Chapter 9
If her mother complained later, Abby would say, “Oh, didn’t you hear him ring?” Her mother wouldn’t quite believe her, but she would probably let it pass.
Abby was dressed in the new style she’d come home from college with this spring—a flowery, translucent skirt with a black knit leotard, and black nylon stockings even though the morning was already warming up.
The stockings gave her a beatnik look, she hoped.
(These were her only pair, and when she took them off at the end of the day she knew she’d find startling black splotches here and there on her legs where she had colored in the holes with a felt-tip marker.) Her long fair hair was streaked lighter in places from half a summer’s worth of sun, and her eyes were heavily outlined with a black Maybelline eyebrow pencil but her lips were pale, which her mother said just made it seem she had forgotten something.
Dane wasn’t given to compliments—and that was fine; Abby could understand that—but occasionally, when she slid into his car, he would rest his eyes on her for a moment longer than usual, and she was thinking he might do that this morning.
She had taken extra care getting ready, dampening her hair to comb it straight and dabbing a drop of vanilla on the insides of her wrists.
Some days it was almond extract or rosewater or lemon oil, but today was most definitely a vanilla day, she’d decided.
She heard her mother’s footsteps crossing the upstairs hall and she turned, but the footsteps stopped and her mother said something to Abby’s father.
He was shaving at the bathroom sink with the door open; it was Sunday and he’d slept late, for him.
“Did you remember to …?” her mother asked, and then something, something.
Abby relaxed and turned back to the window.
The Vincents from next door were getting into their Chevy.
A good thing they were leaving: Mrs. Vincent was the kind of woman who would have asked Abby’s mother, seemingly in innocence, “Now, who was that fella I saw Abby tearing out of the house to meet? Young folks nowadays are so … informal-like, aren’t they? ”
All Abby had told her mother was that she was hitching a ride with Dane to help set up for Merrick Whitshank’s wedding.
She had made it sound like a chore, not a date.
(Although it was a date, in her mind. She and Dane were still at that early stage where even tagging along with him on some humdrum errand, hanging around his edges like a puppy tied outside a grocery store, made her feel especially chosen.) So far, Dane and her mother had come face-to-face only twice, and it hadn’t gone well.
Her mother just had a tendency to take against people, sometimes.
She wouldn’t say anything outright, but Abby always knew.
The Vincents drove away and a panel truck pounced on their space.
Parking was very tight on this block. Almost no one had a garage.
What could have been the Daltons’ garage—the basement area at street level, opening onto the sidewalk—was Abby’s father’s hardware store.
If Dane were to ring the doorbell for her, he would have had to park who-knows-where and walk from there to her house. So honking was just sensible, really.
Her mother was complaining about something, in her mild way.
“… asked you a dozen times if I’ve asked once,” she was saying, and Abby’s father offered some muted response—“Sorry, hon,” maybe, or “… told you I would get to it.” Abby’s cat marched purposefully down the stairs, each paw landing plop, plop, plop, as if he were offended.
He leapt into the armchair near Abby and curled up and gave a disgusted sniff.
Some oppressive quality in the room—its small size, or its overstuffed furniture, or its dimness compared to the sunlight out on the street—made Abby feel suddenly desperate to get away.
Although she loved her home, really. And loved her family, too, and had thought she couldn’t wait to finish her freshman year and come back to where she was cherished and made much of and admired.
But all this summer she had felt so itchy and impatient.
Her father told corny jokes and then laughed louder than his audience, “Haw! Haw!” with his mouth wide open, and her mother had this habit of humming a tiny fragment of some hymn every few minutes or so, just a couple of measures under her breath, after which, presumably, the hymn continued playing silently in her head until a few more notes emerged a moment later.
Had she always done that? It would have perked things up if Abby’s brother were around, but he was away lifeguarding at a Boy Scout camp in Pennsylvania.
Oh, and here came Dane! His two-tone Buick, blue and white, slowed for the stop sign at the corner.
Already she could hear the pounding thrum of his radio.
She grabbed her purse and tore open the screen door and rushed out lickety-split, so that by the time he’d double-parked in front of the Laundromat across the street she was flying down the stairs at the side of the house and there was no need for him to honk.
