When Jean raised herself on an elbow and peered out Natalie’s front window, she saw what she’d feared in the sky: an endless mass of vellum-gray clouds, the kind that came like drums and flutes before the marching storm. She worried not for her own sake but for Welland’s. Today was the annual Police-Fire-Library Picnic in Corkin Park, and every year, for months before the date, he worked so hard on his part: arranging entertainment, such as it was, helping to round up sponsors for the picnic baskets and the petting zoo and the pony rides, setting up his lonely little booth in the Activity Zone. Jean went to the picnic every year, just to show her support, even though she didn’t much care for what went on there. Mothers let their children run around with hands and mouths sticky from ice cream until it seemed half the picnic grounds were caked to them. Teenagers leered at each other or snuck off into the scrub brush. The dunk tank water quickly became so dingy she feared for the health of any town official or local radio “personality” who had to sit on the wobbly wooden seat. The Wheel of Fortune was all right; she’d won twenty-two dollars one year. But then she’d lost it all on the silly carny games. Why the balloon shoot and the basketball toss and the pickle pitch and all the rest were run by the husbands of librarians was something Jean could never fathom. But they did seem to enjoy barking at people.
It was almost eight o’clock before Natalie came downstairs, and when she did she was wrapped in a blue housecoat that, to Jean’s eye, seemed at odds with her mood. The fabric of the housecoat had a fuzzy nap and was edged with a shiny satin ribbon. On the chest, over the heart, was a yellow Tweetie Bird. The housecoat, in other words, was entirely lighthearted. Natalie, however, appeared to be quite the opposite. Pensive was the word, and if she’d been asked about this, and if she chose to be honest, Jean would have said she was a little annoyed. If you were going to invite someone to be a guest in your house when their marriage was ending, the least you could do was be in a good mood around them. The least you could do was smile and offer breakfast and ask how they slept. Natalie didn’t do any of these things. It was probably just as well, because then Jean would have had to decide whether to mention what a terrible bed her loveseat made. But, of course, she wouldn’t have mentioned it. You simply didn’t complain when your friend was offering her hospitality, however faulty. What you did was show a similar generosity of spirit. But Natalie didn’t ask, and so Jean wasn’t able to express her generosity in that way. Her friend just spooned coffee grounds silently into the machine in her tiny kitchen. She obviously had something on her mind.
“Is everything all right, Natalie?”
“Hmmm?”
“You’re very quiet this morning.” Jean perched on a seat at the kitchen island. “You were quiet last night, as well. And we both know that’s not like you.”
“I was just thinking about what you said on the phone to Louise. I’ve kind of been thinking about it for hours.”
“Oh, that seems a shame,” said Jean. She looked down and adjusted the way her pajamas draped over her breasts. “I hardly remember what I said.”
“It was all about growing old.”
“Well, I guess I was upset,” said Jean. “I don’t know why you would lose sleep over it.”
“It kind of bummed me out.”
Natalie had stopped spooning coffee, and Jean could see the apprehension in her face. Apprehension had an unfortunate effect on Natalie; she lost all the vivacity in her dark eyes, and of course her sense of humor. She was obviously a woman who struggled with things that were uncertain, like the future. Under the circumstances, Jean thought it best to say something cheering.
“Oh, Natalie,” she said, “I really don’t think you need to worry about getting old just yet.”
“Why not?” Natalie dropped the coffee spoon and folded her fuzzy blue arms. “I’m an overweight, middle-aged, single woman. I’m exactly the person who should be worried about growing old. And frankly—” she looked at Jean “—so are you.”
What were the chances, Jean wondered, of Natalie ever not saying the blunt thing if she had a choice? If it was between bluntness and graciousness—or even something complimentary!—bluntness cut down all other options like a knight in the Crusades.
But never mind. Natalie was clearly anxious, and Jean realized how she could be generous with her this morning: she could put aside her own feelings and do her best to distract Natalie from her niggling fears.
Corkin Park, roughly triangular and set against the lake, was named after Oswald J. Corkin, one of Kotemee’s original favorite sons. He had enlisted in the Anglo-Egyptian Nile Expeditionary Force in 1896 and fought in the Sudanese War under Lord Kitchener at Dunqulah and Omdurman. It was at Omdurman, on the western bank of the Nile—where in five hours Kitchener’s men killed eleven thousand of the enemy and sustained only forty-eight losses and not quite four hundred wounded—that Corkin’s name had become enshrined in lore. He’d got his toe shot off, the second on the left foot. But as the bullets flew he’d managed to find the piece of toe. He later brought it home in a handkerchief.
Just before ten in the morning, under a cloud-socked sky the color of wasps’ nests, Jean and Natalie arrived at the Police-Fire-Library Picnic banner and saw Oswald Corkin’s namesake filling up with Kotemeeans. From the waterfront that defined the diagonal northeastern edge, to the southern line of scrub brush that acted as a buffer between the park and the old Pleasant Lane Cemetery (where nine-toed Oswald J. Corkin lay at rest), to the baseball diamond next to Howell Road, which eventually became Highway 18, along the western side, Jean could see as many as three hundred picnickers, a legion of sticky, feral children and their irresponsible parents, a multitude of leering, slouching, snack-devouring teenagers, and some older people who seemed to be hurrying through the questionable pleasures of pickle-pitching and picnic-basket bidding in advance of the coming storm. She was pleased about the turnout, for Welland’s sake, but she was sad, too. With no sun to sparkle the water, the lake in the distance looked cold, and the dunk tank had about it a miserable, condemned air. In the petting zoo, the borrowed farm animals hunkered down in their stalls. In the baseball outfield, the Ferris wheel the Fire Department had rented stood blackly forbidding against the sky’s unremitting gray. And no one was making use of the Fire-hose Cool-off Zone.
