Young Jeff Birdy’s orange Barracuda throbbed and gurgled at the corner of Calendar and Main while he waited for the light to change, and Jean could see him pointed across her path as she slowed to a stop. When the light turned she got the full spectacle of that boy easing his car into the intersection and curling left just in front of her. He took it nice and slow, like he was riding a show horse around an arena full of people who’d come to watch only him, letting the sunlight flash off his chrome and not seeming to care that there were cars behind him with drivers impatient to get somewhere, not seeming to care about anything at all in the world. Jean watched him in his dark T-shirt and Labatt’s baseball cap, one arm dangling limp out the window as if it viewed disdainfully the task of gripping the wheel, and she wondered at the influences that must have led to such a display of . . . arrogance was the word. Ash had never been like that, had he? Jean didn’t think he had. So how could this boy of twenty-two, who had accomplished no more than a clean car—a car that, as it made that clotted, back-of-the-throat noise sounded bronchially infected to Jean’s ears—how could he smile with such enormous self-assurance at people he hardly knew? It was a paradox.
The paradox of Jeff Birdy’s smile.
But he rounded the corner and he was gone, and Jean pushed the image out of her mind, because on this bright day she had before her a bit of a challenge. She needed to convince Dorothy to leave Roy at home for an evening and come out to dinner with her. They hadn’t really had a heart-to-heart in a long time, just the two of them, and as Jean set herself the task of making a lasting experience for her—or, not lasting, but exquisite—she was feeling a little under-equipped.
Over the past few years she had lost track of what made Dorothy deeply happy. Her friend had become someone who personified resilience and endurance, someone you admired for facing a hardship you were grateful to have avoided yourself. It had made her a little severe, though. There were walls around Dorothy, and whatever sense Jean had of who was inside, the woman of secret joys and wishes, came from her memories of the Dorothy she’d known in high school so many years before.
That Dorothy, the regal seventeen-year-old with a fall of chestnut hair, had loved track and field, and swimming in cold, cold water at the lake. November wasn’t too late for Dorothy Perks to dive in, so it was said; and one October 31st, after a Hallowe’en dance, Jean had actually seen her splashing away from that showoff Frank Rennick (and who’s to say they weren’t still in the water when people lost track of them long after midnight?). Dancing, of course, that was another thing she loved to do. Jean used to envy Dorothy for having her choice of tall, covetable partners for the “Stairway to Heaven” finale of every event, and the way she so smoothly managed the song’s awkward transitions from slow to fast to completely rhythmless. During those last fifteen seconds, when everyone else stood around motionless like a closetful of poorly hung clothing, Dorothy zeroed in on the eyes of whatever boy she was with, draped her long arms behind his head, and pulled him forward so that their lips touched for the first and only time the instant Robert Plant eased out the word “Heaven.” For Jean, who was usually standing against the wall with Cheryl, it was like watching the end of a famous romantic movie you’d seen over and over and over, predictable and unavoidable but still a little enthralling.
Swimming and running and toying with boys: there were surely now more depths of joy to survey in Dorothy Perks than that. But when Jean had called last night, Dorothy had insisted that she couldn’t come out for dinner, or that if she did she needed to bring Roy along because she said there wasn’t anyone left willing to sit with him. And Jean knew that if Dorothy brought Roy, then she’d be forced to invite Milt, because he was acting so needy lately it wasn’t worth the aggravation and pouting to leave him behind. So she pulled the car to the curb and tried again.
“Dorothy,” she said when her friend answered the phone, “I know you’ve said no already but I want to insist on you coming out with me this evening. We deserve a girls’ night out, just the two of us.”
There were some strange sounds that Jean couldn’t quite place coming through the earpiece, and when Dorothy spoke she seemed distracted. “I’m sorry, Jean,” she said. “I’d love to, but I can’t. Do you want to know what I’m doing right now?”
Jean was fairly convinced she didn’t want to know, but Dorothy was a friend, so the word “yes” came out of her mouth.
“I’m watching my husband tear the stuffing out of his favorite chair in big handfuls.”
“Why is he doing that?”
“He says the chair is against him. It’s making his ass sore, because he’s been sitting in it all day, so now he’s teaching it a lesson.”
“I see,” said Jean, and she waited while she heard Dorothy yell at Roy to clean up the mess he was making because she was sure as hell not going to do it. “Well, then—Dorothy, are you there?—I guess we could have a couples’ night out.” In the background, Roy was shouting something unintelligible. Jean tried to make her voice bright. “And we’ll go someplace casual.”
They went to Ted’s Big Catch, which was a fish and chips place way up on Main at the corner of Primrose that was nicer than it sounded, with wood paneling and heavy varnished tables and those big captain’s chairs that gave a big man lots of support and had only a little vinyl padding for the back.
