The Black Hour (21 page)

“You’ll be able to tell me all the dish.”

“Dish?”

“All his deep, dark secrets.” She laughed and reached for him. Doyle tried to smile. He managed to bare his teeth.

“We don’t tend to have—secrets in the department,” I said. “On the contrary.”

“Exactly what I mean,” she said. “We’re still getting around to all that back story couples have to get through. Such a whirlwind.” When she giggled, she gained a little extra chin. I concentrated on that, because otherwise she was adorable.

“Oh? How long have you known—”

“Amelia teaches the sociology of violence,” Doyle said.

“Baby,” his wife said. “I’m going to turn to violence if I don’t have a drink in my hand soon. Melly, how about you?”

“I have one coming.” I looked toward the doors and then at Doyle. He couldn’t possibly leave me alone with her. He didn’t trust me. He shouldn’t trust me.

Nancy raised Doyle’s hand to her cheek and kissed his knuckles. “A white wine. Champagne if they’ve got it.”

“At your service.” He glanced at me. “Anything at all, Amelia?”

“I’ll go in with you.”

“Don’t be silly,” Nancy said. “Let’s find a—right there, that bench has our names on it.”

“I really need to find my friend. I’m her ride.”

“You weren’t leaving already, were you?”

“Back soon,” Doyle said, and was off across the yard.

We both watched until he was inside.

“Well,” Nancy said. “Let’s relax.”

“I—uh—”

“I mean you can relax,” she said. “Don’t hurt yourself trying to tell me. I know who you are.”

“So. How long—”

“And we don’t have to chitchat,” the new Mrs. Doyle said. She held out her hand and straightened the ring on her finger. Doyle’s mother’s. “We’re not going to be swapping recipes over the back fence.”

“Good.” Suddenly I felt more certain than I’d felt in a while. What could she take from me? She already had Doyle. Everything else, off-limits. “I hate to cook.”

“I heard that about you.”

This was the game. She’d heard things about me, but I didn’t know which things or how true. “I’m legendary,” I said. “I don’t know anything about you.”

“I’m a private person.”

“Excellent,” I said. “That’s easily accommodated.”

We stood in silence, me grinning at her like a fool until she realized I wouldn’t ask a single thing. She glanced up at the house.

“Nick will want us to get along,” she said.

“
Nick
wants no such thing.”

She pulled on the front of her sweater, twisted the hem. “What will we say we’ve been talking about?”

In another world, I would have liked her for this. I had Corrine, but the truth was that I hardly had any friends left from other parts of my life. I had colleagues. I had ex-boyfriends. I had distant family members who shared the polite disregard I had for them. Women were at their best when they kept close women friends or had sisters they could turn to. Study after study had proven it, and yet a sociological study of women’s pairing habits couldn’t bring me to join a book club. I’d rather shoot
myself
.

Too bad Nancy and I had met the way we had. We might have been able to drink and tell lies together.

“He’ll assume that I’ve been regaling you with stories of our sexual past,” I said. “That’s what he expects of me. You couldn’t possibly help but come out on top. So to speak.”

She paled. “I don’t want to hear about that.”

“Not going to tell you.”

“Why not?”

I couldn’t win with her. “I’m a private person, too.”

“I thought you were
legendary
.”

“Oh, I am.”

Now she flushed pink and turned on her heel toward the bench. She had me there. I had to follow. Doyle had left us together, and he’d expect us together when he returned.

Damn Corrine and that glass of water.

Nancy minced to the bench and sat on the far end. She eyed my halting approach. I didn’t want to sit. I’d have to get back up. If I could help it, this woman would never see me scraping to my feet like a tortoise rolled onto its back.

“I work in a charter school,” she said.

I didn’t care.

“I’m forty-five, never married before.”

More than that—I didn’t want to care.

“Used to ride horses when I was a girl, but now I want to raise Shetland sheepdogs, breed them. Live on a farm somewhere.” She gazed out at the lawn. I recognized some of the faculty and administration, mostly men. The faculty wives I could pick out stood at their brilliant husbands’ elbows as if providing some sort of physical evidence. They didn’t have much to say to one another. Their haircuts were severe, bobbed. None of them wore soft sweaters.

I didn’t care. I couldn’t. I hadn’t sat on the bench, but I’d been forced to see this party, this party and all those to come just like it, from where she sat. Bleak. Or at least, you could see it that way—if you weren’t happy as shit about everything else you’d gotten in the bargain.

“You’ll be fine.”

She glared at me. “I don’t need your reassurances.”

“That was the only one I had.”

“I’m going to tell Nick we talked about Willetson and the lake. And the weather, before we ran out of topics, got uncomfortable, and decided not to try to be friends.”

“No one calls him Nick,” I said.

“That way he won’t expect us to be chummy the next time we run into you.”

“I can’t see him expecting that.”

“I hope not to run into you all that often,” she said.

“Your concept of him is really interesting.”

“Amelia—I can still call you Amelia, can’t I? Amelia, it’s time for us to understand each other. Nick and I are married—”

“No one calls—”

“I
do
.” She gave me a look of such pity that I felt something important and fragile inside me strain against cracking. “I call him Nick. And I’m the only one who matters.”

Joss grabbed my arm as I hobbled through the Wolitzers’ foyer.

“Is there no booze?” She brushed impatiently at her skirt. “Should’ve known to bring my own.”

“Can you take Corrine home for me?”

