on what happened. The guilt.