The two couples arrived at almost the same time, and they settled around a table in the big dining room where there were lots of hurricane lamps and seashells and fish netting, and it was a lovely picture, Jean thought, reassuring herself. She said, “I wish I’d thought to bring a camera!” probably a little too enthusiastically. Dorothy looked much less frazzled than she had a few nights before at Jean’s house. She had on black slacks, and a thin black cardigan over a peach jersey top, and she had her hair tied back to show off her long neck. She looked very slim, almost pert, and not at all her age, and Jean made sure to compliment her.
Roy had on a sports jacket, which he filled out with an impressiveness bordering on the grotesque, and his thinning hair was gelled and combed back in silvery strands, like a wire grille. When he spoke, his words came out slow and ponderous, and he seemed very calm, if a little confused, not knowing quite why they were there, or who Jean and Milt were, even though they had met many times before. Dorothy had encouraged him to wear a tie, she said, by which Jean felt she meant to explain the jumbled knot bunched against his thick neck. And Milt was Milt, wearing his usual checkered shirt and khaki pants with the black running shoes that Jean absolutely hated. “They’re comfortable, and they look just like dress shoes,” he insisted, even though that last part was not even close to true.
When the waitress came and asked for drink orders, Roy said, “Beer.” Dorothy tried to whisper to him that he could only have milk or juice (she caught Jean’s eye and mouthed the word “med-i-ca-tion”), but he bunched up the heavy features of his face until they looked like folds of pork and seemed about to cry or make a scene and it was a relief when Dorothy relented.
“Are you having a Mojito?” Jean said to Milt.
“No, I thought a beer.”
“Fine, and I’ll have a Chardonnay. Dorothy, are you joining me?”
“Well I’m driving, so . . .”
“Oh, just have one.”
“Don’t worry,” said Milt. “The fried batter will absorb the alcohol.”
They got their drinks and ordered their food, and then Jean raised her glass to toast Dorothy, saying, “Here’s to my friend who has shown such grace and endurance in the face of everything.” Jean knew it wasn’t the best toast ever, but as she brought the glass to her mouth it seemed a little odd to her that Dorothy didn’t seem pleased, and that she had looked immediately at Roy. But then Jean turned and saw Roy looking back at her with a suspicious glower and put her glass down.
“‘Everything,’” Roy said. His eyes were squinty and he seemed to be chewing agitatedly on his lower lip. “What you mean, ‘everything’?”
“Just everything,” Jean said, trying for a chuckle. “Everything life throws at us.”
“So why you didn’t say to the whole table, ‘everything’?”
Dorothy put her hand on Roy’s forearm. “It’s okay, hon. Jean was just being nice.”
Jean felt the blood rushing to her face. “I was just being nice,” she said, her voice reduced to a little girl’s chirp. She looked at Milt, who was looking at Roy and seemed just as confused as she was.
“Roy doesn’t like to feel like a burden,” said Dorothy, focusing on Jean now with a great intensity.
“‘Everything,’ you mean me,” said Roy, still glaring at Jean, still chewing his lower lip. “For what she needs ‘endurance.’ It’s me.”
“No, hon,” said Dorothy gently.
“Oh, no,” said Jean. “No, I wasn’t talking about you.”
“No,” Milt contributed, shaking his head.
Roy’s eyes squinted menacingly at Milt and back at Jean, and for a moment it felt to Jean as if the whole table, in fact the whole evening, were being dangled over the side of a cliff. And then she had a sudden inspiration.
“I meant growing old!” she exclaimed. “Because Dorothy looks so good! She’s the same age as me, but I could be her older sister!”
Roy’s eyes compressed even more, and the dark irises rattled back and forth like marbles in a matchbox between Dorothy and Jean. For a second or two he appeared uncertain, wavering, and it seemed that anything might still happen. And then a grin broke across his face like splitting skin. “Her mother!” The corners of his eyes crinkled and his grin widened until he showed pink gums and the brown ridges of teeth. He slammed the table, clattering the cutlery and plates. “You look like her mother!”
Dorothy’s eyes were on her and Jean thought she noticed a flicker of pity in her face, pity stirred up with gratitude, like a sour-sweet Mojito. She chuckled. “That’s right.” She lifted her glass. “Here’s to you, Dorothy!”
Roy slammed the table again and lifted his beer high. “To Dorothy!”
And Jean smiled at Milt, because after the poor man raised his glass he seemed unsure whether he should take a sip.
