Meanwhile, my aunt tallied up the day’s receipts and counted out the cash in the registers, and from the Community Events space I could hear metal chairs banging and clanging loudly. I assumed that Mina was using the task of breaking down the room to vent her angry frustration with Johnny’s playing along with Angel’s flirtations.
I considered talking to the girl, but I knew it was something that had to work itself out. Young love is nothing if it isn’t volatile—which has got to be the oldest story in any bookstore.
Near the end of my conversation with Dana, we realized we had a few mutual acquaintances in publishing, holdovers from my days in New York. Dana was happy to fill me in on the latest gossip. Time slipped by and I didn’t notice that Mina had left for the night, or that Aunt Sadie had retired to the apartment above the store—the home we both shared with my son, Spencer, since my husband’s suicide a little over one year before.
“Oh, wow, it’s after midnight,” Dana cried. “I really have to run.”
I rose and escorted her to the front door, which my aunt had locked after Mina left. Dana and I said good night, and she promised to drop by again before she returned to New York City the next afternoon.
Then, dead on my feet, I yawned and locked the door. My eyes dry and red from wearing contact lenses for hours, and the start of a headache throbbing at my temples, I turned out all but the security lights and activated the burglar alarm.
Just then, a tapping on the front door startled me. I peered through the window and saw my slight, young employee standing on the dark sidewalk. I deactivated the alarm, unlocked the door, and Mina Griffith stepped inside.
Mina’s freckled face appeared flushed. “Sorry to bother you, Mrs. McClure, but I need to use the phone. My cell battery died and the pay phone in front of Koh’s isn’t working.”
I ushered her inside. “Who do you need to call? Are you stranded?”
Mina nodded. “I can call Rebecca, my roommate. She drove me to work today, and she can pick me up. Johnny was supposed to meet me at Frenzetti’s Pizza and give me a ride, but he’s an hour late and they’re closing up . . .”
Her voice faded, and I felt a stab of pity for the girl.
“Look, maybe there was a plumbing emergency or something and his uncle needed him,” I said. “Maybe he’s trying to call you and your cell is dead.”
Mina nodded listlessly.
“Why don’t I drive you home myself?” I offered.
“No,” Mina replied resolutely. “Rebecca can get me.”
I could see how upset Mina was, and I suspected she needed to pour her heart out to her roommate as soon as humanly possible. Twenty-five minutes later, Rebecca was pulling up, honking lightly in her Toyota, then Mina was gone.
AS I LOCKED up, set the alarm, trudged upstairs, and fed our little orange striped cat, Bookmark, I sincerely hoped Johnny Napp would turn up in the morning on Mina’s doorstep with a fistful of daisies and a good excuse— one that didn’t involve Angel Stark.
I checked on Spencer, and found him asleep. I gently kissed his tow-headed bangs, untangled his legs from the sheets and pulled them over his torso, then slipped back out the door.
I was sorry that I hadn’t spent much time with Spencer today. I had been busy getting ready for the author appearance, and he had day camp, so he’d been gone all morning until late in the afternoon. Then came Angel Stark’s appearance and I had to manage that.
Usually Spencer enjoyed the author appearances, but this time I felt that the R-rated nature of Angel Stark’s true crime book precluded a nine-year-old attending. Fortunately, Spencer willingly agreed to remain upstairs, most likely because Friday night was
In my small bedroom, I stripped off my linen pantsuit, kicked off my slingback heels, and undid the French braid from my shoulder-length reddish-brown hair. Then I took out my contact lenses (worn for special occasions like author appearances), placed them next to my black, rectangular-framed glasses on the small wooden nightstand, crawled into bed, and clicked off the lamp.
For some reason, I couldn’t stop thinking about Dana Wu’s assertion that Angel Stark was careless. It was that damn Jag, I guess, dragging her through the street then peeling off without a backward glance.
I thought about that big yellow car in
I might have dismissed Fitzgerald’s novel as pure fiction except my late father had been a Quindicott police officer, and I’d grown up hearing plenty of stories of the wealthy kids around the region getting into trouble—from prankish vandalism to drunk driving and date rape—only to have charges dropped when things were “taken care of ” through payoffs to victims or connections with authorities.
I myself had struggled to get a half-scholarship into a top university, paying for room and board through work-study and the auctioned sale of my late father’s old
Of course, to be honest, back then, I’d had stars in my eyes about the moneyed class, fancied the dream-life of being a part of their afternoons on the yacht and evenings at the country club. As a part of that world, Calvin immediately appeared polished and aloof and intellectual and desirable. My reality check came after I’d gotten accidentally pregnant with Spencer. My late husband and I had married right out of college, and I was instantly thrown under the thumb of his new family. A family with money—lots of it. And used to always getting their way.
And because Calvin’s wealth had made life perpetually easy for him, I found out too late that yes, he may have been intelligent and introspective and had all of those sensitive qualities an impressionable college girl wants in a romantic college boy, but he had a limited capacity for the things that actually mattered in a real-world marriage: patience, tolerance, strength, the capacity to compromise and make hard decisions, or even the discipline to make a consistent, continuous effort.
The ease with which he’d been able to breeze through the years of his life had done nothing to build his character. His father’s early heart attack and his mother’s incessant coddling—accompanied by pulling strings attached to his money when it suited her—left the man a moral weakling.
Of course, that’s my perspective now. Then, I’d been too caught up in it all to understand what was happening in my marriage and why.
It’s been said that anything coming close to accomplishment, achievement, invention, or discovery emerges from an ability to overcome obstacles and roadblocks . . . from a willingness to endure pain. Too late, I deduced that Calivn didn’t actually ascribe to this philosophy.
After years of making excuses for my husband in my own mind, I was forced to admit the bald truth. Calvin had grown so accustomed to letting his family sweep in and solve any childhood difficulty, that the first sign of any roadblock in his adult life sent him off every path he’d begun to travel.
He dropped out of law school, quit job after job with which his mother’s friends had hooked him up. He’d started writing probably two dozen novels and plays, but never wrote past page forty on any one of them. He took to smoking cigarettes and staring out windows. He wasn’t a man who could even muster the requisite vigor to enjoy partying, clubbing, or any other vice, for that matter—having had his fill of them all through his high-society teen years.
The most interest Calvin showed in anything was his own analysis. For five solid years, he sought daily appointments with therapists, but he never kept the same one more than six months. Each, eventually, would be labeled a “quack.” Then, during one stretch, while ostensibly “searching” for a new one, my late husband stopped taking his medications.