Natalie was standing off to Jean’s left when a sudden burst of loud, crackling noise attracted her attention. “Is that thunder?” she said.
“No,” said Jean. “It’s just Welland’s band plugging their speakers into the generator.”
There was no missing the hopeful note in Natalie’s question. In fact it had taken a fair bit of convincing by Jean to get her to come to this picnic at all. Natalie, in typical fashion, had said it was the sort of thing that made her wish for a crampy period: “It’d give me something better to do with my time.” But Jean was shameless and insisted that this was the only thing that would keep her mind off Milt, and that she really wanted company. So Natalie had sighed herself into some Levi’s and a pair of sneakers and come along.
The revelation she had provoked that morning, that Natalie was anxious about growing old, had burrowed away like an earthworm in Jean’s mind all through the bagels and blueberry cream cheese Natalie had served for breakfast. She thought about all the years she had known Natalie, and how her friend had always presented a combative, ironic, foul-mouthed front. She wondered now, for the first time, if perhaps that public Natalie wasn’t the true one, but simply a protective shell. All the snippy comments and brutal truths and epic rolls of the eye—maybe these were Natalie’s way of hiding the fact that, inside, she was really quite fragile. How heartbreaking, thought Jean, if that were true.
Ever more it seemed as if the people she loved and thought she knew had been visible to her only through veils, like a play watched from behind a screen you didn’t even know was there. What a disappointment to see the screen rise just before the story’s end and discover . . . oh! . . . how things really looked. Perhaps it was true that you never really knew anyone until it was too late. Or maybe really knowing someone wasn’t possible. Maybe all you had were theories, and one theory lasted until it was replaced by another. The way she had assumed Natalie was always honest until she’d learned it was only sometimes. Or the way she’d had one theory about her mother and her mother’s opinion of her, which had informed her whole life until her mother’s last breath, only to go to the funeral and have Welland tell her something quite different.
“Mom told me something about you, Jeanie,” Welland had said. “When she first got sick.”
They were sitting beside each other in the front pew of the church, before Andrew Jr. and his brood arrived.
“About me?” Jean had replied.
“She thought you were a strong woman. Stronger than her even. She said you never took the easy way. ‘Impressive,’ Mom said. She probably never told you that.”
“No,” Jean had said, staring into Millicent Keeping’s hydrangeas by the altar. “She never told me.”
“It’s true, though. I’m not making it up.”
“I didn’t think you were.”
Once those words had been spoken, Welland sat a bit awkwardly beside Jean, as if he wasn’t sure what more was expected in the moment. He was likely confused, because he must have thought what he’d said was a good thing, not that it wasn’t. And he’d probably expected Jean to react more happily, not realizing how hard it is to react happily to something that rearranges your whole emotional framework in one big swoop and you have to sit with it dumbly because the person you wish you could talk to about it is lying dead in a box.
Luckily for Welland and Jean, Andrew Jr. pressed in just then with his family and there wasn’t any room for thinking.
Welland coming to mind gave Jean a reason to look around the park, and after a short wander through the Activity Zone with Natalie in tow she found him, Constable Welland Horemarsh, sitting on a stool in his Kotemee Police Department booth. He was accompanied by Billy Walker, his foam child, placed on a box with his legs out straight in front of him, and a thousand traffic safety pamphlets arrayed along a folding table in stacks of varying height, like a ruined brick wall. Welland made sure he and Billy were sitting off to the side, so as not to block the large black-and-yellow sign cut in the inverted triangle of a Yield symbol that announced, “Billy Walker says: Play Safe around Cars!” Jean had always wondered if that sign wasn’t sending a mixed message, but she’d never had the heart to mention that to Welland.
In front of the booth, two boys whom Jean judged to be about nine or ten were grabbing pamphlets from the stacks and swatting each other with them, and each grab of a pamphlet sent two more fluttering to the ground. Another boy about the same age was lunging across the folding table in an effort to grab Billy Walker’s foam foot. Welland was doing his best to shoo all three of them away while maintaining his “friendly cop” manner. He had his stiff smile on and kept leaning over and waving at them as though they were yellow jackets hovering around a bowl of fruit. It was having no effect.
“Boys,” Jean said, striding over to the booth. “Boys! Where are your parents?”
The boys continued to swat and lunge. “Jean!” called Natalie, coming up behind. “Did you hear? There are girls showing off their underpants over by the Ferris wheel.”
“Underpants?” said Jean.
“Pink ones!” said Natalie.
With a shout, the boys tore off.
A sheepish look passed over Welland’s face. “I can’t be associated with that,” he said. “But thank you.”
For a few years it had been Jean’s hope that Welland and Natalie might see something in one another, but it had never happened. Welland had probably been too nice for Natalie’s taste, or Natalie too sharp-edged for his. Now, of course, given the gaps in Natalie’s honesty, it was just as well.
“Natalie let me sleep at her place last night,” said Jean, “while I recovered from Milt leaving me for another woman.”
“Milt left you?” Welland, bless his heart, appeared both shocked and terribly concerned. It looked rather handsome, that concern, against his dark-blue policeman’s uniform. Jean hoped Natalie wouldn’t notice.
“He’s having an affair with Louise Draper,” she said. “So that’s as good as left me.”
“Your friend Louise?”
“My former friend.”
“Holy cow.” There was something odd about the way Welland was looking at her, Jean thought. He appeared caught, somehow. Torn between one thing and another.
“Welland?” was all she said.
“Well,” her brother pointed vaguely south, “I thought I saw Milt a little while ago, over by the pickle pitch.”
