5. Jo
FIVE
jo
It’s a week and a half after the barbecue at Bill and Jo’s house, and the women and kids are gathered in Caroline’s backyard. Caroline’s kids, Marcus and Christina, are showing all the other children how to jump through their sprinkler (as if there were a right and a wrong way to do so), and Barbara is sitting in the shade, holding newborn Huck to her breast beneath a lightweight blanket as she nurses him.
“You don’t even look like you had a baby,” Caroline says, walking across the thick sawgrass in a pair of wildly unfashionable, single-buckle Birkenstock sandals. Jo admires the way Caroline bucks convention by forgoing makeup and wearing simple dresses that look as though she whipped them up in twenty minutes on a sewing machine in her rec room. “Drink this, hon,” Caroline says, handing Barbara a tall glass of lemonade over ice. “I’d love to spike it for you, but I don’t think little Huck is ready for vodka just yet.”
The other women laugh lightly and take their Madras cocktails from the tray that Caroline sets on the patio table in the grass. Jo sips hers, unsure about what exactly is in a Madras, but she soon deduces that it’s just cranberry, orange juice, vodka, and lime. She also realizes quickly that it’s terribly refreshing in this heat and humidity, and that if she’s not careful she could easily overdo it. She sets her drink down purposefully and focuses on Caroline.
“I have to ask, Caroline,” Jo says, looking once again at the simple floral print A-line dress with a rope belt that Caroline is wearing, “but do you make your own dresses?”
Caroline puts one leg over the picnic bench and sits down to join them with a pleased sigh. “Oh, call me Carrie—everyone does,” she says. “And how could you tell—was it the upscale edge stitching along my hem?” She winks at Jo with a smile and holds up the skirt of her dress with one hand, showing them a slightly wonky line of thread.
Jo flushes; she hadn’t meant to sound catty—not at all. “No! I sew a lot of my own clothes, and I thought I spotted a fellow seamstress in our group here. That was all.”
Carrie reaches out and pats Jo’s thigh as if they’ve been best girlfriends for years. “I’m teasing, Jo. I sew because I never got bitten by the fashion bug, if I’m being honest. I see the things that other women wear and I admire them so much for their style, but it’s not for me.” She wrinkles her small nose, which is dotted with a constellation of freckles. “But your clothes look so professional. Where did you learn to sew like that?”
“My mom,” Jo says with pride. “And thank you. I was a Girl Scout growing up?—”
“Of course you were,” Frankie interjects, tapping her pack of cigarettes against the wooden tabletop, but not taking one out—most likely in deference to the newborn in their midst. When Jo looks at Frankie she expects to see derision, but instead, Frankie’s face is a mixture of amusement and affection. “I know who I want on my team in case of an emergency or a natural disaster, and Barbie doll,” she says, turning to Barbara and the baby, “I’m sorry, but it ain’t you with your twinsets and pearls.”
Barbara looks stunned for a second, but then her face collapses in laughter. “I am actually not offended,” she says, switching Huck from one breast to the other beneath the blanket. “My money is on Jo being the one out of all of us who could start a fire without a match. Or build a shelter from twigs and leaves.” Huck fusses as he resettles, and then he goes quiet. “But if you ever want someone to keep the score of a golf game in her head, I’m your girl. I also won a limbo challenge in college, and I’m passionate about dressage.”
The other women stare at Barbara for a long moment and then they break into collective laughter. “Yeah, I’m on Team Jo, too,” Judith, who is overall the quietest of the bunch, says. “But I’d love to see you limbo sometime, Barbara.”
“You know,” Barbara says, leaning back against the chair she’s sitting in next to the trunk of the tree that hangs over them, “when you called me ‘Barbie doll’ a minute ago, Frankie, it took me back to when I was a little girl. My parents always called me Barbie, and to be honest, most of my friends back in Connecticut do, too.”
