She was shaking her head. “He couldn’t get enough people to join, but he had to pay the administrative costs.”
“Who is this guy? This sounds incredibly fishy to me.”
“I know, honey. I wish I didn’t make the double investment, but if I’d encouraged my friends to do it, oh, I would feel so much worse now.”
“So besides what’s left of Dad’s life insurance policy, are there other savings you have?”
“Heavens, Alice, Granny and I won’t end up on the street, if that’s what you’re worried about. If worse comes to worst, we can take out a home equity loan. You know Daddy’s bank will give us the most favorable rate, although to spare him the embarrassment, I’d have half a mind to go somewhere else. Oh, he’d be appalled at what I’ve done.”
A home equity loan? I still couldn’t figure out what she had left in savings, nor did I know how much their monthly expenses were, but I feared that if I forced my mother to provide numbers, it would undo her.
“You can’t beat yourself up,” I said. “You were trying to take care of you and Granny, and that’s exactly what Dad would want you to do.”
“He was such a responsible man. Do you know I get half his pension every month, and when I’m sixty-two, I’ll get his social security as well?” This would be in 1987, which seemed so far away that it provided me with little comfort. “You mustn’t mention anything to your grandmother,” my mother was saying. “At her age, we can’t have her worrying.”
“Fine, but it sounds like this investment guy should go to prison. I know you’re embarrassed, but I think you should report him.”
An expression crossed my mother’s face in this moment, a look of fake innocence I had never seen on her.
“We don’t—” I hesitated. “We don’t know him, do we?”
“Honey, that hardly matters.”
“Mom, you need to tell me who it was.”
“Riley is such a small town, and you know how people talk,” she said, and I thought of having made a similar observation to Charlie Blackwell about Madison. But it was truer, much truer, of Riley. “After we sell the brooch, we’ll see where that leaves us,” my mother continued. “It’s Victorian, you know, which means it’s valuable. If I can make up some of what I lost, we’ll pretend it never happened.”
“Mom, who did you invest the money with?”
She did not seem angry at all, which was more than I could say for myself; she just seemed sad and tired. “I don’t want to get anyone in trouble, do you understand? You can’t tell a soul. I’m sure he didn’t mean harm, but he was inexperienced, and he got ahead of himself.” She seemed to consider a few more rationalizations, but in the end, she simply said, “It was Pete Imhof.”
AFTER A FITFUL
night in my childhood bed, I ate the bacon and eggs my mother prepared for breakfast, and we did not acknowledge our conversation of the night before; my grandmother was still asleep upstairs. When I finished breakfast, I read
and as soon as my mother left the kitchen, I leaped up and opened the drawer where she kept the phone book. He was listed, his number and an address on Parade Street. A few minutes later, I took off on foot; I told my mother that, driving into Riley the previous afternoon, I’d seen a blouse I liked in one of the windows downtown.
Given that it was a Monday, my going over there before five o’clock, when he’d be at work, didn’t seem to serve much purpose, but I was so agitated that I was reluctant to be around my mother or grandmother. I’d walk by his place first, I thought, figure out exactly where it was, and then return in the afternoon to try to catch him before I left town. If I didn’t speak to him, I’d need to stay another night, which I wasn’t keen to do; among other reasons, I couldn’t help wondering if Charlie Blackwell would call, and if he did, I wanted to be in Madison. (Courtship before the widespread use of answering machines, before voice mail or e-mail—how quaint it seems now.)
When thoughts of Charlie came to me, as they had repeatedly in the last twenty-four hours, I’d have the feeling of a pat of butter melting in a hot pan. Our initial kiss had lasted for several minutes, and eventually, we’d ended up sitting on the couch and then lying on it, me on my back with my head on the armrest, and him on top of me. We had talked and talked and kissed and kissed, his mouth warm and wet and familiar and new, and sometimes we’d just looked at each other, our faces ridiculously close together, and smiled. We both were old enough to know how unlikely this was to last or become anything genuine, but that probably made us enjoy it more, the awareness that it might only be these few hours. Lying beneath him, I felt tremendously happy.
Just past midnight, he said, “I think I’d better leave in the next five minutes, before I abandon my gentlemanly act and try to seduce you.”
Although we both had on all our clothes, my bra had come unfastened along the way, and as he spoke, he had an erection. And certainly we could sleep together, people did that now, it was 1977. A diaphragm (not the one given to me by Gladys Wycomb but a newer version) sat inside a toiletry case in the cabinet beneath my bathroom sink, unused since Simon. But this was the first time in my life I’d been tempted to have sex with a man the night we met, and I was only half tempted—it would be like leapfrogging over the normal stages of getting acquainted. Besides, Dena would never speak to me again.
A little reluctantly, I said, “Maybe you should kiss me good night and ask if I’m free later this week.”
“Hold on a second.” He feigned shock. “You mean to tell me you can squeeze in a date in between all the library preparation?”
“That’s not very nice.” I turned my head to the side, glancing back at him from under my eyelashes. “I wanted to accept when you asked me out earlier. I just thought I shouldn’t because of Dena.”
“I’m glad you reconsidered.” When I turned my head again, he was grinning, and the force of his grin was almost enough to obliterate the idea of Dena’s wrath.
