I say, “So when the journalists call and you say no—why do you?”
“Are you kidding? You think we’d talk about you to some sleazy reporter?” Dena scoffs. “We were raised better than that, and hell, we didn’t even vote for your husband!” She leans forward, extracting a cigarette from the pack, and after she’s lit it and taken a puff, she says, “At least I sure didn’t. Pete here just doesn’t vote.”
Pete smiles the way Charlie does when he’s broken wind particularly loudly, as if he’s half sheepish and half pleased with himself. Fleetingly—I don’t want to think this—I wonder if Pete is brain-damaged. Not that any single terrible event necessarily happened, but it could be that alcohol and perhaps drugs have had a cumulative effect.
“Hey, why won’t Charlie talk to that black guy?” Dena says. “You tell him old Dena thinks he should.” She means Edgar Franklin, I’m pretty sure, though unlike Gladys Wycomb, Dena does not use an accusatory tone; instead, she sounds self-effacing, as if she doesn’t really believe her opinion could matter. Or maybe it’s that, having once been married herself, she knows regulating one’s husband’s behavior is no small feat, so she doesn’t hold me accountable for Charlie’s decisions. She lifts a clear glass ashtray from a shelf beneath the coffee table and taps her cigarette into it. “Now, am I allowed to get a picture, Alice, or will your goons freak out?”
“Of course,” I say.
“Otherwise my sisters will never believe me you were here.” She stands.
“How are your sisters doing?”
“They’re plugging along. Marjorie’s oldest son’s over in the first of the 158th Infantry, so that’s hard.” Again, there is a notable lack of blame in Dena’s voice. How is it that she’s forgiven me for both the past and the present? “Peggy’s living in Mom and Dad’s old house, which you couldn’t pay me enough to do. The place is falling down around her, not to mention she’s due to have hip surgery, so I don’t know how she plans to get to the second floor.”
“Maybe she can have one of those chairs put in like my grandmother had,” I say, and Dena chortles, though I wasn’t kidding. It is sobering to think of Peggy Janaszewski needing hip surgery when, as little girls, she and Marjorie were our students the times that Dena and I played school and pretended to be teachers named Miss Clougherty.
Dena disappears down the hall, to find her camera, presumably, and Pete and I are left alone. The room is silent except for the whir of the air conditioner, and then Pete says, “A lot of water under the bridge, isn’t there?”
“There sure is.” We both start to speak at the same time, and I say, “Go ahead.”
“When I look back, I don’t feel real good about everything,” he says. “That was a tough time.”
Is he referring to after Andrew’s death or to the pyramid scheme?
“And the papers, they can’t leave it be. Every time it goes away, someone brings it up again, but they don’t care what he was like—they act like he didn’t do anything his whole life but get in the car and drive to that intersection.”
“I hope you know that I still think of him,” I say. “I still wish I could change what happened.”
But Pete does not seem angry. He says, “I always knew you were a nice person. I probably didn’t show it, but I knew.”
Unexpectedly, my eyes fill with tears; they are close to the surface, I suppose, given that I sobbed immediately upon my arrival. I swallow, keeping the tears at bay, and say, “I had no idea how to act back then, and I bet you didn’t, either.”
“He had a real big crush on you,” Pete says. “You could probably tell. I remember the time we saw you downtown, and you two were flirting like crazy.” (That afternoon just before my senior year of high school, when I’d been buying ground beef for my mother—the sunlight and Andrew’s eyelashes and Pete in the driver’s seat of the mint-green Thunderbird.) “If I’d found out you were pregnant,” Pete is saying, “I like to think I’d have done the right thing and married you, but it was probably for the best I didn’t know. I was too immature.”
He says, “What if we let Andrew be the father instead of me? That seems more like what it was supposed to be—revisionist history, isn’t that what they call it?”
Except that if Andrew had been the father, I wouldn’t have had an abortion, at least not if I’d learned I was pregnant after his death. And Andrew wouldn’t have been the father anyway, because we wouldn’t have had that rash, impulsive sex. But Pete Imhof is trying to offer me a kindness, so all I do is smile sadly at him.
From the pocket of his jeans, Pete withdraws his own pack of cigarettes; they are Camels. He pulls one from the pack but doesn’t light it. He says, “I would never have gotten my shit together without Dena. I kept showing up at the steak house where she was working until she finally took me home with her and saved me from myself, you know?” He leans in and adds, “Don’t tell her I told you, but I did vote for your husband. I like how he’s tough on terror.” Pete winks. “Dena has no idea.” As he lights his cigarette (it no longer seems like he’s brain-damaged), he says, “You want something to eat? Did she offer you anything?”
“I’m fine,” I say, and I hear Dena approaching from the hall. She says, “It won’t go on,” and when she’s in the living room, she hands a digital camera to Pete. “What am I doing wrong?” He fiddles with it, and the camera makes a zooming sound, the lens emerging.
Pete says, “You two stand together,” and I join Dena in front of the shelf of decorative plates. The lighting would be better outside, obviously, but I say nothing. Dena sets her arm around me, a gesture I am moved by, and I do the same for her.
After Pete has taken several shots, Dena says, “Now you guys.” Pete and I stand side by side, smiling and not touching; this isn’t a photo I ever imagined posing for. After the pictures are taken, they look at the tiny versions on the screen. “Isn’t technology today amazing?” Dena says.
“I’m sorry to rush out, but I have an obligation back in Washington,” I say. “It was very good to see both of you, and let’s stay in touch as things unfold. Did you keep Belinda’s number?”
“It’s in the kitchen,” Dena says.