“No.” Jean shook her head. “That doesn’t sound like Milt.” The pickle pitch involved trying to toss dill pickles into the mouths of large pickle jars. You got three pickles for a dollar, and to win a prize you had to get one whole pickle into a jar; half a pickle cut in two by the jar’s glass rim, or any amputated piece of one, didn’t count. Milt had no hand-eye coordination at all, and vinegar made his nose itchy.
“And,” Welland adjusted the back of his cap, “um . . .”
At that moment an enormous boom sounded across the park, followed by an ear-ripping electronic crackle and a piercing wail of amplified feedback. Not far from Jean a terrified toddler clutched her mother’s knees, her lower lip trembling.
“I think it’s time for the entertainment,” said Natalie.
On a flatbed trailer set up on Corkin Park’s southern edge, against a backdrop of scrub brush, three bedraggled and sleepy-looking young men took up positions with their instruments and stared with apparently limitless fascination at their own feet. Closer to the front of the stage a skeletal girl with lank, dirty-blond hair, wearing purple tights and a jean jacket covered in what appeared to be beer labels, grabbed the microphone stand in front of her with a sudden, jealous vehemence.
“Hello, Kotemee!” she shouted, emphasizing the meee. There was a speckling of applause from the thirty or so people, most of them elderly or mothers with infants who happened to be sitting at the picnic tables arranged haphazardly between the Activity Zone and the stage. The girl wrenched the microphone toward her mouth once more, as if furious with it for trying to escape. “We are . . .” She leaned back and let a dramatic pause swell, or, perhaps, given the way her mouth hung slack, she had forgotten what she was going to say. No, here it came. “. . . Swamp Fire! ” At this, the bedraggled boys began to flail and shrug, and the amplifiers unleashed a sound like something forged hammer upon anvil. In front of them, the girl convulsed in rhythm.
Jean looked up at Welland, whose expression was apologetic. “Well, it’s sort of countryish,” she yelled above the music.
“They had their own generator,” Welland yelled back. Then he added, with something like optimism, “A John Deere.”
Natalie held out her hand and looked toward the clouds.
Whatever else it was that Welland wanted to tell Jean, he seemed reluctant to express it at a shout. So Jean and Natalie made their way toward the other side of the Activity Zone, where a parked snack truck gave off smells of popcorn and fried dough, and where the music was no more oppressive than that sound produced by the teams of weed-whackers deployed semi-annually by Kotemee Council on all town-owned lands. As they went, the two women were forced to wade through children like Mennonites through fields of flax. But Jean was determined to make good on her private pledge to lift Natalie’s spirits, so she tried to draw Natalie into the sorts of Activity Zone diversions she herself would normally have avoided. The petting zoo and the pony rides, for instance. In all their cow, goat, pig, rabbit, and saddled-pony glory, they seemed a bit pathetic, even cruel, to Jean. But she figured they’d be naturals for Natalie. She was an animal person, after all.
But as they approached the perimeter fence of the Animal Zone, Natalie would have nothing to do with either the petting or the ponies.
“I don’t want fleas,” she said, shuddering.
“But you love animals,” said Jean.
“What makes you think that?”
“You’re a pet groomer!”
Natalie shook her head. “That’s faulty logic. Maybe I’m a pet groomer not because I like animals, but because I hate messy ones.”
They went next to the Ferris wheel, because Jean thought it would offer a nice view, and because for a little while it would place Natalie above just about everyone in Kotemee, which Jean thought would probably appeal to her in some deeply psychological way. But Natalie wasn’t interested in the Ferris wheel.
“Have you seen the delinquent who’s running the thing?” she said, jabbing her thumb toward a boy of about sixteen whose shirt was smeared with grease and also what looked like some mustard. “I wouldn’t trust him to run his own mouth.”
Jean laughed and gave Natalie’s shoulder a light, joshing swat. But really it seemed that she was just being difficult, and Jean thought there was a good chance her own patience was going to run out, and soon. She decided the best thing was to steer them toward the one annual picnic activity she herself actually enjoyed, which was the Wheel of Fortune.
As usual the Wheel was set up on the theme of playing cards, with suits and card values crudely painted on the plywood wheel and matched by betting spaces on the worn, painted-vinyl sheet laid lengthwise along a narrow table. A crowd of people was gathered around the betting table but Jean saw an empty space and squeezed in, and laid two dollars on the jack of clubs. Natalie could just mind herself for a while.
Pete Besseler, one of the librarian husbands, ran the Wheel. Pete was one of those men with a big Adam’s apple and a wiry, ageless body so unlike Milt’s. He had on the same dirty canvas apron that he wore every year, with big bulgy money pouches and a spray of card suits printed on the front. Jean suspected that some librarian with an eye to raising money had bought the apron and the wheel and the betting sheet all together in one big package ten or fifteen years before. Maybe the same librarian knew she had a ready Wheel runner in the family. Pete certainly acted as if he was born to the job.
“No more bets, no more bets!” he said, waving his big hands as though he were fending off autograph seekers. Without taking his eye off the betting board, as if he could trust no one, Pete reached up with his long, crane-like arm. He gave the wheel a tug, and it began to turn, the sprung metal tab at the top chattering against the nails. Jean loved that sound. Except it always seemed to her that when she had money down on the table, Pete never really gave the wheel a proper spin. She felt as though she had to beg the wheel to go around more than one full turn. Possibly it was a matter of perception, and possibly not.
After a moment the wheel came to a stop on the five of hearts. “We have a winner!” called Pete. The winner was a little dark-haired girl betting her mother’s money. Isn’t that cute, thought Jean, as Pete swept her coins off the jack of clubs into his pouch.