“So there’s booze? She’s had too much?”

“I mean back to campus. I have to go, OK?” I’d left Nancy on the bench, alone. Damn her and her pity, her Shirley Temple hair. Ridiculous creature.

Joss tilted her head and looked at me over the top of her hipster glasses. “I can take her. Is everything all right?”

Nothing was, but I couldn’t talk to Joss here, and I couldn’t wait for Corrine to come back from wherever she’d gone. “I’m just—exhausted. I don’t have the nerve for this anymore.”

She nodded, her eyes sliding away and past me. “There’s Corrine. I’ll go make sure she knows she’s got shotgun. Take
care
, Amelia. Get some rest.”

Joss patted my cane hand on her way past. On the far end of the ballroom I saw Corrine next to one of the bars. No drink in her hand, and she didn’t even seem to be in line. She stood next to a bookcase hanging at the edge of a group admiring the Wolitzers’ artwork. The group included a professor or a trustee and his entire family, from the looks of it. What idiot would bring his mother and adult children to this? A bow-tied bartender approached the group with a tray of drinks. Corrine was included in the offer. The elderly lady, stately as a queen, turned and checked Corrine top to bottom. One of the young men, prim and attentive to the lady as a concierge in his Rothbert-red tie, caught me staring.

Phillip Carrington-Something. He smiled and waved. I looked to see if I also knew anyone else in the group. The other young man was the real thing: this kid’s suit probably cost half my annual salary. He turned and seemed to note me. For a moment, the shelf of memory wobbled. I knew him from one of my intro classes last year, I supposed. Maybe he hadn’t liked the grade he’d gotten. As I turned away, the elegant lady brushed Phillip away from her.

Corrine had ditched me for easy drinks? Not that she’d bothered with my water. I could have waited for next year’s reception with as much likelihood of getting a drink brought to me. She’d adopted a serious sucking-up policy.

A crash. I shrank away from it, stumbling over the cane. My heart raced. Nothing, it was nothing. Someone had dropped a glass. I sensed those around me watching and hoped the Wolitzers weren’t among them.

Doyle emerged from the crowd with a trio of wine glasses and paused in the wide doors. He’d see his wife, a stranger in a strange land in an out-of-season sweater, left alone on the lawn. He’d wonder at my lack of social skills, the depths to which I would sink to hurt him. He’d wonder what he ever saw in me. He’d have to think for a long time. This time, he wouldn’t bother.

I waited until the Wolitzers were directing the cleanup of the broken glass, then slipped out.

When class broke up, the rest of them headed to the Mill while I hung back to help Dr. Emmet. She’d shown up to class a few minutes late looking peeved and distracted but pretty. Dressed up, her hair loose. When one of the girls complimented her, she blushed. “Stuffy faculty reception,” she said.

Class discussion had stumbled and halted, but she didn’t seem to notice or care. Finally she looked at her watch and asked if we minded cutting class short. No one minded. I walked her to her office and then out to the parking lot.

“I’ve got it,” she said, jingling her keys.

“You sure?”

“See you tomorrow.”

I shoved my hands into my front pockets and started off.

“The Mill’s the other way, young scholar,” she said.

I turned and walked backward a couple of steps, shrugged.

“You OK?” she said.

“Just—yeah, OK.”

She didn’t believe me, but it was the truth. School was OK, the teaching gig was OK, campus food when I got tired of cheap noodles, going to the Mill once a week. All of it fine. The problem—I’d figured on more than that. I’d staked everything on it.

When I opened my door, Kendall, stretched out in his loft bed, said, “Somebody called for you.”

“Bryn?” I hadn’t known I’d been waiting for her call.

“Who’s Bryn?” He sat up on an elbow. “Dude, do you have a
chick
back home?”

“She’s—no. Who called?”

“Number’s over there.” He gave an ambiguous nod toward my side of the room. “A guy.”

Which only left my dad. When I dialed, the phone rang and rang. I held on. He had no answering machine and usually had to come from outside where the latest fixer-upper waited in the drive with its hood propped open. At twelve rings: “Hello?” He didn’t sound out of breath, had walked in for the phone like a man with all the time in the world.

“Hey, Dad.”

“I told that young man you didn’t have to call me right back.”

“I wanted to.”

“Well, then.” That was his embarrassment. Affection had been Mom’s business. He didn’t know how to give it or to take it. Maybe it was the only thing we had in common, other than how much we missed her. “Well, then, you’re OK up there?”

“Fine,” I said. Was there any other answer I could give? “How about you?”

“Keeping busy enough. Someone asked me about you the other day. Can’t think of who it was, now.”

I couldn’t think who it could be, either. And if anyone had asked, it would have been polite chit-chat.
How’s your son?
they might’ve asked when the line at the A&P took longer than normal.
He’s just fine. Up at college
, my dad would say.
Still?
He wouldn’t have a good answer for that. Still.

“Busy at work?” I asked.

“Yep, I fixed every dab thing in the place this week.”

That’s what he said every week. I tried to laugh. We’d run out of things to say already.

“Spent a little time at the old barn this week. Cleaning it out.”

“Grandpa’s barn?”

“Needed done, sooner or later.”

My grandfather had been gone for years, his house down the road sold, his land fallow until the lean economy passed and someone could afford to buy and farm it again. The old barn, sturdy but locked up since the funeral. Six years—this was definitely later. “Cleaning for what?”

“Auction,” he said. “About time to get it back to use.”