Abe didn’t turn around. He walked faster, holding the beam out at shoulder height as if the answer was out there. “She wanted to tell me about my father.”
“What’s happening with your father?”
Abe dropped his arm to his side and the light brightened only a small circle ahead of their shoes. The muscles in his forearm tightened as he squeezed the lantern’s handle. “He’s gone again.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he took money from the store and he’ll be back when it runs out.”
“Where does he go? What does he do?”
“Who knows?”
Betty cringed. “It must be awful to worry about your mother like that. Is there anything else you want to tell me?”
“Just that I’m not my father.”
The way Betty was not her mother. She wondered if Abe looked like his father, the way she favored Tillie. Was it as disconcerting for Abe as for her? Betty would have preferred not to look like the mother who gave her away even though she could not imagine doing anything similar.
“I know you’re not like that,” she said.
They continued down the beach, hand in hand.
As if reading her mind—which she was sure he could—Abe looked at Betty like he was reminding himself she was there. He stared into her eyes and didn’t blink. Then he pulled her into a kiss. And time stopped.
When they arrived at the bottom of the dunes, Betty released her grip on Abe’s hand and removed her shoes and socks. She folded one sock into the other as if Nannie were watching. Then Betty stashed them inside one of her loafers and set the pair in a patch of tall grass. Feet in the sand was better than sand in the shoes, Nannie would say.
Without talking, they followed the flashlight’s beam up the hill, treading and sinking into sand, stepping over the thickets of grass and through bushes of thistle. If someone ever cleared this, the view from the top would be vast and spectacular, like the ones of exotic locations she’d seen in Vogue and Seventeen. Her heart pounded at the thought of privacy. If she didn’t love Abe and trust him, she would have mistaken the thumping and shaking for fear.
When they’d almost reached the top, Betty saw a neatly folded cardigan atop a patch of beach grass. Abe shined the light on it. Aquamarine with pearl buttons. She’d seen it before, but it was a popular color this season according to Seventeen. It could be anyone’s.
Then Betty heard an indecipherable sound. A deep voice. Guttural. An animal? It sounded more like a grunt or a pant than a feral cat’s howl or a lost dog’s whimper. With one more step, Abe fell to his belly as if hiding in a foxhole and shined the light up at the shed. Betty lowered herself next to him and saw two pairs of feet—human feet. Knees, pale skin, a bare behind? She closed her eyes and covered her ears with her hands.
“Oh my God!” Betty whispered. “They’re . . .”
“Having sex.” Abe kissed her cheek and pressed his lips to her hand.
Betty dropped that one hand away but kept her eyes closed. She was horrified. They were doing it outside? On the ground? “Are they gone?”
Abe chuckled. “They scooted as soon as they saw the light. I guess that’s one way to forget about what’s going on at home.”
Betty opened one eye, then the other, and rolled onto her back. “How dare they!” They’d ruined her night and her favorite place.
“Who do you think that was?” Abe asked.
“Marv and Eleanor.”
“What makes you think that?”
Who else could it be? Although an aquamarine cardigan seemed a little conservative for Eleanor. And hadn’t she been wearing pink earlier?
She stared through the leaves and broken branches. The stars twinkled brightly and seemed just out of reach. Sometimes she felt that way about Abe. “It has to be them,” Betty said. “Marv has grown up coming to Stern’s. Not many people know about this place. Who else could it be?”
“It could be anyone,” Abe said.
“Not here. It had to be Marv. Didn’t you see who it was?”
Abe laughed, but it wasn’t a mean laugh. “I tried not to!”
Betty burned with embarrassment, yet at the same time she knew Abe’s humor wasn’t at her expense. Her heart was safe. “They don’t even love each other. Not really,” Betty said.
Hand in hand, they skittered and slid back down the dune in the dark.
“I’d like to go home now,” she said. “I think that was enough excitement for one night.” That really wasn’t what she meant but Abe didn’t argue. Nor did he let go of her hand.
If she slept with Abe, would everyone be whispering about her the way she had just whispered about Marv and Eleanor? If they’d been making out, would someone have seen them? Would she become just another girl who’d succumbed to summer romance, or was it different because she and Abe were in love, planning a future?
Abe squeezed her hand. “Let’s pretend tonight never happened.”
After Betty’s earlier tryst with anger, they had talked, laughed, kissed, and shared ice cream. She’d learned about his father. They’d grown closer, linked by disappointment. She wasn’t sure she could forget such a lovely evening, even if she tried.
The next day, instead of eating lunch with her grandparents, Betty stood in the foyer of their house, licked one of the three-cent stamps she’d found in Zaide’s desk drawer, and affixed it to the corner of the envelope addressed to Patricia in New Jersey.
The correspondence filled both sides of Betty’s engraved and monogrammed cream-colored, linen stationery. Beneath the black engraved, swirling “BCS,” Betty’s A+ penmanship filled the page. She exaggerated her preparations for Barnard—the book she was reading, the clothes she was packing, the anticipation she was feeling. Truth was, Betty hadn’t been thinking at all about leaving South