She put another two dollars on the jack of clubs. To her there was something boyish and fun about the jack, something ready for action. Other people around Jean placed money on various spaces, inexplicably choosing fives and threes and eights, numbers with no personality. They seemed to be betting indiscriminately, as if they were trying to get their money in before the storm came. Pete stretched out his hands in anticipation of the horde of autograph seekers. Beside Jean someone placed another two dollars on the jack of clubs.
“Oh,” said Jean, half turning. “No, I think he’s already waved off the bets.”
“No he hasn’t,” said the bettor.
“No more bets, no more bets,” waved Pete.
“Now he’s waving them off.”
Jean suddenly realized the bettor standing beside her, standing firm and still with a pale-yellow sweater draped around her shoulders and her hands clasped in an attitude of confident repose, was Fran Knubel.
“Oh, Fran,” said Jean, feeling her face pinch. “Hi there.”
“Jean,” said Fran. It was more an acknowledgment—I see that you exist—than a greeting.
Pete was reaching up to hook his long, grappling fingers over one of the nails.
“Pete!” called Jean. She pointed down at her jack of clubs space. “I had my money in here first.”
Fran made a huffy sound. “Two people can have their money in the same space,” she said. Jean noticed that for once Fran wasn’t wearing any attention-grabbing jewelery. Perhaps she thought it would be at risk among the common crush of Kotemeeans.
Pete shoved his hands in his money apron and came over wearing an official-looking scowl. “What’s the problem?”
Jean leaned toward him in a way that he might have thought was friendly, or even flirty, and if he did then so be it. “It’s just I had my money in here first.” She tapped Fran’s coin. “This one’s Fran’s.”
“There’s no problem,” said Fran, her hands unfolding in the manner of an open book. “Two people can bet in the same space.”
Around Jean, people who’d put their money down were getting restless. Someone grumbled, “Come on,” and a child echoed it more plaintively, “Yeah, come on!” There were spreading murmurs of agreement. It seemed to Jean that Kotemeeans these days were more impatient than ever. Was the world pressing down on them so relentlessly?
Pete wrapped his hand around the back of his long neck and looked down at the jack of clubs space. He swallowed and his Adam’s apple slid up and down like a little elevator.
“I don’t see the problem, Jean. Five people could put their money in there if they wanted.”
“Oh,” said Jean. “Really?” She sensed Fran nodding fiercely beside her. “Well, all right. I just wanted to make sure.”
A few of the other bettors cheered with ironic verve as Pete reached up and finger-hooked a nail. “No more bets! No more bets!” he repeated, and gave the wheel a nice tug for once, perhaps out of frustration.
“People do it all the time at the roulette tables in Las Vegas,” said Fran, as the metal tab chattered against the nails. Her voice sounded small and tight, as though she were wearing some sort of corrective collar. “Whenever Jim and I go, the chips are just piled on.”
“I am sure you’re an expert on betting at Las Vegas, Fran,” said Jean, watching the wheel spin. “But this is Kotemee, and I thought the rules here might be different.”
“You just didn’t want me in your space.”
“Well there are lots of spaces,” said Jean, spreading her hands. “I don’t know why you have to copy me.”
That was when Fran turned to Jean. She turned with a full-body jerk, and Jean could tell that something big was coming, and that it was unavoidable. Fran turned, her mouth pursed tight but her eyes wide and wet as brimming soup spoons. She turned and said, “And I don’t know why you have to be so hateful. How’s that?” Fran stared wetly at Jean, not blinking. “I try so hard to be friendly and yet you push me away. You just push and push and I don’t understand!”
It felt to Jean as if Fran was not actually expecting a response but just setting out her anger and frustration and dismay like a centerpiece on a dining room table. Look at my bright dismay, Fran was saying. Her big, wet eyes, her turbulent mouth, her aspect of injury; altogether it was something quite impressive, almost something to be admired.
“We have a winner!” called Pete at the wheel.
“So fine,” said Fran, her voice gone faint. “You don’t like me. That’s really the only thing that matters. And I don’t need any more humiliation.”
Watching Fran turn into the crowd, Jean had the strange and empowering sense that she was becoming almost a student of human nature. Something about striving so hard to find the roots of her friends’ happiness was making her more attuned and observant. She turned back to the Wheel, ready to train her new powers of perception onto Pete Besseler, and noticed that Pete was sliding eight dollars toward her across the vinyl betting sheet.
“What’s that?” said Jean.
“Your winnings!” said Pete. “Yours and the other lady’s. Where did she go?”
Jean felt her shoulders sag. “I’ll take it to her.”
“No,” said Pete, giving his head an official shake. “Can’t let you do that. Half that money’s not yours.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Jean, grabbing the money out of Pete’s hands. “If you feel the need you can call the police. My brother has a booth.”
The air felt weighted and damp against her cheeks and the dark clouds bulged oppressively low, like the underside of a vast, moldy bunk bed. Jean wandered around the perimeter of the Activity Zone looking for where Fran might have gone and came to the sudden realization that she had completely lost track of Natalie, too.
“Natalie?” she called. She turned in a complete circle, searching, searching, aware that she must look like a grandmother who’d lost a five-year-old child. Incompetent woman, people would be thinking. I’d never trust her with mine. As she peered out over the dozens of heads she caught on one that looked familiar. But it wasn’t Natalie’s, or Fran’s. It was gray and combed and bobbing pertly in the direction of the Picnic Basket Zone. It was . . . Milt. Seeing his head so far away, so disconnected from her, gave Jean a queer sensation. It was as though she were lost at sea, her body tossed between the waves, and Milt’s head were a buoy. She was in the grip of the tides, the cruel, unthinking hand of nature, and Milt’s head was the only sign of civilization, her only connection to humanity. She stood on her toes and stared at Milt’s head as it receded, as the currents took it farther from her, and the urge to cry out to him was so strong . . .