“Huh,” Frankie says, slipping her unopened pack of cigarettes into her purse and snapping it shut. “So most of us have nicknames already—Frankie, Jo, Carrie, and Barbie. Aren’t we a bunch of cuties? We sound like a pep squad.”
Everyone’s eyes shift to Judith, who is sitting there quietly, knitting as she sips her Madras cocktail. She’s focusing on her motions— knit one, purl one, knit one, purl one —but she suddenly notices that everyone has gone quiet and her eyes flick up to the other women.
“What about you, Moody Judy,” Frankie says, lifting her chin at the most mysterious member of the group. “You got any good nicknames? Do people call you Judy?”
Judith pushes her dark-framed glasses up her nose with her forefinger. “Not really. Just Judith.”
“Well, Just Judith, I think we’ll call you Jude,” Frankie says, uncrossing her legs beneath the picnic table and recrossing them. She rattles her ice in the empty glass, having long since drained her Madras.
Judith shrugs. “Suits me just fine,” she says, returning to her knit one, purl one. She truly does seem like the most easygoing person Jo has ever met, but as the other women move on with their conversation, comparing notes about babies and men, Jo’s eyes linger on Judith—or rather, the recently-christened Jude —and the way her face remains placid and unbothered.
Jo tilts her head slightly, watching the calm sea of Jude’s face. She has given them nothing so far in terms of personality: she hasn’t once yelled at her twin daughters, the sweetly-named Hope and Faith, and she hasn’t said a single bad word about her husband Vance’s long hours at NASA, unlike the other women whose lightly-veiled complaints run the gamut from “He’s never home,” to “I feel like his head is in space already, but the empty shell of his body is still here on Earth.” But not Jude; she just knits and purls and watches as Hope and Faith work out their differences with one another and with the other children, never even raising an eyebrow.
“So we are officially a girl gang now,” Carrie says, reaching out and putting her index finger inside the soft curl of Huck’s baby fingers now that Barbie has removed him from under the blanket. He is slumbering easily with a belly full of milk, and the women carry on around him. “We’ve got nicknames and we drink together in the afternoon.”
“Yes,” Frankie says drily, “we are an extremely tough girl gang, drinking Madras cocktails beneath a palm tree while we run a pre-school here in the backyard.” She lifts her chin in the direction of the children—nine in total, aside from baby Huck—and as if on cue, Hope and Faith seem to team up without exchanging words and push Carrie’s five-year-old daughter, Christina, right into the sprinkler.
Christina stands up, her face already crumpled into a red, tear-stained mask. “Mommy,” she says, walking over to Carrie with both hands held out. Her palms are wet and covered in blades of grass. “I don’t like to be messy.”
Carrie pulls Christina into her lap and, without batting an eye, lifts the hem of her own homemade dress and uses it like a rag to wipe off her daughter’s hands. “See?” she says to the other women. “One of the other beautiful things about not having spent hundreds of dollars on a high fashion dress!” She plants a kiss on her daughter’s cheek, wipes both of Christina’s eyes with the heels of her hands, and then sets the little girl back on the ground and gives her a loving pat on the bottom. “Go play, lovey,” she says.
Jo watches in amazement as Christina, tears now almost a memory, runs right back into the fray of children.
“She’s so easy,” Jo says in wonder. Kate is way more high-strung than that, and once the tears start to flow, it’s nearly impossible to stanch them. Sometimes Jo feels like the worst mother in the world because she can’t always figure out how to soothe or redirect her own children when they need it.
Carrie shrugs and knocks back the last of her Madras. “She can definitely be a pill.” Her eyes flicker over to Jude, who is still knitting away, seemingly oblivious to the fact that it was her twins who had pushed Christina into the sprinkler and started the tears in the first place. “But for the most part, she’s pretty angelic. Her brother is much more of a rough-and-tumble kid, believe me.”
“Boys tend to be, I think,” Jo says, thinking of the way that Jimmy likes to take things apart without asking and then attempt to put them together again—with varying degrees of success.