For a good hour or so, everyone seemed to enjoy themselves well enough. Milt munched happily on his burger and salad. Dorothy ate one of her fish pieces with the batter and one without, and the batter that she left on the plate looked like a little brown snowsuit for a tiny baby. She lit up a cigarette, too, even though smoking wasn’t allowed, because she seemed to be aware that, with Roy sitting there so massively, no one would come to the table and ask her to put it out. And for his part, “Big Boy” ordered two plates of fish and chips, and piled them into his mouth, sometimes with his fork and sometimes with his fingers. Every once in a while if he started to pick up a big piece of fish—or his coleslaw, he tried that also—Dorothy would give him a sharp little smack on the wrist so that he would drop it. It seemed to Jean that Roy didn’t like that very much, being smacked like a child, but otherwise he seemed to be quite content, laughing sometimes when he thought someone had made a joke, wiping his greasy mouth with his napkin or his sleeve, burping with deep satisfaction after his third beer. A couple of times, Jean tried to address a question to him, just to be friendly, such as, “How are you enjoying living in the country?” and “Do you ever watch boxing on TV?” But he would only look at her the way a toddler might, as if she were talking nonsense and just interrupting his fun. In fact, after the blow-up over the toast to Dorothy, the only words he said to anybody were, “I want the ketchup.” And he didn’t have to say that twice.
But despite the fact that the evening was proceeding as well as anyone might have reasonably hoped, Jean felt herself getting more and more frustrated. Because this wasn’t supposed to be just a friendly get-together, this was supposed to be a fact-finding mission. And it turned out, as Jean had expected, that a dinner for four in a busy fish and chips restaurant was a terrible time and place to find out anything about a person that was of any value whatsoever. Every time she tried to open up the subject—“So, Dorothy . . .”—of what made her friend really, truly happy these days, Dorothy would get distracted by something Roy was doing, like pretending to eat the end of his tie, or she’d shrug and give some meaningless answer such as, “I just like to veg in front of the TV with Roy.”
After more than an hour of this it was starting to occur to Jean, and frankly it was a surprise given that she had been friends with the woman for nearly forty years, that maybe Dorothy was not a very deep or thoughtful person at all. That was the sort of thing you’d think one person might have discovered about another person at some point, she thought, but apparently all their conversations for years and years had only skirted the surface like water beetles, not even trying to reveal any deep, dark, inner truths. She tried to put it down to the situation, which really was not ideal, but even so, by the end of her second glass of wine, Jean was feeling a little sad about her friendship and starting to lose some of the fire for her cause, at least where Dorothy was concerned.
And then something happened that put everything back on the right track.
Milt was doing the talking, going on as he liked to do about the differences between Grade 9 students and Grade 10 students, the two grades he tended to teach—in their maturity levels and tendencies toward aggression or insolence or overt sexuality, that sort of thing. Because he was a substitute teacher and wasn’t able to form relationships with the kids in the classrooms, he believed he had a unique and “scientifically useful” perspective. He was like a “test rat” being dropped into different cages, he said. And of course all of this was going completely over the head of Roy, and Dorothy as well, and Jean was a little annoyed at Milt for discussing a topic that held so little interest for half the people at the table (three-quarters of the people, if the truth were known). But when Milt mentioned the part about being a “test rat,” Roy thought that was hilarious and began to laugh so that his shoulders shook. And then, possibly because his mind was caught on the image of Milt as a small furry creature, he went to grab a handful of food from the wrong plate. It was Dorothy’s little suit of batter. And when he picked it up with his fingers, laughing, Dorothy slapped his wrist, and that’s when Roy hit Dorothy in the mouth.
It happened so quickly—the back of Roy’s left hand flying up to Dorothy’s face with a wet, splatty sound, Dorothy’s head snapping back with the blow as she emitted a small, high-pitched “Oh!”—that for half a second it seemed no one was quite sure whether they had seen what they had seen. Then blood started to bloom from Dorothy’s lower lip, which began instantly to swell, and tears came to her eyes. And Jean shot to her feet.
“You brute!” she shouted with all the air in her lungs. “How dare you hit my friend.”
She rushed around the table to Dorothy, who tried to push her away, insisting she was all right. But Jean could see that her face was pale, and that she needed air or water or just a sense of safety. So she told Milt, who was sitting in his chair like someone at a magic show, paralyzed with amazement, to “watch that animal,” pointing to Roy, who was quietly feeding batter into his mouth. And she helped Dorothy to her feet and led her outside, around the tables and past the waitresses and waiters, who seemed to be at the same magic show as Milt.
Out on the street, Jean set Dorothy against the front of the building, brushed the hair off her forehead, and used the cuff of her blouse to wipe some of the blood from Dorothy’s mouth. It was still light outside and she could see the age in her friend’s face better now, the lines around her eyes, the fragility of her skin, the soft, pouchy places that once had been flat and firm. Dorothy’s mascara had begun to run in black tributaries over her cheeks, and Jean whispered, “Stay here and I’ll be right back.” She went into the restaurant, where Milt was now gamely sitting next to Roy and talking to him in a calm voice like an older, much smaller brother (she was so proud of him in that moment), and got a clean, damp cloth from the manager. When she returned through the door, she found Dorothy trying to light a cigarette with her trembling hands.