But then she noticed another head. It was near Milt’s, it was also familiar, and it seemed to be moving in the same direction, at the same pace. Jean felt her stomach twist and she lost the ability to breathe. Her face went tingly and cold. She turned away, made her feet carry her in the opposite direction. She pushed past two young men gnawing like jackals on buns stuffed with sausage and sauerkraut, past a little girl holding a puff of blue candy floss, past a busty T-shirted woman with a swoop of black hair down her back, past an old man bending down for a quarter. They were in her way! She would push through! She would keep going in this new, better, happier direction even if it took her back to the Fiery Swamp!
In the midst of her flight over the trampled grass and dirt and food wrappers of Corkin Park, through the flaxen fields of children, away from the specter of those two heads . . . she nearly collided with Fran, who was turning away from the Kotemee Garden Club booth with something cupped in her hands.
“Oh, Fran!” blurted Jean.
Obviously startled, at a loss for words, even embarrassed, Fran glanced down at what she was carrying—a small, pressed-paper pot of soil that sprouted a slender green shoot—then looked up and around as if for a path of escape.
“Fran,” said Jean. “We won!” She showed Fran the money in her hand.
Fran frowned as if she were confused. She reached up to adjust the sweater around her shoulders, and her gaze flitted between Jean’s face and the coins in her hand. “We won?”
“On the jack of clubs! Here.” Jean pushed the money into Fran’s palm.
“How much?”
“I guess eight dollars.”
Like a prairie morning, Fran’s face filled with a sudden light. “Well isn’t that . . .” She held out the little pot. “This Blood Lily was seven dollars and eighty-five cents. And now . . . it’s like it’s free. Oh!” She looked mortified. “Is this our money?”
“Um, no,” said Jean, swallowing. “No, that’s yours. That’s yours to keep.”
“Well,” said Fran, relaxing, “I mean that’s just . . .” She seemed not to know what to feel, what emotion to display for Jean’s benefit. She opted for a small, relieved smile. “What a nice surprise.”
For a moment the two women stood at the fringe of the Activity Zone with a darkening sky overhead and the air around them thick and alive and close to trembling.
“I should say . . .” began Fran. “Before, that wasn’t very . . .” She stopped when Jean glanced around behind her. “I guess I’m boring you.”
“Oh, no, Fran. That’s not it.” Jean touched the woman’s wrist. “I’m sorry, it’s just . . . Milt, my husband. He’s . . . he’s here, somewhere, and I don’t want to see him. Or him to see me.”
“Is that why you were rushing?”
“Yes.”
Fran became alert. Her eyes sharpened, her features firmed, her whole bearing shifted, as if somewhere inside her a hidden switch had been flicked from standby to on. “Is something wrong? Has something happened?”
Jean hesitated. The problem was she was made a particular way, with a fundamental makeup—the way wood has a grain, with all its fibers laid and arranged in a certain direction—and that makeup insisted that only friends were told personal details about one’s life. And friends were not acquaintances or people you met at a gathering, and they were not someone who came into your shop on a regular basis and seemed to want to intrude into your existence, they were not a woman who drove a Cadillac SUV and traveled frequently to Las Vegas, or who wore brooches to the supermarket and disparaged the town that had always been your home. They were not Fran. But just now it seemed too difficult, too much work, to resist Fran’s desire to be involved. Jean had other needs for her energy, other purposes for her time. So she found herself nodding.
“Recently Milt told me that he was having an affair.”
Fran recoiled. “No!”
“Yes.”
“I can’t believe it. He seems like the last person, other than my Jim. I mean, the two of them, I would have put them in the same pea pod.”
“I didn’t know you knew Milt.”
“Well, people have pointed him out to me,” said Fran. “And we chatted that one time, remember?” Fran gave a tug to her sweater and shook her head at the unfathomability of Milt, who had been pointed out to her, having an affair. “It’s so sad. I always imagined you two having great conversations.”
Jean made an effort to keep her gaze steady and her expression neutral. She admired newscasters for their ability not to look horrified at the crimes they reported.
“So, Fran, I think it’s going to rain. You should probably get that lily home.”
“Who was it with? This affair.”
“Oh, I don’t think that’s important.” She began to back away as Fran shook her head in apparent agreement; no, it wasn’t important. “Have fun with that lily. And I’m sorry about the jack of clubs before.”
Fran held up her coin-stuffed fist and gave it a triumphant waggle. “We’re winners!”
“Yay,” said Jean.
A sudden seriousness overtook Fran’s face as the ground spread between her and Jean. “Do you want me to say anything to him? If I see him?”
Jean tried to gather this in. “Do I want you to say anything to . . . my husband?”
“Yes, the bastard.”
“No.” Jean shook her head. “Thank you.”
She heard thunder, or sensed it, as she wandered past the petting zoo toward the picnic tables looking for Natalie. The skinny girl and bedraggled boys of Swamp Fire made it difficult to hear anything but the screech of children (evolution clearly intending for that sound to pierce any other). But the air itself was a warm body embracing her, and she felt it shudder. She had an image in her mind of Milt and Louise running through the coming downpour, laughing, getting soaked, pulling off their wet clothes in the shelter of the living room she had decorated, standing naked on the carpet she had vacuumed, drying themselves with the towels she had bought on sale at Sears.