“I’ll second that,” Barbie agrees. “Though I don’t have any girls, so I can’t really compare raising one to the other. But I can say that I never jumped out of a tree as a kid, and on more than one occasion I’ve seen Heath and Henry attempting to climb branches and catapult themselves onto the grass. Three and four year olds!” she says, shaking her head. She looks down at sleeping Huck. “I can only hope that this little monster is Mommy’s calm and easy one.”
“What are your girls like, Jude?” Jo asks, pulling Jude away from her knitting again.
Jude smiles wanly as she pushes her glasses up her nose again. “They’re pretty easy. Mostly they just entertain each other and come to me when they’re hungry, if I’m honest.” Jude sets her knitting on the table and pushes herself to standing. She’s a tall, lean woman with mousy blonde hair, and her glasses hide a pair of brown eyes that look like melted chocolate. “Carrie, would you mind if I slipped in and got a refill of juice? I’m still a bit thirsty, and I need to use your powder room.”
“Oh, go ahead, honey. Mi casa es su casa and all that jazz.” She waves a hand at the house and turns back to watch the children as they start a rowdy game of Red Rover.
Jude walks through the sliding door and into the house just as Jo remembers that she brought a recipe card with her for Barbie, but left it in her purse in the living room. “I’ll be right back,” she says, though the other women are already deep in conversation about when they’ll be asked to sit for formal family photos for the NASA press kit.
Once inside the air-conditioned house, Jo takes a moment to wander around. The hallway is lined with black-and-white candid photographs that must have been taken by a professional photographer, but they seem to capture Carrie and her husband Jay and the kids in the most natural of poses. Jo is envious of the way the pictures appear artsy and not staged, like her own family photos. She desperately wants to be as comfortable and as sure in her own skin as the smiling woman in these photos is.
The front room, where her purse is sitting on the couch, is filled with yellow suede furniture— With children ? Jo thinks—and a huge, state-of-the-art stereo system is set up next to a bookshelf that’s covered in hundreds of books and equally as many albums. She walks over and looks at the spines of the novels and the vinyl, pulling Please Please Me by the Beatles from the stacks. It’s brand new and fresh off the press, and Jo has been wanting to purchase it for herself. There’s just something about the Fab Four that turns her into a teenager again, and she loves listening to them sing.
She puts the record back and finds the recipe card for Barbie in her purse, which she presses to her chest as she walks back through the kitchen.
“Oh!” Jo stops in her tracks. “Jude,” she says, fanning herself with the recipe card unnecessarily. “I forgot you were in here. I have a recipe that I was going to give to Barbie,” she says, holding up the card with her neat handwriting on it, as if this will allow Jude to see the directions for making Beef Burgundy over Noodles. “Don’t you think the nicknames we’ve all got are cute?” she rambles on, slipping the card into the front pocket of her skirt. “People have always called me Jo, but it feels like we’re all getting to know each other much more quickly. In fact, if someone calls me Josephine, I assume we’re pretty much strangers—” Jo cuts herself off here as she realizes that, for the entirety of her chattering, Jude has been standing there with a bottle of vodka in one hand, poised to pour it into her glass. “Oh, I’m sorry,” Jo says, backing away and sliding open the door to the patio. She walks directly to the picnic table and sits down again, the laughter of the other women drowning out the thoughts in her head.
Jo slips the recipe to Barbie as she heads over to the children to hold a stick for limbo at one point, and then she moves the sprinkler to another part of the yard so that Carrie’s lawn won’t drown in a puddle of water. But all the while, she’s glancing back at Jude, quiet knit-purl Jude, who is smiling to herself and drinking her juice with vodka.
Jo is unsure what to make of Jude as she blithely sips her secret cocktail, but before she knows it, they’re all consulting their watches and moaning about needing to get dinner on the table in this heat.
Jo gathers Jimmy, Nancy, and Kate, and heads home to put her meatloaf in the oven.
