Rich People
I’d taken the kids over to their friends Locke and Helena’s house for Helena’s birthday party.
(Was there a single weekend in the summer when someone wasn’t celebrating a birthday?
Was there any party theme—unicorns, rainbows, Care Bears, the groovy sixties—that hadn’t been exhausted?
Was there a single child among the members of the Lake Catherine Country Club with a name like anybody I knew back in New Jersey?)
Regina had taken the children back-to-school shopping now.
When they returned to Boston, Jilly would be enrolling in first grade at a private school in Back Bay.
Hayward—his voice mostly changed by now—might be the only seventh grader in his class to sport a mustache.
As for me, I’d be entering school the next fall almost as flat-chested as I had been before.
Back at Wonderland, an unfamiliar man sat at the dining room table across from Regina. His briefcase was open, and there were papers spread out on the table. He’d taken out a calculator.
Regina seemed to have pulled herself together for his visit. She had makeup on, and she was wearing a gray pantsuit with a pair of matching flats. I headed to the kitchen to make a snack.
“What’s up?” I asked Prudence. I’d never seen Regina dressed this way, carrying on what looked like a business meeting.
“Something to do with the Emersons’ money,” Prudence said. “I think he takes care of their insurance policies or something. Not that those two have anything to worry about. Rich people. Who understands anything about them?”
A change seemed to have come over Forrest since that day on the island with Brenda.
He had started stopping by the club to watch the children’s tennis lessons, as he hadn’t done since the affair began.
Though I had no proof to offer Regina that the affair was over—and she seemed determined to believe it wasn’t, and to accumulate more evidence—what I saw in Forrest’s behavior, in these final days of summer, suggested to me that since Brenda had revealed her plan to him, he’d been keeping his distance.
It was a late afternoon, the third week in August. Forrest and I were picking up Jilly from a friend’s house. Just as Forrest pulled into a gas station, we spotted Brenda’s little Honda parked by one of the pumps. Seeing her car, he swerved away, back out onto the road.
I said nothing, but Forrest did. “There was someone there I didn’t feel like running into,” he told me. “Let’s just say, I’ve made some stupid choices in my life.”
It was a surprising admission for a man to make to a girl my age. At that moment, he almost reminded me of the old Forrest, the one who talked to me as if I was a friend, not a kid. I offered no response.
“I’ve always known you’re wise beyond your years, Frances,” he said to me. “You probably haven’t missed a thing all summer. You probably didn’t miss a thing.”
“It’s not my business,” I told him. Though Regina had made it mine. This part I kept to myself, naturally.