“Here, let me,” said Jean. She gave Dorothy the cloth and, as her friend pressed it against her face, Jean put the cigarette to her lips, flicked the lighter, and inhaled. She hadn’t smoked since she was sixteen and now, with her heart already racing, the act of lighting a cigarette, and feeling the rush and the urge to cough when the smoke hit her lungs, seemed daring and illicit.
The sun hung fat and buttery over the roof of The Granary bulk store on the far side of the street, and the light was beginning to take on that summer evening glow. Jean handed back the cigarette, and Dorothy straightened.
“I should go inside.”
“Oh, no.”
“He’ll be worried about me.”
“After what he did? Let him be worried.” Jean took the damp cloth, wrapped the edge of it around her finger, and cleaned a smudge of makeup from the corner of Dorothy’s eye. “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she said. “I’m going to get Milt to take Roy home in your car. And you and I will have our girls’ night out.”
“Jean—”
“Don’t worry about Roy.” She kept her voice quiet, but Jean felt within herself a rising tide of purpose. Her will was inexorable, like the flight of a magnificent bird, or the march of a whole field of kudzu. She had never felt more sure of herself, of her plan, of what she could do for her friend. For all her friends. “You have every right to think of yourself and your needs right now. Tonight is about Dorothy Perks. Roy will be just fine with Milt.”
“Are you sure?”
“I couldn’t be more sure. Now, what I need to know is, can Roy show Milt the way back to your place?”
“Of course he can.” Dorothy frowned. “It’s not like he has Alzheimer’s.”
“That’s terrific,” said Jean, patting her arm. “I just wanted to check.”
She went back inside, where Roy was now sitting quietly watching sports people on the TV screen hanging from the ceiling in the far corner of the dining room, with Milt in the chair beside him looking backward toward the door. Life in the restaurant seemed to have returned to normal, with the usual motion and chatter; people so easily moved on from dismay. When Milt saw Jean he seemed deeply relieved. And because he had been so quietly helpful, so reliable, she felt bad when she had to tell him he would be driving Roy home.
“No, I am not doing that,” he said, thereby completely erasing in Jean’s books all of the goodwill he had built up. “He’s a total wild card. What if he clocks me while I’m driving?”
“That’s absurd. He won’t clock you.”
“How do you know?”
“I’ll have a word with him. You pay the check.”
“The whole—?”
Jean fixed him a look, and Milt sighed and slumped off to the waitress area. Then she went to the chair where Roy was sitting and tapped on his shoulder. His huge head turned and, seeing Jean, he started to cry.
“Dotty?” He reached for Jean’s hand and swallowed it in a mitt of soft, blood-warm flesh. “Is Dotty okay? She be mad at me?”
“I should hope so,” Jean said. “That was a terrible thing you did.”
Roy’s face crumpled even more than before and he nodded fiercely, sending plops of tears onto his knee and the floor below. Then he let go of Jean’s hand, wiped at his eyes with a fist, and began to push himself up out of his chair.
“No, no,” said Jean.
“I go to my Dotty.”
“No, you sit down,” she commanded. It was like ordering a giant cooked ham to sit. But there was enough force of will in her, she thought, to make even that happen if need called for it. And Roy sat. “Now listen,” she said. “Milt is going to drive you home. You know Milt?” She pointed at Milt, who was slowly handing his credit card to the waitress. When Roy nodded she continued. “You be nice to him, you hear me? When you get home, you can watch TV together.”
“With Dotty?”
“Don’t worry about Dotty.” She patted his hand. “Everything is going to be fine.”
Outside, Jean tucked her arm into Dorothy’s and led her up the street for half a block, past the print shop and the vintage clothing store, and under the ornamental street lamp with the wrought-iron curlicue that marked the start of Calendar, and Jean turned them down this street to get them out of view of the restaurant before Milt and Roy emerged. They walked for a while without talking. Calendar was lined mostly with modest two-story houses, built before the war, but people cared for them as well as any mansion. Some of the gardens were lovely, and several times Jean had to resist the urge to stop and study the leaves she saw: clumps of lemon thyme with leaves like green grains of rice rimmed with gold, purple Persian shield, pretty catbells the size of dollar coins. At a house on the corner, someone had set out a pot of Angel Wing, which was as beautiful as any caladium plant she had ever seen. Jean made a mental note to come back for a closer look, when all this was over.
“I think it’s going down a bit,” said Dorothy, touching her lip.
“Oh, let’s hope it stays for a while,” said Jean. “You look like one of those bee-stung Hollywood starlets.”
“I want you to know, Jean, he’s never hit me before. Sometimes I thought he might, but he never has.”
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jean.
“He’s getting worse, though. His mind seems to work best when he’s feeling paranoid. Maybe that’s the fighter in him. Otherwise he’s just a little boy.”
“Don’t think about it anymore.” As they walked, Jean put a light hand on Dorothy’s back and rubbed her gently. “Don’t think about it anymore,” she repeated.