“Can you come out after the kids are in bed?” Frankie is asking as Jo listens. The phone is wedged between Jo’s shoulder and her ear as she turns Kate around by the shoulders and points wordlessly towards the bathroom so that Kate will wash her hands before dinner.
“Uhhhh,” Jo says, spinning around in the kitchen and reaching for a bottle of milk that’s sitting on the counter. As she tries to walk to the table, she realizes that in all of her turning and twisting and reaching, the long, coiled phone cord has wound itself around her torso. She rolls her eyes and repeats all of her steps backwards until she’s free of the cord. “I’m not sure, Frankie.” Jimmy and Nancy pull out their chairs and sit down just as Bill comes in the side door and sets down his briefcase. “I might be able to. Can I call you back?”
Frankie exhales, and Jo can tell that she’s smoking. Perhaps she’s sitting on her lanai with a glass of wine and a French for Beginners book. “Sure,” Frankie says. “You can call me. But I think it would do you some good to get out of the house and take a walk. Spin it to Bill like that: just tell him that we’re a couple of gals who want to walk off our middle-aged chub after dinner.”
Jo nearly laughs out loud; she’s thirty-two, and there’s no way that Frankie is any older than she is. In her mind, they’re far from middle age. “Okay, I’ll throw that against the wall and see if it sticks. Listen, I need to get dinner served. I’ll call you after.”
She hangs up the phone and turns to Bill with a forced smile. “Hi, honey,” Jo says, walking over to him and leaning in for a kiss. “How was the day?”
“Can’t complain.” Bill loosens his tie and slips it over his head. He sets it on the counter, walks over to the fridge, and takes out a beer. “How about you?”
Jo is making tracks back and forth across the kitchen as she brings the meatloaf, a bowl of mashed potatoes, and another bowl of green snap peas to the table. She sets each thing down efficiently, pointing to Kate’s chair so that her youngest will sit rather than fling herself at Bill, as she loves to do.
“We went over to Carrie and Jay’s house,” she says, then remembers that Bill doesn’t know all the ladies as well as she does. “I mean Caroline’s house. The Reeds have a lovely home.” She sits down and unfolds her napkin, keeping her eye on her daughters as she does this to make sure that they’re watching. Jo knows she isn’t the most fashionable or the most wildly exotic woman on the planet, but she does know her manners, and it’s her goal to teach them to her daughters by example. Once she sees that they’ve both put napkins on their laps, she looks back at Bill. “The kids all played in the sprinkler, and we sat in the shade and had lemonade.”
She isn’t sure why the lie trips off her tongue the way it does, but Jo fills her plate and avoids looking directly at her husband. Bill has never minded her having a drink here or there, but something about sitting around all afternoon and having cocktails with the new neighbor ladies feels…decadent. And unlike something Jo would do. And yet she’d enjoyed it—immensely. The drink had loosened her up a bit, and the company was good. Catching Jude pouring herself more vodka was still tickling at the back of her brain, but there was no way she wanted to bother Bill with idle gossip like that when she was still trying to make friends with these women.
“Sounds nice. I’m glad you’re fraternizing with the other hens,” Bill says as he forks a big bite of meatloaf into his mouth. He smiles at his children. “And how about you hedgehogs? Have you been up to anything good today?”
Kate, never one to hold her tongue, nearly bounces out of her seat now that she’s been given permission to speak up. “Daddy,” she says breathlessly. “Today at the Reeds we jumped in a sprinkler. And then Hope and Faith pushed Christina down and Christina CRIED. Can you believe that? And no one even got in trouble. If Nancy pushed me into the sprinkler, she would get in trouble, right?” Her eyes are wide as she watches her father’s face for a response.
Bill looks at Jo as he takes a pull from his bottle of beer. “Help me out here.”