Her mother had always made her believe that in choosing Milt she had failed. Marjorie’s measure of a man, a husband, stood the height and width of Drew, tackled tasks in the same direct, unimaginative fashion, charted his course by the same unblinking stars. And perhaps that had contributed to Jean’s choice not to take Milt’s name, which lingered for years as a small hurt for him. But in the face of what she’d believed to be her mother’s disappointment and disdain, she had always held to the certainty that Milt was a man she could grow old with. Their experiences together had been investments in the memories of their infirmity. Someday we’ll laugh at this—that had been their motto. Twenty-two years ago, when Milt’s stuffy Aunt Agnes was visiting and Milkweed showed her his pink, pencil-thin erection . . . sixteen years ago, when Jean had done a terrible job tying Milt’s father’s canoe to the roof of the car and it went flying into a roadside cucumber stand . . . eleven years ago, when they were eating marinated octopus on a bench in Athens and someone snatched Jean’s purse with all their credit cards . . . six years ago, when Jean collapsed from low blood pressure and awoke to Milt giving panicky directions for the ambulance and heard in his voice how much he loved her . . . two years ago, when Milt put Styrofoam Chinese food containers in the hot oven . . . every one of these experiences and dozens more were securities meant to bring returns later, a kind of pension of reminiscence. But the investments had turned out to be worthless.
Where was Natalie? Natalie would understand, thought Jean. Natalie was divorced. Natalie had her own failed portfolio of recollection. She too faced the prospect of a desolate old age.
Standing in the middle of Corkin Park, Jean realized that she and Natalie were closer to kindred spirits now than they had ever been. And she saw, with a fresh slap of horror, how she had wronged Natalie. How she had abandoned her own duty by not thinking the best of her friend, by not forgiving her immediately for her lie of omission, by which she had probably only meant to protect her, and even if not, no one was perfect! There were degrees of betrayal, shadings from light to dark, and compared to the hard, black mark against Louise, Natalie’s was barely a smudge! And Jean knew with a ferocious clarity, the conviction of someone reborn into her beliefs, that Natalie deserved her gift. Of course she did. If anyone was worthy of the sacrifice, it was her.
“Jean!”
It was Welland, running up behind her. As she waited for him she felt the first drop of rain on her cheek and held her hand out for more.
“Welland, I have to find Natalie before it opens up on us.”
Her brother was red in the face from running and couldn’t speak just yet. He put a hand on his chest and bent over as he pointed to another part of the park. “I saw her,” he wheezed. “When I was looking for you.”
It was a good thing Welland was in Community Services and not doing actual police work, Jean thought; imagine if he ever had to run to catch a jewelery thief, or a murderer. But of course, as a sister, she would never actually say that. She loved Welland. It was crazy to her that he had never found a woman to really appreciate him and care for him. Because he was handsome and big, and wore a uniform, there was never any shortage of floozies at bars who wanted to drape themselves on him like a Roman toga. But he was too nice for that type, too gentle-souled. As she watched Welland trying to catch his breath she had an image of him becoming like their father before he died, silent and isolated, sunk into a chair in the basement, waiting for the inevitable. That was no way for someone to live.
“Welland,” she said, “are you getting enough exercise?”
Her brother nodded and heaved with his hands on his knees, and he made a little racquet motion with his arm.
“Well, if you can walk I’d like to go find Natalie.”
“Sure,” he breathed, “no problem.”
They made it past the Animal Zone and the Ferris wheel and approached the chip wagon selling cardboard containers of greasy French fries—there was still no sign of Natalie, and Jean had felt half a dozen more drops—before Welland seemed able to string a sentence together. When he did he became a very somber presence beside her. Jean thought perhaps he had some advice regarding Milt, but that wasn’t it.
“Adele Farbridge,” said Welland. “She’s your friend, right?”
Jean stumbled slightly at hearing Adele’s name and she had to reach to catch Welland’s elbow. She looked back at the ground they’d just passed as if she’d been tripped up by some unevenness. “Yes,” she said, finally. “I saw her just the other day.”
“I have something bad to tell you.”
Could it have made the news already? Jean didn’t see how that was possible. She walked along with Welland, through air that carried the scent of malt vinegar from the chip wagon, trying to fathom the logistics of how the information about Adele could already have been discovered and reported—it was only yesterday morning that she had left her. Had the news simply wafted out on a breeze? Beside her Welland was slowing, stopping, his hand on her arm, as if he needed to tell her face to face. A boy passed with a pile of salty, golden fries heaped like kindling on his plate. She heard a man sneeze and looked around.
“Maybe we should sit down,” Welland was saying.
It was Milt. He was twenty feet away, wearing his green-checked shirt and his khaki shorts and his brown shoes with brown socks pulled high on his calves, something Jean had never been able to get him to stop doing. “Wear your sandals with shorts, Milt,” she would say. But no, he wouldn’t. He had no regard for her opinions. Her feelings. He did what he wanted, no matter who he hurt. For years she had asked him to apply for a full-time teaching position and he wouldn’t. He wouldn’t. He liked his freedom, he said. She understood that now. As he walked from the chip wagon toward the Picnic Basket Zone with his own plate of French fries, he stopped and sneezed again, burying his face in the crook of his arm while holding the plate high above his head.
“Milt?” she called out, embarrassing herself with the febrility in her voice.
He continued on, apparently unable to hear her over the squeals and laughter of roaming children, the distant frenetic clamor of Swamp Fire, and, wafting toward them from the Activity Zone, the bossy, blaring voices of the librarians’ husbands.
“Jean,” said Welland, laying his hand on her shoulder. “We really need to talk.”
