“You seem to be having trouble making up your mind.” I glared at him, and he added, “Why don’t you relax?” He extended the pack of cigarettes to me—they were Camels—and I shook my head. “If you’d prefer a beer, I’ve got plenty,” he said. “It’s early in the day, but I don’t judge.”
I folded my arms in front of my chest.
“Hey, I see you’re not wearing a wedding ring,” he said. “You still single?”
I stared at him, and my rage was like a storm inside me, a hurricane of fury. I thought of him calling me a whore that day at his family’s house; it was a memory I’d never forgotten but one I tried to store as far back in my mind as possible.
“I can think of something that might take the edge off.” He was smirking. “Be fun for both of us.”
“You’re repulsive,” I said.
“That’s not what you used to think.” He smiled, and when I didn’t return the smile, his expression grew sour. “Forget about the money, Alice. Your mother’s a grown woman, married her whole life to a banker, for Christ’s sake. That deal had a lot of potential, but not enough people came on board, and we had to cut our losses.”
“That isn’t satisfactory,” I said.
We looked unpleasantly at each other, and he shook his head. “You have some nerve, I gotta say. What are you really accusing me of here, fucking over your family? When you of all people should understand that mistakes happen.”
It was his ace card. And hadn’t I, in my way, forced it? Because then the situation could, at core, be my fault instead of his, and I could feel guilt instead of anger. And wasn’t guilt much more ladylike, didn’t it fit me far more comfortably? Yes, no matter what Pete Imhof did or said, no matter how manipulative or crude, I would always have done worse. This knowledge was what prevented me from upending his coffee table, from throwing his ashtray across the room or clawing his face. As I left his apartment, all I said was “Never come near any of us.”
I MADE IT
a few blocks before I began to cry, and I was so worried about being seen by someone I knew that I immediately ducked into the narrow alley between two houses; presumably, I was trespassing. I stood there, leaning against one house’s white aluminum siding, and my shoulders shook, and I was grateful for the blasting noise of an airconditioning unit above my head. It wasn’t even that I believed I didn’t deserve to be punished; sure, I deserved it. Almost fourteen years had passed since the evening I’d slammed my car into Andrew Imhof’s—the dread that gathered in me every late August, as September approached, would come in a few weeks, as reliable in its annual arrival as dogwood blossoms or fireflies—and Andrew would still be dead, and I would still be shocked by the enormity of my mistake. Andrew would always be dead, and I would always be shocked. It never went away.
And the problems that had arisen for me in the last forty-eight hours, my mother losing twenty thousand dollars while I unexpectedly found myself drawn to a man Dena was interested in—what right did I have to complain about either situation? On the whole, I was far more lucky than unlucky. But it was hard not to wonder what I could have done differently, how I could have prevented this sequence of events. I went out of my way to be considerate and responsible; it wasn’t as if I didn’t care what people thought or how they felt.
I told myself.
The tears had begun drying up—really, the older I got, the less I cried in either frequency or duration.
Immediately, it was clear to me that I couldn’t go through with my purchase of the house on McKinley and that even if Charlie did call, I couldn’t see him again; there were my solutions, and they hadn’t been remotely difficult to figure out.
I swallowed, wiped my eyes with a tissue from my purse, and stepped out from between the houses. Long ago, I had become my own confidante.
I HADN’T DECIDED
ahead of time to do so—I’d had the dim notion that I’d go to a store that sold estate jewelry—but on 94 heading into Madison, after I’d passed the third billboard for the same pawnshop, I pulled off. It surprised me that the proprietor was a woman or that, at any rate, it was a woman behind the counter that afternoon. The aisles were cramped with television sets and stereos, with motorcycles and leather jackets and, on a shelf behind glass, a large jade Buddha.
My mother had given me the brooch by itself, not even wrapped in brown paper, and as I passed it to the woman, I immediately wished I’d waited and put it first in one of the three or four small velvet jewelry boxes I’d acquired over the years (they always seemed too nice to throw away). That surely would have given the brooch a classier aura.
“I’d like to sell this,” I said. I thought it best to speak as little as possible, lest I reveal my ignorance of pawn lingo. I was the only customer in the shop, so at least I didn’t have an audience.
The woman was about my mother’s age, wearing several bracelets and rings (her nails were long and dark red) and a large silver cross on a silver chain. Her hair was a brassy shade, short but voluminous, and her voice was deep and friendly. “Hot as blazes out there, huh?” she said as she inspected the brooch.
“Wisconsin in July,” I said agreeably.
I thought.