“Christina is Carrie and Jay’s little girl, and Hope and Faith are the Majors’ twins.” Jo cuts her meatloaf with a knife, then switches her fork to her right hand and takes a bite. “But I’m sure that Mrs. Majors talked to her girls when they got home, and hopefully it was a lesson for them to be kinder to their friends,” she says pointedly, ending the gossip session with a stern look at Kate. “Why don’t you tell Daddy about the books we got at the library on our way home from the post office?” she prompts.
Nancy sits up straighter; this is her area of expertise. “Well,” she says, tilting her head to one side as though she’s preparing to give an important speech. “I spent some time familiarizing myself with the children’s section,” she says, looking at Jo for praise as she stresses the word “familiarizing” (Jo is big on the children using what she calls “five-dollar words” to expand their vocabularies). “But in the end, I think I’ll find more to read in the young adult section,” Nancy decides. She pushes her mashed potatoes around with her fork. “Even Jimmy got a book,” she says, looking at her older brother.
Jimmy, who prefers to eat fast and get outside to maximize his play time with the other neighborhood kids before dark, merely rolls his eyes.
“What did you get, champ?” Bill asks his son.
Since the evening when he locked himself in the bedroom and skipped dinner, Jo has been watching Bill for signs that anything might be wrong. He seems fine at the moment, but she’s wary of missing something and she pays attention closely as he talks to the children over dinner.
“A book about Joe DiMaggio,” Jimmy says. “Mom made me get it.”
“I think summer reading is important.” Jo looks at her son as he pushes his peas aside and tries to hide them beneath the edge of his meatloaf. “And getting to choose a book about something you’re interested in isn’t exactly torture, Jimmy.”
Bill sighs. “I wish I had time to read for fun. It’s been nothing but work since we moved here, and frankly, I’m envious of you all getting to play in the sprinkler and go to the library.”
“Let’s go swimming tonight, Daddy!” Kate says. She swings her short legs under the table, kicking the legs of her chair with her heels. “Can we?”
Bill glances out the sliding door that divides the dining area from the pool deck. “We could. It’s certainly warm enough.”
This is Jo’s opportunity, and without thinking, she takes it. “If you all go swimming, would you mind if I went on a walk with Frankie this evening? She called before dinner and asked if I wanted to get some exercise with her.”
Bill glances up from his plate and his eyes fix on Jo. “You two are going out walking?”
Jo shrugs. “It sounded nice. She thought maybe after the kids were asleep, but if you’re going to swim with them, perhaps you could oversee showers and bedtime?”
Bill looks at Jo with a surprised smile. “Sure. I’d love to put these monsters to bed. What do you say, guys? Think we can manage it?”
The kids all make excited noises about swimming and breaking the normal routine of Jo supervising the brushing of teeth and story time, and Jo feels an unexpected sense of relief at the idea of getting out of the house on her own. Most days it never occurs to her to escape from the expectations and chores of her life, but every so often, the idea of just opening the front door and leaving it all behind for an hour or two does seem appealing. She’s never considered going out walking with a girlfriend, and it’s refreshing to savor just a touch of independence.
Once dinner is done and the dishes are washed and put away, Jo wipes down the counters and picks up the phone to dial Frankie.
“It’s Jo,” she says as soon as she has Frankie on the line. “I just need to change my clothes, but I’m up for that walk if you are.” She’s giddy like a young girl whose mother has just agreed to let her go outside with a friend.
“Meet you in front of your house in ten minutes.”
The sun has fallen behind the palm trees, leaving the sky a watery blue. There are pinpricks of starlight all over the evening sky as Jo emerges from the front door of her house in a pair of culottes and a sleeveless shirt. She’s got her Keds on, and she’s ready to stroll.
“Glad you could join me,” Frankie says. She’s wearing a pair of high-waisted shorts and a man’s white t-shirt with sandals. “Let’s check out our new neighborhood, shall we?”
The women walk in companionable silence for a block, looking at the cars in the driveways, and at the families living their lives inside of lit-up homes.