Kotemeeans, at least the ones who came to the annual picnic, were very messy eaters, it seemed to Jean. They produced a lot of garbage—paper cups and cardboard plates and plastic straws and tissuey napkins and waxed paper wrappers and bags of every known material. And suddenly the garbage wasn’t confined to waste receptacles or corralled on top of picnic tables or even dropped discreetly underneath, it was everywhere. Because as the thunder and darkness of a rolling deluge advanced over Corkin Park the Kotemeeans began to scatter, and they left their garbage behind. And when the rain truly came, it came in thick, heavy dollops that thumped the ground and the picnic tables and the awnings of the Activity Zone and the roofs of the snack trucks like falling bits of flesh. And soon it was sluicing the garbage off the picnic tables and out of its hiding spaces and lodging it in the mud underfoot. And Jean ran through it. She ran to find Natalie. After her talk with Welland, she ran as fast as she could.
Her brother knew that something had happened to Adele, but not because it had been reported in the news. He was checking the police systems regularly now: the CPIC, the RMS, the PIP, and the NCIC. It was all part of his daily routine, thanks to Jean. It seemed to Welland that he was finally doing real police work. He expressed that to Jean with a combination of relief, and pride, and nervous elation. Without any orders to go by, or any real purpose, he roamed the networks and the databases looking for names he recognized, crimes he found intriguing. He had slipped into the station early that morning, he told Jean, before coming to the park. And as he’d scrolled through the identities of victims, he’d seen one he thought he knew. He’d clicked on it, and learned that Adele Farbridge, the finance executive, had been found in her apartment by her cleaning lady, discovered face down on the bed. There was a picture included, a driver’s license photo, and when he studied the face he knew this was someone he had met . . . this was Jean’s friend.
Telling her all of this, Welland seemed the image of torment. Oh, he was such a sweet man, Jean thought. Such a good brother. It broke her heart to think that Welland would be distraught at having to deliver this news about Adele. The last thing my poor sister needs . . . that’s what he’d be thinking.
To the south, a pulse of lightning flashed and lit the sky beyond the scrub brush, and a count of two later the thunder barreled over them. Perched on the bench of a picnic table, Jean tipped back her head as Welland spoke and stared up at the blackening sky. She caught a few lucky raindrops on her cheeks, breathed with a hoarseness she hoped would signal distress, and asked the questions she thought someone hearing this news would ask.
“How did she die, Welland?” Jean asked. “Do they know who killed her?”
Welland’s face bloomed with horror. “Oh, no, she didn’t die.”
Jean blinked at her brother as another drop glanced off her cheekbone. She was quite sure she hadn’t heard that correctly.
“But—”
“Oh, gosh. I’m sorry, Jean. I didn’t mean to—”
“Welland, what are you talking about?” Jean swiped the rain from her lashes. “Didn’t you say her body had been discovered?”
“She was discovered, thank goodness. Before it was too late. She’s in a coma,” said Welland. “They found some heavy drugs in her system.” He touched Jean’s arm in a way that she knew was meant to be encouraging. “There’s still a chance she’ll come around.”
This news so widely missed the mark of encouraging that Jean pulled her arm back.
“It’s upsetting, I know.”
“Yes,” she said. What could have gone wrong? She retraced in her mind those crucial moments with Adele, when she had spread glob after glistening glob of narcotic into her skin. How could someone so skinny have survived? Part of Jean thought she should admire Adele for that, but she couldn’t because it was so disappointing. She had worked so hard to make those final moments beautiful . . . and final . . . and now there was a chance it would all be shattered. There was a chance that at any second Adele would wake up and demand to know what Jean had been thinking. And undoubtedly other people would want to know as well. Jean Vale Horemarsh, what could possibly have been going through your mind? And then it would all get so complicated, and she might not be able to give Natalie or Cheryl their Last Poems . . .
“I wish I hadn’t had to be the one to tell you,” said Welland. “It’s just so rotten. Because you’ve already lost Mom, and your friend Dorothy. And now you might lose another.”
Jean leaned forward. “She might still die?”
“Well, maybe.” Welland pressed his wide thumbnail into the soft, damp wood of the picnic table, and Jean could tell, as his sister, that he had something else to say. She waited. Welland wasn’t very good at handling being rushed. She waited as he lifted off his cap and used the bill to scratch his scalp through his sweat-damp hair. And she waited as he watched a father run by the picnic table in pursuit of his little tomboy daughter. She could just wait and wait if necessary, without ever letting Welland know how urgent her situation was . . .
“The thing is,” Welland finally continued, “the circumstances are suspicious. There were drugs in her system, but no sign of her taking anything. So, according to the report, they suspect foul play.”
Welland kept talking and Jean tried to listen, even though she found the phrase foul play distracting in its implications of fedoras and whisky and snub-nosed .45s, and even though her imperatives pressed down harder with each passing minute. Welland mentioned that Jean’s name had been listed in the report as one of Adele’s contacts—probably it had been lifted from her address book—and so, just as a routine matter, she was probably going to get a visit from some city detectives. It was no fun talking to city detectives, Welland told her, his face full of concern.
“Welland,” she said, stretching her arm across the rain-spotted picnic table, “I don’t want you to be too upset about Adele.” She laid her hand on his wrist. “If she does die—and what are the chances of that, by the way?”
Welland made a helpless flaily-arm gesture. “It didn’t say in the report.”
“Well, assuming she does, we can just think of her as being lucky. She’s already had a mastectomy. There’s no telling what awaits her. If she dies this way then at least she won’t have to die like Mom did. She’ll have been spared all that pain. And that’s good, don’t you think?”
Welland looked at Jean and squinted with one whole side of his face. It was similar to what would happen to Drew’s face when he was trying to noodle a thing out, and Jean was sad for her brother that it was just about the only part of their father that he had gotten.
“She’s young, though,” he said.
“Not so young, really,” said Jean. “My age.”
“But you’re young, Jeanie!”
