we’d gone to Red’s that we were having one of the two dinners Charlie most preferred). His refrigerator was largely empty but held a few items that all belonged to the same category: ketchup; mustard; relish; packs of hamburger buns that he never closed properly after their first use, causing them to go stale; and a shelf of beer. Meanwhile, his freezer was filled to capacity with multiple packages of Blackwell-brand boneless strip steaks and ground beef. His apartment was on the first floor, and he kept a three-legged black kettle charcoal grill on a patch of pavement in the backyard and usually accessed it by climbing out his kitchen window rather than walking through the front of the house and around the side. I’d perch on a stool in the kitchen while he climbed in and out, tending to the meat, and when dinner was ready, we carried our plates to the living room, sat on the couch, and watched baseball. I knew plenty of women wouldn’t have considered this a pleasant arrangement, but I liked how the game made conversation easy, how we could talk or comfortably not talk, and Charlie seemed especially sweet when he was explaining a play: “That was a great save, because when the ball’s coming directly at you, it’s harder to tell how deep it is.” Or “He bunted foul with two strikes, so that’s why it’s an out.”
Charlie ate breakfast every morning at a diner on Atwood Avenue, and he encouraged me to meet him there, but I was afraid, should we run into anyone we knew, that it would look like we’d spent the night together. (“Then I guess we might as well,” he’d joked, but I had come of age before sexual liberation really took hold, there’d been curfews in place when I’d started college—ten on weeknights, midnight on weekends—and men weren’t allowed in our rooms in the sorority. I’d had trouble entirely shaking the propriety of that time.) Besides, I had work to do during the day: I wanted to finish the papier-mache characters by the time back-to-school faculty meetings started in late August, and as the weeks passed, I really was beginning my lesson plans. I prided myself on being a librarian who didn’t just rehash the same material year after year, and this year I was especially excited about a new book called
which I planned to use with the fourth-graders as an entry point into a unit on origami.
As for Charlie’s schedule, he described this time as the calm before the storm—he used the expression repeatedly, both with me and with other people. I was hesitant to ask him much about his impending congressional run because the topic made me skittish, and it also didn’t seem entirely real. Did he actually want to live most of the year in Washington, D.C., to sit in an office building on Capitol Hill debating policy, casting votes on the House floor? Restless, joking, athletic, spontaneous Charlie? It seemed like he’d be acting out a role in a play. And of course, if he were elected (it was unlikely, but if he were), what would happen to us?
For his job at Blackwell Meats, he did not, as far as I could tell, go to the company headquarters on the outskirts of Milwaukee more than twice a week. He did drive to Milwaukee regularly, but more often it was to play midday golf or tennis with one of his brothers, preceded by lunch with Hank Ucker and prospective donors to his war chest: lawyers from large firms, the CEO of an outboard motor company, men Charlie referred to as stuffed shirts. I once asked a little tentatively if he considered his job at the meat company full-time, and without hesitating, he said, “Alice, here’s an insight I’ll give you into who I am. Being a Blackwell is my full-time job.”
In the late afternoons or on the weekends when, increasingly, I skipped my trips to Riley, Charlie and I would go swimming at BB Clarke Beach (“You should wear a bikini,” he said the first time we went, when he saw my red- and-white-striped one-piece) and then we’d go play badminton at the Hickens’ house or meet up on the Terrace with Howard and his latest young thing—he had already moved on from Petal—and Howard and Charlie would go through several pitchers of beer (Charlie would always drive there, I’d always drive back), and then Charlie and I would go home and grill. We’d never made it to the Gilded Rose, we hadn’t even discussed it again. I didn’t mind.
The way I’d felt in Charlie’s presence, ever since leaving the Hickens’ barbecue, was as if I were suspending disbelief. Our compatibility seemed so improbable that at first dating him struck me as some combination of amusing and mildly irresponsible. Once, late on a Sunday afternoon the previous May, I had run into Maggie Stenta, one of Liess’s first-grade teachers, at the food co-op where I belonged, and we’d started chatting while Maggie’s children ran wild in the aisles. “Listen, do you want to come over?” Maggie had said. “We’re just having sloppy joes.” Though I’d drawn up a list of other errands I needed to run, I accepted the invitation, which meant following Maggie back to her house, where I proceeded to forget my milk in a bag in the backseat of my car. Inside, Maggie said, “Do you want some sangria? We had people over last night, and it’ll go bad if we don’t drink it.” We sat on chairs in the yard, Maggie’s kids were jumping on a trampoline—the older one, Jill, was my student—and Maggie’s husband was inside on the second floor, and Maggie yelled at him, “Can you fix dinner, Bob? I don’t have the energy,” and then her neighbor, a woman named Gloria, came over and said she was pretty sure she’d seen a lizard run under her living room couch—“Not a big one, maybe four inches,” she explained—and this seemed to delight Maggie, so we went over and were tipping up the couch, and then the lizard scampered out—it was olive-colored— and into a vent in the floor, and Maggie decided what we needed was a net, which neither household had, so we left the children with Maggie’s husband and walked to a hardware store that he’d told us would be closed and indeed was. On our return, Maggie said good-naturedly, “Have you ever seen kids more badly behaved than mine?” We went back to Gloria’s house and looked around in the basement, which was outrageously cluttered, but we saw no sign of the lizard. By then it was seven o’clock, I had prep work for my classes the next day, I was tipsy from sangria (I ended up calling a taxi two hours later), and no doubt the milk in my car had gone bad. But what I felt that afternoon and evening was what I felt around Charlie all the time:
IN MID-AUGUST
, I was getting a haircut at Salon Styles—I had just settled into the chair after being shampooed—when Richard, the man who cut my hair, said, “Did you hear about Elvis?”
“I don’t think so.”
“He died. They were saying on the radio it was a heart attack, but it sounds to me like the old hound dog had a fondness for the pharmaceuticals.”
In the large mirror I was facing, I could see my own eyes widen. “He wasn’t that old, was he?”
“Forty-two.” Richard had parted my wet hair in the middle, and he took hold of chunks on either side, holding out the hair by the tips. “How many inches are we taking off today?”
THAT EVENING, AS
soon as I knew she’d be home from work, I dialed Dena’s number. The friendliness in her voice when she answered the phone, before she knew it was me, broke my heart a little.
“It’s Alice,” I said. “I was thinking about you today because of—I’m sure you know Elvis died, and do you remember when your mom took us to see
the night it opened, and then she made us peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches afterward?” Dena didn’t