Eventually, led by Jean, the two women circled around, across on Mott Avenue and down Primrose, as the sun dropped behind the buildings and the light turned bluish-gray, then darker still, until they were back at Main and it was feeling very much like evening. For now, Dorothy seemed content to go wherever she was taken, but Jean was aware that at any moment she might stop in her tracks and insist that it was time to go home. They came to the corner, where the light was red. Jean slipped a foot out of her shoe and rubbed it—she wasn’t used to walking so far in pumps—and began looking around for another restaurant, or just a place for them to sit and talk. Then she heard a familiar sound.
The deep, clotted, throat-phlegmy noise of Jeff Birdy’s Barracuda came toward them along Main and the car pulled to a stop just over the white line of the crosswalk, its juddering engine heating and vibrating the air around them, its headlights carving out bright swaths of the intersection and making everything else shrink into darkness. Across the street the walk sign flashed and Jean tried to nudge Dorothy forward off the curb, into the spray of light, toward the other side. But for some reason it was harder to get Dorothy moving than she’d expected. Her hand against Dorothy’s back met the resistance of someone holding her ground.
“Who’s that?” she said. She was squinting from the lights, and at the corner of her mouth—hard to tell, it might have been the squinting effect—seemed to be a tiny, puffy smile.
“Nobody to worry about,” said Jean. “Just Jeff Birdy.” She tried to make the nudge at Dorothy’s back a touch more insistent, without turning it into a shove.
“Ash’s boy?” said Dorothy, actually batting Jean’s arm away. “I haven’t had a good look at him since he was ten.” She bent down and shielded her eyes, trying to see past the glare into the Barracuda’s interior. Above them the traffic lights changed and Jean waited for Jeff Birdy to drive on. But he didn’t drive on. He just sat there with the green light, throbbing.
“Why doesn’t he go?” Jean said.
“I think I see him,” said Dorothy, peering into the depths. “Oh, I think he’s handsome.”
Behind Birdy the driver of a Toyota honked his horn, and out of the side window of the Barracuda came a hand that twirled lazily in the air to wave the car past. The ground under Jean’s feet shook with the Plymouth’s pistons, she smelled its raw exhaust, and she clutched Dorothy’s arm as if they were two virgins standing at the lip of a volcano. Then, like a dentist’s drill lifted off a tooth, the noise and shuddering just stopped, the headlights of the wide, orange barge went dark, and in the shimmer of silence Jeff Birdy swung open the driver’s door and stepped out. Dorothy straightened and drew a hand down the edge of her hair.
“Hey,” said Birdy, grinning.
“Hey,” said Dorothy. She flicked a hand at the car. “Seventy-three?”
“Close. Seventy-two.” He lifted off his ball cap by the brim, rubbed his hair with the heel of his hand, and set the cap back down securely.
“I like the paint job.”
Birdy nodded, as if he judged the comment reasonable. “Looks better in the daylight.”
“Morning light,” said Dorothy. “About five or six.”
“Maybe.” Birdy grinned. “I wouldn’t know.”
Jean cleared her throat and adjusted the purse strap on her shoulder.
“This is my friend, Jean,” said Dorothy. “I’m—”
“Nah, let me guess,” said Birdy. “I’m good with names.”
Dorothy let out a high, girlish laugh and Birdy leaned against the roof of his car, studying her. After a few seconds he said, “Roxanne.”
A smile spread wide over Dorothy’s face. “You’re a mile off.”
Birdy shook his head. “No, I’m not.” He opened his driver’s side door and his body began to disappear into his car, legs first. Before he was fully gone, he paused. “Get in,” he said.
“Oh,” said Jean. “Well, no. We were just—”
Dorothy turned to face her. “Tonight is about Dorothy Perks,” she whispered. “You said.”
She was standing close enough that she could smell the cigarette smoke on Dorothy’s breath and see the glimmer of excitement in her eyes. Jean looked over her shoulder at Jeff Birdy. She wasn’t sure what faith she could have in that young man to make Dorothy happy, but she knew that she probably couldn’t do it by herself.
“Why not?” she shrugged.
The inside of Jeff Birdy’s car smelled of stale beer and burnt motor oil, and there was a chance, Jean thought, that if she had to stay in the back seat long enough with the windows closed she would wind up with a terrible headache. Birdy had rolled up the windows because he wanted to show off his stereo but thankfully, after about twelve ear-splitting seconds of Toby Keith, Dorothy had managed to get him to turn it down. Or maybe she had turned it down herself. Jean couldn’t really hear at the time, and she couldn’t see much from the back because the springs in the ripped vinyl seat seemed to be mostly broken and she was sitting lower than she was used to sitting. She could see, however, that Jeff Birdy was steering the wheel of his car with only the heel of his left hand, and that Dorothy was leaning over toward him, half out of her own seat. Jean thought that somebody probably had a hand on somebody else’s leg.
“So what are you girls up for?” said Birdy.
“I dunno,” said Dorothy. “Anything, I guess.” She looked back at Jean. “What are you up for, Jean?”
