But he didn’t ask me out again before he left, we didn’t make a firm plan, and as soon as he was gone, I wished we had. I didn’t specifically think that I liked Charlie Blackwell, but it was the same as wondering where to put my furniture in the house on McKinley before realizing I wanted the house itself. Except, I thought now, how could I buy a house when my mother’s financial situation had become so precarious? Wouldn’t I be better off keeping my money in savings in case the problem was even worse than I thought?
And what about Dena? As I headed east on Commerce Street, away from the Riley River, my betrayal of her seemed far starker without Charlie present to distract me. I needed to talk to her. First I needed to think of what to say, then I needed to talk to her. No, first I needed to figure out what was happening with Charlie, if he was nothing but a flirt, or if we really would see each other again, then I needed to think of what to say to Dena,
I needed to talk to her.
Walking up Commerce, I passed Jurec Brothers’ butcher shop, Grady’s Tavern, and Stromond’s bakery, where, if you were under the age of twelve, they gave you a free sugar cookie in the shape of a dog bone. In the space that had once been occupied by the fabric shop, there was now a Chinese restaurant—a Chinese restaurant in Riley!— and I had heard that Ruth Hofstetter, the comely fabric-shop clerk whose single status into her late twenties had confused and saddened my mother and me, had later become the shop’s proprietress before selling it altogether when she married a widowed farmer in Houghton. Ruth was probably in her early forties now, I thought, and the age difference between us struck me as significantly smaller than when I was in high school and she was twenty- seven or twenty-eight. It had occurred to me recently that I could marry a man in his forties or even his fifties, as I was pretty sure Ruth had, especially if I didn’t marry anytime soon. And this seemed not so much objectionable as impossibly hard to fathom. How could you, if it was your first wedding, marry an old man? How could you still carry within yourself the you of your girlhood, your ideas of satin dresses and white lilies, yet be joined to a groom with fleshy hands, age spots, thinning gray hair? Dick Cimino had been forty-eight when Dena had married him, though in her case, that had sort of been the point, May-December, a sugar daddy to bestow on her gifts and attention.
The answer to how Ruth had done it, I supposed, was that she was older, too; if you married an older man,
were older, and you looked older. You were not so different from him. Or, inversely, he carried inside him a younger self, his droops and wrinkles felt like a costume.
Where Commerce crossed Colway Avenue, I could feel a shift in the neighborhood. Not that it was seedy, none of Riley was truly seedy, but there were more houses here with peeling paint, ratty indoor furniture on their front porches. The sun had gone behind a cloud, but it was still hot.
I turned onto Parade Street, checking the numbers. His address was a two-story structure with gray vinyl siding; it clearly had been built as apartments without ever having been a house. My heart beat rapidly as I tried the main door, which was not locked, and then I was standing in an entryway with gray walls, a blue linoleum floor, and a wooden staircase covered by a clear plastic runner. The hall smelled of old cigarette smoke. His door was along the left wall of the first floor, and I thought before I rang the bell that he would be home after all, because if you lived in a place this dingy, you probably didn’t have a job, and then I thought that was a snobby observation on my part and no doubt incorrect, and then he opened the door.
He seemed surprised, but in a faintly amused way, to find me standing there. “Alice Lindgren,” he said. “It’s been a long time.”
Although I was nervous, I was angry, too, and my anger guided me. “How could you?” I blurted out.
He actually smiled, which infuriated me more. He was wearing a white tank top, cutoff jeans, and flip-flops, and he had grown a dark, dense beard and gained perhaps forty pounds since I’d seen him last. (Once, getting milk shakes at Tatty’s with Betty Bridges when I was home from college, I’d spotted him across the restaurant, sitting at the counter with his back to us, and I had hardly moved or spoken until he left half an hour later. Other than that, I had not laid eyes on him in nearly fourteen years.)
He ambled to the couch where it seemed he’d been sitting before—the television beside me was on, showing
(Pete Imhof watched
?), and on the coffee table in front of the couch was an incomplete
crossword puzzle with an uncapped pen lying sideways atop it and an ashtray, the smoke still rising from a just-stubbed cigarette. Only after he’d lit a fresh one, inhaled, and released smoke through his nostrils did he say, “Business deals go south all the time.”
“Pete, it was clearly a scam!”
“Since when are you an expert on asset management?” He looked indignant, and for the first time, it occurred to me that this hadn’t been intentional. He had gone to my mother because, presumably, he’d heard my father had died, he’d guessed she’d have received an inheritance, and he’d been trying to raise money for this scheme. But he really might have thought it would turn out to be profitable. Perhaps it hadn’t been just to spite me.
“Whatever it was,” I said, “you don’t involve vulnerable people in a risky venture. My mother needs that money to live off, and to support my eighty-two-year-old grandmother.”
“Alice, I lost out, too. Thirty-five grand, in fact, which is a lot more than anyone else.”
“You need to repay my mother.” I tried to sound firm and persuasive.
He snorted. “You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.”
“Then find some other way to fix the situation.”
“If I hear of an opportunity in the future she might be interested in—”
“Don’t even think about contacting her again.”