His arm was dangling out his window—tanned skin, subtly muscled, glinting with gold hairs, she knew—and his face was turned toward her but she couldn’t read his expression because cars kept passing between them.
(All of a sudden there was traffic, as if his presence had enlivened the neighborhood.) She waited for a driver who made way too much of a production about having to veer around him, and then she darted across, causing another driver to brake and tap his horn.
She circled the Buick’s front end and opened the passenger door and hopped in with a flounce of her skirt.
“Johnny B. Goode” was the song that was playing.
Chuck Berry, hammering away. She set her purse on the seat between them and turned to meet Dane’s gaze.
He tossed his cigarette stub out the window and said, “Hey, you.”
“Hey, you.”
Last night they had been all over each other but today they were playing it cool, evidently.
He shifted gears and started driving, his left arm still trailing out the window, his right wrist resting casually across the top of the steering wheel. “You look like you’re still asleep,” Abby told him.
In fact, he always looked that way. He kept his eyes so narrowed that it wasn’t clear what color they were, and his pale-blond hair was too long and hanging over his face.
“I wish I were asleep,” he said. “Last thing I wanted to hear was that alarm on a Sunday morning.”
“Well, it’s nice of you to do this.”
“It’s not nice so much as I need the money,” he said.
“Oh, they’re paying you?”
“What’d you think: I’d be getting up this early out of the goodness of my heart?”
But he just liked to sound tough, was all. He and Red were old friends, and she knew he was glad to help out.
Although it was probably true that he was short of cash.
A few weeks back he’d been fired from his job.
His family was well off—better off than hers, at least—but lately he’d been taking her on the kind of dates that didn’t cost much: eating hamburgers at a drive-in or sitting around with their friends in somebody’s parents’ rec room or going to a movie.
He would watch any movie that was showing, especially Westerns and tacky horror shows that made him laugh, though she was less enthusiastic because they couldn’t really talk in the movies.
Should she offer to pay her own way from now on?
But the little she earned from her summer job was meant to pad out her scholarship.
And besides, he might be insulted. He was prickly, she had learned.
They were leaving Hampden now. The houses grew farther apart; the lawns were bigger and greener. Dane said, “I don’t guess I happened to mention that my dad’s given me the boot.”
“The boot?”
“Kicked me out of the house.”
“Oh, my goodness!”
“I’ve been staying with my cousin. He’s got an apartment on St. Paul.”
Dane didn’t often volunteer any personal details. She grew very still. (The radio had switched to “Good Golly, Miss Molly,” and Dane’s reedy, drawling voice was hard to distinguish from Little Richard’s.) “I needed to get out of there anyhow,” he was saying. “Me and Pop were fighting a lot.”
“Oh, what about?”
Dane unhooked his sunglasses from the rearview mirror and set them on his nose. They were the wraparound kind and she couldn’t see his eyes at all now.
“Well,” she said finally, “that can happen, in families.”
It wasn’t till they were waiting for the light at Roland Avenue that she ventured to break the silence again. “What is it you’re helping to do today, anyhow?” she asked him.
“We’re cutting up a tree.”
“A tree!”
“Yesterday some of Mr. Whitshank’s work crew took it down and today we’re cutting it up. He wants the yard to look good for the wedding.”
“But the wedding’s at the church. And the reception’s some place downtown.”
“Maybe so, but the photographer’s coming to the house.”
“Oh,” she said, still not seeing.
“Mr. Whitshank’s got this whole, let’s say, image in his head.
He told us all about it. Can that guy ever talk!
He can talk your ear off. He wants two photos.
He wants Merrick coming down the stairs in her wedding dress with her bridesmaids ringed around the upstairs hall above her; that’s the first photo.
And then he wants her on the flagstone walk out front holding her bouquet with her bridesmaids spread in a V behind her.
That’s the second photo. The photographer’s going to stand in the street with a wide-angle lens that takes in the whole house.
Except this tulip poplar was smack in the way of the left-hand flank of bridesmaids and that’s why it had to go. ”
“He’s killing a perfectly good poplar tree for the sake of a photograph?”
“He says it was already dying.”
“Hmm.”