“Anything sounds good to me,” said Jean, in a way that she hoped sounded joyful and adventuresome and not middle-agey. She had decided she was going to say yes to whatever Dorothy wanted. This was her night. And the truth was, Jean was a little excited herself, although it was funny to her how familiar it all seemed, sitting in a loud old smelly car driven by a cute Birdy boy who seemed to think he could have whatever he wanted. It wasn’t a very pleasant feeling, really. More wistful, all things considered. But anyway, that didn’t matter. It was just important that Dorothy have a good—no, not a good—a wonderful time.
“You want a beer? I got some beers in the back.”
“Sure!”
Birdy reached a smooth, muscled arm into the back and pointed to a battered plastic cooler on the floor, shoved into the crevice between Dorothy’s seat and the bench of the seat into which Jean was sinking. “You wanna pull the lid off that and grab a coupla cans for Roxanne and me?” He said this without looking around at Jean. “Help yourself while you’re at it.”
Jean considered asking him whether he should really be drinking while he was driving, but she abandoned that idea on the grounds that she knew what sort of answer she would get from him, and what sort of look she would get from “Roxanne.” She bent down and had to use all of her strength to pry off the lid because it was so snugly wedged between flanks of vinyl. At a certain point in her struggle down there, among the gum wrappers and fragments of straw, Birdy turned on the car’s interior light. Jean thought he was doing it to help her. But when she finally managed to sit up straight with three wet cans in her hands, she realized that Birdy was examining Dorothy’s face while he drove. His eyes stared hard at her, his jaw muscles flexing. Dorothy was facing straight ahead, and Jean could feel the tension radiating off her like sonar.
“So how old are you, anyway?” said Birdy.
As far as Jean could tell, Dorothy didn’t flinch. “Why don’t you guess,” she said, her voice a small, tight version of itself. “Are you as good with ages as you are with names?”
She kept staring straight ahead. In the back seat, Jean held the cold, slippery cans to her chest, hardly breathing.
“I know you’re north of forty,” he said. He looked forward and snapped the wheel to avoid something in the road ahead, then went back to staring. “But you’re not as old as my mom . . . I guess that’s all that matters.” He reached up to the ceiling and flicked off the light.
In the back seat, Jean marveled at the cold calculus of young Jeff Birdy, and she silently cheered for Dorothy. Because Jean was acquainted with Jeff Birdy’s rather plus-sized mother, and she was a good four years younger than either of the women in her son’s car.
“I got the beers,” she sang, and passed two of them to the front. As she did, she gave Dorothy’s shoulder a little squeeze.
They drove with Jeff Birdy in his rumbling Barracuda along two-lane highways and across gravel concessions as the darkness settled around them. If Birdy was “between jobs,” as he explained at one point, he also seemed to be between ideas as to what to do with two mature women willing to be taken wherever he intended to go. It didn’t seem to matter to Dorothy, who leaned her head onto Birdy’s shoulder and held his arm as if it were a vine keeping her from sinking into quicksand. In the back seat, Jean helped herself to another beer and silently mouthed the words to Birdy’s country tunes.
The roadside landscape was turning grape-colored in the darkness when Birdy abruptly hit the brakes, and the gravel beneath the car shotgunned the floor under Jean’s feet. Dorothy lifted her head.
“What is it?”
He threw his car into reverse and looked over Jean’s shoulder as he began backing up. After about fifty feet he crunched to a stop again and rolled down his window.
“You see that lane?” said Birdy.
Dorothy leaned across him to look out his window as Jean slid over on the back seat and rolled down hers. In the dim starlight, on the side of the road, Jean could see the shape of a huge oak or maple tree on a knoll and, beside that, the beginning of a lane that was not much more than two wheel ruts worn into the dry earth. The lane seemed to lead nowhere but down, toward some place beyond view that was even darker and more remote than the place they already were.
“I’ll bet that leads to some kind of water,” said Birdy. He crunched an empty beer can in his fist and whipped it into the far grass for emphasis.
“What kind of water?” said Jean.
“Maybe a creek, maybe a pond. Hard to say.” The car shuddered and grumbled beneath and around them. Jean smelled exhaust coming through the window, or perhaps through unseen holes in the floor. Birdy turned to Dorothy. “Whaddaya say, Roxanne . . . check it out?”
“Sure!”
“I don’t know . . .” Jean began to say from the back seat. She wasn’t quite sure how she intended to finish that thought. I don’t know if this is safe. I don’t know if this is wise. I don’t know what good anyone can expect to come of this but I guess it’s not my call! And it didn’t matter because Birdy had already cranked the wheel and now they were bumping down, down the lane, crashing through weeds and grass that beat against the open window frames and filled the car with a swirl of dust and floaty particles that caught in Jean’s nostrils. In the front seat, Dorothy held on to the boy’s arm with one hand and pushed against the ceiling with the other, while Jean held on to the back of Birdy’s seat and dipped her head the way she’d been told to do on airplanes during emergency landings.