She shook her head. It was obvious to anyone who looked, without the veils of affection, that she was getting on. When she focused a clear eye on the mirror she saw nothing of the girl she’d been, only the wearing, dragging, unforgiving work of age. Just as when she looked at her friends, the ones she had known the longest, she saw not just who they were but how much they had changed. Their faces and bodies were billboard advertisements for the passage of time, explicit proof of how old she was getting, and therefore how close to her mother’s fate. She was never going to convince Welland of this, though; he was too big-hearted, which made his judgment unreliable.
But she couldn’t waste any more time. She patted Welland’s hand and stood.
It must have been that abrupt motion that attracted the attention of Fran Knubel because, from the other side of the Picnic Basket Zone, separated by perhaps twelve or thirteen tables, she could be heard calling out, “Jean!” The sound of her voice reached Jean at roughly the same moment the clouds above gave way and the chubby drops began to fall, hitting the ground with their fleshy thuds and knocking the paper cups and bags and wrappers off the picnic tables into the mud and under Jean’s feet as she began to run.
And as Jean ran to find Natalie, ran to her responsibility, ran through the Kotemeean refuse as fast as she possibly could, it would have looked to Fran as though she were merely dashing to get out of the rain.
It was a desperate sound, a frantic yelling, that finally drew Jean to Natalie. She found her, to Jean’s great surprise, at the dunk tank.
The Activity Zone was mostly deserted. Rain pooled in the awnings, slammed down on the lids of coolers and the game tables being folded and packed away by librarians’ husbands slopping through the mud. Natalie stood in front of the dunk tank, hair smeared to her forehead and neck, a spout of water running from her nose, her white blouse showing pink where it stuck to her skin. She had three baseballs clutched to her chest, and one more in her hand, which was raised to fire.
“Stop! I’m begging you, Natalie!”
The yelling came from Tina Dooley, who was in the dunk tank. It was an old and very poorly designed dunk tank. There seemed to be only one way out of the Plexiglas surround filled rib-high with gray, sloshing water; that was to stand on the triggered platform on which the dunkee sat, and step from there to a wooden ledge, which led to a set of descending stairs. Natalie seemed to have discovered this design flaw, and every time poor Tina Dooley tried to step on the platform to get out of the tank, Natalie hurled a ball with the accuracy of a sniper toward the padded target, triggering the platform to swing away and dropping Tina into the drink.
“Natalie!” cried Tina as she was knocked sideways by the wave she had created. “For God’s sake! What’s the matter with you?”
Natalie seemed not to hear, or perhaps the sound of Tina’s pleading only fed whatever revenge-lust gripped her. In her blue-and-lime one-piece bathing suit with ill-advised frills around the hips, Tina struggled once more onto the platform on her knees. Natalie waited for the precise moment and whipped another ball, sending her tumbling backward into the rolling water with an enormous glunking splash that climbed the sides of the tank and sloshed over the top. There were no organizers to intervene; all of them were scrambling through the rain to dismantle and pack away other displays and pieces of equipment. Tina, her coppery hair clinging to her skull like seaweed, her eye makeup trailing down her cheeks like squid’s ink, clutched herself as she rose to her feet. Hands trembling, teeth chattering, she leaned back, exhausted, against the Plexiglas wall as the water lapped at her.
“I hate you!” she wailed. “I hate you, you cow!”
Jean tugged on Natalie’s sleeve. “Natalie,” she said, “let’s go.”
“One more!” Natalie shouted. She was as wet as Tina, but something inside her cooked with a kiln-like heat. She spun the ball in her hand like a pitcher as she watched Tina struggle onto the platform. “It’s her own fault. I told her last month if she sent one more of her goddamn memos I’d get her.”
Jean heard sloshing behind her and turned to see Fran charging through the slop, her prim tennis-shod feet launching little tsunamis of murky rainwater with every step.
“There you are! Oh, thank God!”
One whole hemisphere of Fran—from the left isthmus of her designer jeans straight up to the tectonic plate of her jaw and cheek—was slathered in a layer of mud, and she followed Jean’s gaze to the disaster zone of her own body.
“I took a spill by the pony rides,” she explained. “But it doesn’t matter because I found you!” She squelched up to where the two women were standing and reached to clutch Jean’s dripping elbow. “Jean, I feel terrible,” she said, blinking against the rain. “I should have asked you before and I hope it’s not too late. Would you come for dinner tonight at our place? I just think you shouldn’t be alone right now, and I know Jim has been dying to meet you.”
“Oh,” said Jean. She looked at the splendid mess of Fran—her hair, half her blouse, most of the yellow sweater around her shoulders iced a rich mocha—and tried not to imagine what Fran could have said to make Jim so desperate for an introduction. “Actually,” she said, “I think Natalie’s already made plans for us this evening.”
She turned toward Natalie for confirmation, but Natalie’s attention was all on Tina Dooley as the woman hauled herself from the water onto the shaky platform like an air crash survivor mounting a fragment of fuselage.
“Natalie,” piped Fran over Jean’s shoulder, “would you like to come over to our place for dinner tonight?”
“Nope,” said Natalie, lining up her target.
“Do you mind if Jean does?”
“Nope,” said Natalie, cocking her arm for a throw.
“See?” said Fran. “It’s all set.” The teeth of her smile gleamed bright against the mud mask sliding down her cheek. She thumbed muck off the crystal of her watch. “Try and come for seven, okay?”
With a great woof of exertion, Natalie threw her last ball. It sailed a foot above the target and bounced off the trunk lid of a departing Fire Department cruiser.
“Ha!” yelled Tina Dooley as she climbed to safety on the wooden ledge. She thrust a middle finger in Natalie’s direction. “Eat it, Skilbeck.”
“Damn,” Natalie muttered, shaking her head. “Wanted it too much.”