“I got a haircut.” I jokingly fluffed it. My hair was chin-length then, still thick and dark (I took secret pride in not having needed to pluck a single strand of gray), and I had it feathered a bit on the sides. I’d been told the previous spring that I resembled Sabrina on
“It isn’t your hair,” Rita said. “It’s more like a glow.” She leaned in. “Are you in
“What? No. No, but I’m a little sunburned.” Then I said, “Well, I’m seeing this guy named Charlie.”
“I knew it!” Rita was sixty and had never been married, and though she was attractive, she didn’t seem to date. She had known about Simon, but I rarely mentioned to her the more casual setups I found myself on—it struck me as tedious when women ceaselessly discussed their romantic entanglements. “Bring him to the back-to-school picnic,” Rita said. “What’s he like?”
“He’s cute and funny and—I don’t know, he’s fun. He’s really cute.”
Rita reached out and patted my forearm. I was surprised by how excited she seemed. She said, “I knew it would happen for you.”
I WOULDN’T HAVE thought it possible, but Charlie’s place in Houghton made his Madison apartment seem like a triumph of interior design. I accompanied him there one Friday afternoon for no particular reason—because now we were going everywhere together—and discovered that he’d rented, or Hank Ucker had rented for him, a unit in a soulless four-story complex a few blocks from downtown. Charlie’s was a two-bedroom with a galley kitchen, brown wall-to-wall carpet, beige drapes, a wheat-colored sectional sofa flecked with small blue and red zigzags, and a low glass coffee table. An unplugged television sat on the floor in a corner. The closets were bare, the cupboards were empty, and there was no soap in either bathroom, no towels, no dish towels in the kitchen, not even napkins or tissues; there was a full container of dish soap at the kitchen sink, and when I washed my hands with it after using the toilet, Charlie thrust out his midsection and said, “Dry them on me.” As I rubbed my palms against the oxford fabric, he said, “Oh boy, now you’re turning me on.”
“Why do you need two bedrooms if you never even stay here?”
“Eventually, some reporter will come sniffing around.” Charlie grinned. “A one-bedroom might look suspicious, like I’m just renting a place here to establish my eligibility in the district. I would hate to seem like a cynical politician to the good folks of Houghton.”
“We should go shopping,” I said.
“That’s what you women always say.”
I made a face at him, and he said, “I’m kidding. Maj has promised to spruce up the place before I move in, but if you’re that keen to add your feminine touch, be my guest.” Maj was apparently what Charlie and his brothers called their mother—short for Her Majesty. And she actually liked the nickname, Charlie claimed; he’d said he couldn’t remember when it had started but probably when his oldest brother was in high school and Charlie was in fourth or fifth grade. I asked what they called their father, and as if no other possibility had ever occurred to him, Charlie said they called him Dad, though he did add that the grandchildren called him Pee-Paw; they called their grandmother Grandmaj.
“I’m talking about shopping for soap, which some people would consider hygienic rather than decorative,” I said. “This place is depressing, and it doesn’t need to be. It’s depressing, and it seems fraudulent.”
“It
“Charlie, if you’re running for Congress in this district, you should spend time here. There are worse places in the world to live than Houghton.”
“You think they’ve considered that as the town motto?”
“Believe it or not, I’m trying to be helpful.” I looked around. “I’ll make a deal with you. We settle you in for real. We go buy sheets and towels and food—not anything that will spoil, but a few items to keep in the cupboard. And then we can spend the night here.” We still hadn’t spent an entire night together, which felt increasingly silly on my part.
Charlie said, “How about if we snuggle first and then go shopping?”
“I’m not snuggling on a bed with no sheets.”
“You drive a hard bargain, Lindy.” Lindy was Charlie’s new nick-name for me, an abbreviation of my surname. “You’re not secretly on the payroll for the Houghton Chamber of Commerce, are you?”
But we were smiling at each other, and this was the thing about Charlie—that my impatience with him was always tinged with, if not overshadowed by, amusement. That he entertained me, that I enjoyed trying to cajole him. I felt like I really could help him, that my organization and calmness complemented his energy and humor, and vice versa.
“If I am on their payroll,” I said, “I’ll never tell you.”
WE DID MAKE love late that afternoon, though we ended up using the sofa, because even after we’d bought sheets, I’d wanted to wash them before making up the bed. “Who does that?” Charlie said, and I said, “Everyone.”
He furrowed his brow. “But they’re brand-new.”
Naked on the sofa, he had stroked me until there was that warm rapid internal uncoiling, and then he’d plunged into me, and when we were finished, we lay there, the sweat that had risen on our skin drying, and I said, “Poor Hank Ucker will probably sit on this sofa someday with no idea what’s taken place,” and Charlie said, “Nothing would please Ucks more. When my mother sits here, on the other hand—”
“Don’t even say it. That’s so embarrassing.”
“You’ve gotta meet my folks soon,” he said. “They’re out in Seattle now, but everyone’s gathering in Halcyon, up in Door County, for Labor Day. Oh, and Christmas, you gotta come for Christmas. Maj makes a fabulous goose. The trick is to baste it in ginger ale.”
My impression was that Charlie’s parents were traveling more often than not—technically, they lived in Milwaukee, but they were visiting friends in Denver or Boston, staying in Door County (apparently, there was yet another home, a third one, in Sea Island, Georgia), flying to a university in Virginia for Harold Blackwell to give a