They continued down like that for two or three minutes, Birdy swerving expertly to follow the twists in the lane. Jean thinking of Milt comfy in front of the TV with Roy, and of what a good friend she was, really an exemplary friend. And then without warning they were level, and they were stopped. Birdy shut off the engine, and the stereo, so that all they could hear was the cloud of dust settling on the car, and the cicadas in the trees.
“What’d I tell you?”
“Wow,” Dorothy whispered.
Jean raised her head and looked out. Beginning just a few yards away, a black pond stretched out in the moonlight, surrounded by the small, blue silhouettes of scrub trees. Birdy leaned out through his window, staring at the water. “Trout, I’m thinking.” He lifted his cap and gave the top of his head a scratch. Then he turned back into the car. “So, who’s swimming?”
For the next while, Jean sat on the fender of the Barracuda, beside a mound of clothing, listening to Dorothy and the Birdy boy splashing and hooting in the water, tormenting the trout, just like a couple of teenagers. When she put her hand back, the sheet metal above the engine felt warm, so she lay down with her head on the air scoop, which rose up in the middle of the hood like a big flat nose with enormous nostrils, and looked up at the stars. They were extravagantly bright, strewn like silvery jacks across the dark floor of the universe. What a pity people who lived in the city couldn’t see stars like these, she thought. Adele couldn’t see stars like these. She would have to show them to her, some night soon.
Jean had to admit to herself that she felt a little lonely lying there, without a hard young man grabbing at her goosebumpy behind and her cold-cinched breasts. But still she was coming to believe that everything was going to work out tonight, much better than she could have hoped. She knew that Birdy and Dorothy would soon be coming out of the water, and they were probably going to make love. Dorothy would want that, it would help make the evening complete and familiar for her, so Jean cast a silent wish on her behalf. Thinking about that likelihood, and hearing the two swimmers coming closer, Jean sat upright on the fender again and looked around for something to do with herself. There were probably some interesting plants around the edge of that pond, she considered. So she slipped down off the hood and fetched the little keychain flashlight out of her purse. And when Dorothy and Birdy emerged from the pond holding hands, naked and sparkly with water, she announced, “I’m going to go exploring for a little bit. Don’t leave without me.” Then she kicked off her pumps and trudged off into the weeds and sludge.
It felt well past midnight when things finally seemed to calm down in the Barracuda, so Jean was surprised when she examined her watch in the starlight and saw that it was only eleven-thirty. Time, she supposed, lost its shape when you were standing in your bare feet at the edge of a boggy pond, wondering if those were penny toads landing on your toes, having no way of knowing because your flashlight batteries ran out long ago, while you were swatting mosquitoes and your friend was being riotously screwed in the unsprung back seat of a muscle car by the son of the boy you once wanted to marry. But that was okay, thought Jean, as long as Dorothy was happy. This was her night.
Young Jeff Birdy had some work to do turning his car around and getting it back up the two-rut lane. At one point he got one of his fat rear wheels lodged in a patch of mud, and so with Dorothy steering, her hair all loose and wild, it was Birdy and Jean pushing together on the rear of the car, as the two-barreled tailpipe pumped exhaust against her shin. But they shoved it free—Jean getting a firm handshake from Birdy for her effort—and the ride back into town went quietly after that.
Jean directed Birdy to where her car was parked on Main, all alone now save for a few pickup trucks in front of the Ol’ Town Tavern at the far east end, and she waited with the key ready in the ignition while the boy and Dorothy made their goodbyes. Dorothy had not forgotten how to kiss, that was obvious. Jeff Birdy could count himself lucky for the lesson.
When the two of them were finally alone in Jean’s car and Birdy had rumbled off, Dorothy melted with a sigh in her seat. “Oh, God,” she said, with her eyes closed. “I’m a bad woman, Jean Horemarsh.” She chuckled a little wickedly. “It’s my fervent hope that I have corrupted that boy for life.”
“I’m so glad for you,” said Jean.
Dorothy opened one of her eyes. “Are you? It wasn’t weird for you, considering Ash and everything?”
“You deserved every moment of happiness tonight. I believe that truly.”
Dorothy let out a slow, deep breath. “Thank you,” she whispered. “You’re a good friend.”
That was all that Jean had hoped to hear. She believed it to be true. She believed it. And to have Dorothy say so just confirmed for Jean, as she drove to Dorothy’s house on the outskirts of town, that she approached with the purest of intentions what was now to come. There wasn’t even a question about that, really, but it was comforting to have it reinforced. She was a good friend, just as she had been a good daughter. It was just that as a friend she was better prepared. She had the foresight of experience, which she had not had with her mother. Imagine, she thought, if her mother had been able to enjoy a night like this before she died, a night when the pain was carved right out of her, and the hole was packed full with laughter and bliss. What a blessing that would have been for her, what a blessing now for those who loved her. Jean brought a hand to her face and flicked away tears as she drove.
