There was a spruce tree in the yard, and the grass was deep green; the house was a white box, the wooden front-porch floor peeling maroon. There wasn’t a garage, just a driveway that was two concrete lines separated by a strip of grass. The knowledge that all of this would belong to me was overwhelming and exhilarating. I didn’t yet have keys, but Dena insisted on peering into the windows and wandering into the backyard, which sloped.
“It’s cute, right?” I said.
Dena nodded vigorously and sang, “ ‘Where seldom is heard a discouraging word / And the skies are not cloudy all day.’ ”
Although we were late to the barbecue, Charlie Blackwell was later, and Dena and I were already out back, sitting side by side on a picnic bench in the grass, when he emerged from the kitchen at the rear of the house and appeared on the deck holding a six-pack in each hand. He was wearing Docksiders without socks, fraying khaki shorts, a belt with a rectangular silver buckle, and a faded pink button-down shirt that I could tell, even from several yards away, had once been good quality. He held the six-packs up near his ears, shook them—a stupid thing to do with beer, I thought—and called out to the yard at large, “
there, boys and girls!”
About fifteen of us were present, and several men approached him at once, Cliff Hicken slapping him on the back. Charlie opened one of the beers he’d brought, and after he popped the top, some fizzed up and he pressed his mouth against the side of the can and slurped the cascading foam. Then he said something, and when he and the other men burst into laughter, his was the loudest. Under my breath, I said to Dena, “He’s perfect for you.”
“I don’t have lipstick on my teeth, do I?” She turned to me, baring her incisors.
“You look great,” I said. She waited ten minutes, so as not to be too obvious, and I watched as she crossed the yard and offered herself up, like a gift, to Charlie Blackwell. The day before, I had been in the public library and looked for mentions of Charlie in news articles—long before the arrival of the Internet, I prided myself on my ability to find information, my golden touch with reference books and microfiche—and although I’d turned up little about Charlie himself beyond his status as a former governor’s son, I’d learned that if he really was running in the district that contained Houghton, as Dena had claimed, he’d be up against an incumbent of forty years.
When Dena was gone, Rose Trommler, who was sitting on the opposite side of the picnic bench next to Jeanette Werden, said, “Dena Cimino is sure a piece of work.” Cimino was Dena’s surname now; she was no longer a Janaszewski.
As if I’d misunderstood Rose’s meaning, I nodded and said, “Dena’s the most entertaining person I know. She’s been exactly the same since we were in kindergarten.”
Rose and I were drinking white wine; Jeanette was six months pregnant and not drinking. Rose leaned forward. “I shouldn’t say this, but doesn’t she sometimes drive you crazy?” Rose and her husband lived next door to the Hickens; we’d been in Kappa Alpha Theta together in college, and she wasn’t a bad person, but she was quite a gossip.
“No more than I probably drive her crazy,” I said lightly.
“She’s practically throwing herself at Charlie Blackwell,” Jeanette said. “I wonder if we should warn him.”
I looked directly at her. “About what?” I asked in a neutral voice, and neither she nor Rose said anything. “I bet he can take care of himself,” I added.
“Alice, how about you?” Rose dunked a potato chip in a bowl of onion dip. “You must have your eye on someone special.”
“Not really.” I smiled to show that I didn’t mind. The irony was, I honestly didn’t mind, or not in the way they imagined. In my least charitable moments, I’d think about these women,
But it was a rare married woman who was able to believe that a single woman had any choice in the matter of her own singleness. I shifted on the bench. “Jeanette, am I right that you and Frank were in Sheboygan for the Fourth of July? That must have been wonderful.”
“Well, the way Frank’s mother scolded Katie and Danny, you’d think she’d never been around children before.” Jeanette shook her head. “Just a broken record of ‘Put that down, quit running around,’ when why were we there but for them to run around? And Frank was one of six growing up, but he claims she was even-tempered back then.”
“That’s hard,” I said.
“Oh, but you’re lucky having the company of other adults, Jeanette,” Rose said. “When Wade and I took the kids up to La Crosse, he spent so much time fishing, I felt like a widow. I said to him, ‘Wade, if you’re not careful, your son won’t remember his daddy’s face.’ ”
Jeanette chuckled, and so did I, to be pleasant, though the remark made me think of my mother and grandmother—actual widows—and of how much I’d have preferred to be at the house in Riley with them instead of sitting with these two women. Or I’d rather have been working on my papier-mache characters—I was halfway through Babar (the tricky part was his trunk) and hadn’t started on Yertle the Turtle—or I’d rather have been sitting alone with a pen and a pad of paper, figuring out plans for my house.
“Alice, am I right that you haven’t had a serious beau since that tall fellow?” Rose said. “Remind me of his —”
“Simon.” Again, I tried to smile agreeably, and then I did it, I gave her what I was sure she wanted—some admission of failure on my part—because I hoped it would get her to drop the subject. “I guess I’m in a dry spell,” I said.
“Frank has a real good-looking coworker at the DA’s office,” Jeanette said.
“Jeanette, that’s not nice to set up Alice with a felon,” Rose said.
Jeanette swatted her. “You know that isn’t what I mean. He’s another lawyer, and he owns a super place over in Orchard Ridge. You wouldn’t mind an iguana, would you?”
“I’m not sure if I’m the reptile type.” I stood. “I’m just getting a bit more wine. Do either of you need anything?”