“Think they’re all here for the same reason?” Frankie asks, nodding at a family sitting in the front room of their house with the television on.
“Essentially,” Jo says. “Aren’t we all living in this community because our husbands are working for NASA in some capacity?”
“Do you think everyone here is trying to be chosen for a mission?”
Jo lifts one shoulder and lets it fall. “I think some of the men are probably working at mission control or in some other capacity. I haven’t asked Bill many questions yet. I feel…” She trails off here as they walk.
“You feel?” Frankie prompts.
“I feel like I’m in this new place without a husband sometimes,” she says, surprising herself at the words that come out of her own mouth. “I mean, not really, but sometimes. You know?” Jo looks over at Frankie’s profile.
“I get it.” Frankie looks straight ahead as she nods. “Ed is gone a lot, and I don’t even have kids to distract me from the silence of the house. It feels different than life before because everything is new to me here, and I don’t quite have my bearings yet.” Frankie stops walking in front of a house that’s completely dark. There are no cars in the driveway, and the porch light is off. She picks a bright red hibiscus flower from a bush in front of the house and tucks it behind her ear, then leans over to pick another one. “But meeting you has really helped me to feel more grounded.” Frankie reaches out gently and puts the hibiscus behind Jo’s ear so that they’re matching. “And the other ladies, too. But mostly you.”
“Me?” Jo asks. They start walking again and Jo reaches up to touch the flower. She feels exotic as she breathes in the humid evening air, and she imagines her husband and children cannonballing into the pool while she explores the neighborhood.
“Yes, you. You’re a real breath of fresh air, Josephine,” Frankie says. “Can’t you see that?”
Jo definitely cannot see that. She thinks of herself as not terribly interesting, and it surprises her that Frankie thinks there’s something appealing about her—at least more than the other women in their little group. “I’m just a girl from Minnesota,” Jo protests, shaking her head. “Not anything worth writing home about.”
“Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong.” Frankie pulls her cigarettes out of the pocket of her shorts and puts the end of one in her mouth. She holds the pack out to Jo, who surprises herself again by taking one. She glances around furtively, as if someone might see her sneaking a smoke and have something to say about it. With one eyebrow raised in amusement, Frankie flicks her lighter and touches it to the end of both of their cigarettes. They each inhale and exhale into the night air before Frankie speaks again. “You’re kind of an everywoman, Jo, and there’s great appeal in that.”
They’re walking again, and the nicotine is working its magic on Jo, who gave up smoking as soon as she married Bill. “An everywoman? As in dull and workaday?”
Frankie shakes her head and waves a hand around. “No, no, no—you’ve got it all wrong. An everywoman in the sense that you sort of have it all. And you do it all—with ease.”
Jo barks out a laugh. She and Frankie hardly know one another. “You think I have it all? And I look like I do everything easily?”
“Yes,” Frankie says plainly. “I do. Am I wrong?”
This gives Jo pause. They pass by a house where a man is in the driveway, having a cigarette of his own. He nods at them and they smile politely in return, but don’t stop their slow, ambling walk. “I have a good family,” Jo says carefully. “A loving husband. Wonderful kids. But I get a lot of things wrong. There’s something I fail at every day.”
The hum of air conditioners working overtime to battle the heat of the evening fills the air as they wander by each house.
“I think you’re probably too hard on yourself,” Frankie says. She brings her cigarette to her lips and the tip glows orange as she inhales. Jo looks at the flower behind Frankie’s ear and the way it’s nestled against her dark hair. “I bet your kids think you’re amazing.”
Jo has plenty to say to this—she’s pretty sure that Nancy hates her for making her watch her little sister, that Jimmy thinks she’s a stick in the mud for forcing him to read in the summer, and that Kate feels ignored because she’s the baby and Jo has never had the time to just be a mom to her and to give Kate her full attention—but instead she just watches Frankie’s face as she squints her eyes and looks up at the sky.