And the fact that Dorothy had spent her last night doing the thing she had done so often when they were girlfriends back in high school—swimming and screwing—wasn’t that funny? It was funny how little people changed. Perhaps that wasn’t true of everyone, perhaps it was only true for Dorothy. Maybe screwing herself silly was the only thing that had ever made her happy. If so, that was kind of sad. But what luck that everything had worked out the way it did. Jean thought now that, if she’d believed in God, she would have thought it was His hand guiding events. But no, there was no God, and there was no Afterlife. When people died they were gone. So what mattered was how they lived. And whether they were granted a last moment of beauty, which was rightfully theirs. A Last Poem. Or a last screw . . . Well, whatever the case may be, Dorothy had had hers.
So.
Dorothy was asleep in the seat beside her. Jean drove along the narrow roads leading to Dorothy’s house, the occasional street lamp shining down on her friend’s untroubled face, almost childlike but for the etchings of age, and the smears of makeup, and the small wound on her lip. It would be lovely to do it as she slept, Jean thought, but that was impossible because there would probably be a mess, and Milt was going to be getting back into the car, and he wouldn’t understand. No, he would not. Just thinking about how much Milt would not understand made it all the clearer for Jean that she was right not to tell him about any of this, just as she never told him about her ceramics before they were made. Because until it was done, it was just an idea, and an idea was too easily dissipated. And somebody not understanding, in the panicky way that Milt would not understand, was a sure dissipater.
The closer Jean got to Dorothy’s house, the slower she went, because she realized that she hadn’t brought any of her tools, and she needed time to figure out what to do. Then she remembered: wasn’t there a little fold-up shovel in the trunk? That could work nicely.
As she approached Dorothy’s long country driveway Jean shut off the headlights. They were so late she worried that Milt would be checking out the window for them. For fifty yards or so she drove with only the moonlight to guide her. There were no streetlights, no houses in the distance. Then she turned into the lane and shut off the engine. Beside her, Dorothy began to wake up.
“You’re home,” said Jean.
Dorothy rubbed her face and looked out. “Why did you stop here?”
“Oh. Well, there’s something in your lane, and I wasn’t sure I should drive over it.” Jean opened the door to get out and walked toward the back.
“What are you doing?”
“Just getting a shovel from the trunk.”
“Strange,” said Dorothy. “I don’t see anything.”
“It’s up a ways,” said Jean. She opened the trunk, rummaged around, and finally laid a hand on the shovel as Dorothy got out of the car.
“What time is it?” she said.
“A little after midnight, I think.”
“Oh, God. Roy’s going to be so upset.”
“Don’t even think about that,” said Jean. She set the trunk closed without slamming it. “Remember, you deserved your fun tonight. You did have fun, didn’t you?”
Dorothy sighed. “Jean, it was the most fun I’ve had in years.”
“I’m so, so glad.”
“So where is this thing in the driveway?”
“It’s up ahead. You look for it.”
Dorothy walked slowly forward as Jean struggled to unscrew the shovel’s locking collar. She wondered why Milt had never oiled it. What good was a folding shovel if it couldn’t be unfolded? “Don’t go too far,” she called. Finally it came loose, and as she walked up the lane toward Dorothy she was able to straighten the shovel to its three-foot length and lock it into place.
“I still don’t see anything,” said Dorothy.
Jean was right behind her. Her heart was thumping harder than she’d expected, but just because she wanted to do well. She didn’t want to ruin anything.
Dorothy stopped in the lane and peered forward. “Was it an animal or what?”
“Just keep looking, you’ll see.”
Jean lifted the shovel over Dorothy’s head, knowing that what she was doing she was doing because she loved her friend, because she had been taught by terrible experience that to leave old age to chance was to open your arms to the dragon’s fire, to let the flames lick at will. And the flames were terrible, they were merciless, and they consumed life’s beauty first. And when it came to her dear friends that was something Jean Vale Horemarsh could not allow. She gave the shovel a wave in the air, to get a feel for its heft and to line up her swing. But it was an old shovel, made of a kind of cast iron, and quite a bit heavier than she’d anticipated. So it traveled a few inches farther than she wanted and plunked Dorothy in the back of the head.
“Ow!” she said. “Jesus, Jean, what the hell?”
Jean’s heart nearly stopped. “Sorry! I’m so sorry, Dorothy! That was an accident.”
“Christ, that hurt,” said Dorothy, rubbing the back of her head.
“But . . . you’re still happy, aren’t you?”
Dorothy wobbled her head as if to clear it, then she straightened her hair and put her hands on her hips. She sighed, looking off toward her house. “Yes, I am.”
“Phew,” said Jean. She raised the shovel again over Dorothy’s head and brought it down like an axe.