“You gave up your whole life in Minnesota to come here for Bill. You uprooted your kids, and you’re trying to recreate your family’s comfort zone in a place that couldn’t be more different than the one you came from. That’s big stuff, Jo.”
Jo looks at the toes of her white Keds as she walks. “Thank you for saying that. I haven’t let myself pause long enough to appreciate the work it takes to keep things going every day. Sometimes it’s a lot.” Jo takes another drag on her cigarette. “I want to hear more about you, though.”
Frankie gives a throaty laugh. “What’s to tell? I met Ed in New York City four years ago and we got married in a whirlwind. And now here we are!” She’s clearly trying to sound breezy, but it falls flat. “I’m a city girl, and this feels like living in a quiet beach town, but at least it’s gorgeous here. And I can work on my tan.” Frankie nudges Jo with her elbow as they walk side by side.
Jo smiles, but she’s sensing a lot below the surface; there are plenty of things that Frankie isn’t saying. “What were you doing in New York when you met Ed?”
“I was a Rockette,” Frankie says, sounding wistful. “I went there to be an actress. All I ever wanted was to be on Broadway—I can sing, too.” Frankie turns to Jo and grabs her elbow so that they’re both standing still beneath a streetlight that’s just flickered on. “I had all these dreams, and I didn’t want to give them up, but meeting Ed changed things. I’d been struggling to get by, and he swooped in and saved me. I fell in love, sure, but I also saw an entirely different future when I met him. Something traditional; something real. I wanted to give it a shot, to be a wife, to finally grow up and make my parents proud, you know?”
Jo understands the desire to make other people happy and proud. It’s human nature to seek that approval, but sometimes it seems like a woman’s whole purpose in the world is to make everyone around her happy before claiming any of that happiness for herself.
“And were they proud when you married Ed?”
Frankie starts walking again, but so slowly that it’s almost like she doesn’t realize she’s doing it. She stares ahead into the distance. “Sure. Who wouldn’ t be proud of their daughter marrying a military man who wants to be an astronaut? Remember: my parents are immigrants. They’ve worked hard to get to where they are in this country, and they want more for their kids than they had for themselves. But do they care about the fact that I gave up on a dream to please them?” Frankie turns her palms to the sky, her rapidly-dwindling cigarette held between two fingers. “I mean, probably not. And once we’re married, we spend so much time nurturing the dreams of our husbands, but who worries about us achieving our dreams?”
It’s a big question, and one that Jo doesn’t have an answer to. But they’ve wound their way through the neighborhood and ended up back in front of Jo’s driveway. There are no pool noises coming from the back of the house, so Jo can only assume that Bill has rounded the kids up and is moving them through the bedtime routine.
“Thanks for coming out with me, Joey-girl,” Frankie says, dropping her cigarette butt onto the asphalt and crushing it beneath her sandal. She gives Jo a wink and holds out one hand as if she wants to shake. “What do you say we take a vow of silence? Anything we say on our walks stays between us—deal?”
Jo looks at Frankie’s hand and then takes it in her own. She shakes. “Deal,” Jo says.
Frankie says nothing else, but slips her hands into the pockets of her shorts and walks away, her dark hair glinting under the streetlights as she goes.
Jo pulls the hibiscus from behind her ear and sets it on the hood of Bill’s car as she walks up the driveway. He won’t know where it came from, but she doesn’t care. She’s gotten a taste of freedom and friendship this evening, and it feels good.
But a question lingers in her mind as she turns one more time to see Frankie walking up the driveway to her own house: who worries about a woman’s dreams ?
She doesn’t know. No one has ever bothered to ask Jo what she wants out of life, whether she’s happy, or if she wants to be anything other than what she is. She hugs herself and rubs her bare arms with her hands as if it were cold outside and she had a shiver.
But it isn’t a chill that overtakes Jo as goosebumps rise up on her bare skin—it’s excitement. It’s the thrill of possibility.