“Well, where is she now?” she asked. “In there, in the truck with your friends?” She leaned forward as if to see inside the truck. Jack and Hettie had the windows closed and were wrapped around one another, necking.
“You know she’s not there. No, she’s inside the town hall, at the party.”
Lillian turned around and faced the crowd of people coming toward her and spreading over the lot, headed toward their cars. “Really? Looks like the party’s over,” she said. Then she glanced up at the lighted window above and to the left of the door — Wade’s office. “Oh, look!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that Jill up there with the mask on? What’s she doing up there? Isn’t that your office?” Lillian waved her hand, and suddenly Jill’s face disappeared from the window. A second later the light went out.
Wade said, “She told me she wanted to wait for you there.”
“Oh. While you went off for a few beers with your friends in the truck?”
“No. She wanted to stay up there alone,” he said. “Once she got it into her head that she was going back to Concord, I guess she felt a little uneasy around me or something. I mean, I wasn’t exactly tickled by the idea,” he said. “I looked forward to this weekend a lot, Lillian.”
“Yes, I imagine you must have.” She looked past him into the cab of the truck. “Is that Hettie Rodgers there, with whatzizname?”
“Yeah.”
“She’s grown up some, hasn’t she?”
“Oh, Jesus, lay off, will you?” he said. “It looks like you’ve won this fucking round already, so lay off a little, for Christ’s sake.” Wade was vaguely aware of Bob Horner off to his left by the car door, and as Jill came out of the town hall, Horner walked quickly around the front of the car and started toward her.
“Horner!” Wade said. “Leave her be. This’s got nothing to do with you, so you just act like the chauffeur. Got it?”
“Wade,” Horner said, and he stopped and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets as if suddenly searching for a match. “Nobody wants any trouble,” he said in his high reedy voice.
Lillian had already turned and was walking almost regally to greet her daughter, who had removed her mask — at last, Wade thought. That goddamned mask.
In a voice loud enough to stop several people crossing near them, Wade said, “I don’t want her to go, Lillian.”
“Don’t cause a scene.” She had her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and was escorting her to the rear door opposite Wade. Lillian peered across the top of the car and said to him, “The child is obviously upset enough. No one’s trying to win any ‘rounds.’ We’re both, I assume, only interested in Jill’s happiness,” she announced. “Don’t make it any worse, will you?”
“Goddammit,” he said. “I’m not making it worse. You are. You and this clown here. Me and Jill, we could’ve worked this thing out okay on our own, for God’s sake. It’s a normal thing, a spat like this. I mean, it’s normal for a kid to feel a little strange coming back here like this. It’s even normal for me to get a little touchy about it. Believe it or not. You two, you come butting in here like this, how the hell do you think it makes me feel? Treating her like some kind of tragic victim or something, how do you think it makes me look to her?”
People leaving the town hall for the parking lot were now cutting a wide circle around the Audi and Jack’s truck, many of them staring as they passed, for this was another public and potentially exciting chapter in the ongoing twenty-year saga of Wade and Lillian Whitehouse.
Horner had walked back around the front of the car to the driver’s side and opened the door. With his back to Wade, he said quietly, “Get in, Lillian.”
“You motherfucker!” Wade said, and he grabbed Horner’s shoulder hard with his left hand and shoved him down into his seat, knocking his hat to the ground. “Jesus, Horner, you just fucking wait until we’re through, goddammit!”
To Lillian, standing at the door on the other side, Wade said, “Don’t you say a fucking word. I didn’t hit him. I’m not going to hit anybody.”
Her face had gone white and rigid. Slowly, she tightened her lips and shook her head from side to side, as if to deny having done anything that might have offended him, and in silence, she drew the car door carefully open and let herself in, then closed it and instantly leaned around and locked both rear doors and her own. Horner swiftly closed his door, and Lillian reached over his shoulder and locked it, then stared straight out the windshield, as Horner started the car and edged it through the crowd of people crossing the lane in front of them. The crowd parted for the silver Audi, and in a second the car was at the end of the dirt lane, turning right onto Route 29, and gone.
Wade looked at the ground and saw Horner’s dark-green Tyrolean hat. Leaning down, he picked it up and examined it with care, as if unsure of its function.
Hettie had rolled down the window next to her, and now Jack leaned across the girl’s lap and said to him, “Wade? Hey, you okay, man?”
“Yeah, I’m okay. Sonofabitch lost his hat,” he said, and he started walking toward the town hall.
“You want to get a beer, man? We’re going to Toby’s— you want to meet us there?”
Wade didn’t answer. He heard Jack’s truck start up and lumber off. Then, in front of him, leaving the town hall, came Nick Wickham and, a few steps behind, Margie. Nick nodded agreeably as he passed, but Margie stopped and smiled.
“Hi. Party’s over,” she said.
“Yeah. I got to do some stuff in my office.”
“New hat?” She pointed at the crumpled hat in his hand.
He shook his head no.
“Jill’s up, I see.”
He said, “Yeah, for a while.”
“How’s she doing?”
“Okay,” he said. “She’s fine.”
“Nice. Well, listen, give her my love, will you?” She took a step away from him.
“Will do.”
“You two want to do anything tomorrow you need a third party for, give me a call, okay? I got no plans, and I’m off tomorrow.”
“Like hell you are,” Wickham interrupted from behind her. “It’s the first day of hunting season, and I’ll need you at least in the morning,” he said. “I thought I told you this morning already.”
Margie slowly turned and faced him. “No, Nick, you didn’t.”
“Yeah, well, so long as you ain’t got any plans, whyn’t you come in at six and work through lunch. Take Saturday off instead.” He started walking away. “See you later, Wade,” he called back.
“Yeah.”
Margie shrugged helplessly and smiled. “Well, that’s that.”
“Yeah. You be careful of that little bastard,” Wade said in a weary voice. “He’s dying to get into your pants, you know.”
“No kidding. But don’t worry, I can protect my virtue okay. I mean, c’mon, Wade, give me a break.” She laughed and showed him her large good-humored face.
He turned away and said, “Listen, I gotta go. See you tomorrow, maybe.”
“You okay?”
“Yeah.” He grabbed the door and pulled it open.
“Well, give my love to Jill!”
Wade nodded without turning around and went in. There were still a half-dozen people inside the hall, chatting and cleaning up — LaRiviere, Chub Merritt and his round little wife, Lorraine, and the Congregational minister and the priest from Littleton who served the Lawford parish part time and one or two others. Wade slipped by them and got up the stairs without anyone’s seeming to notice him and walked slowly down the long hallway to his office and let himself into the darkened room.
Crossing to the window, he sat down in the chair Jill had dragged over from the desk, and he looked out the window at the parking lot below, the few remaining cars there, the one or two stragglers walking down the lane toward the road. He saw a Chevy sedan with raucous exhausts and a load of kids careen past, and he thought about all the damage the kids in town had done in the last few hours — minor damage, most of it, easily repaired, easily forgotten, but more than irritating. Even though they had done nothing to him, had destroyed or vandalized nothing of his, he could not keep himself from taking their acts personally, somehow, and he felt his stomach tighten with resentment. He tried to remember how he had felt when he was a kid doing that kind of damage on Halloween Eve, but he could not remember any of it, at least no more than the fact of it — that he and his friends and his older brothers and later his younger brother, Rolfe, had indeed in an organized way caused a considerable amount of damage around town. Why? he wondered. What were we so pissed at? Why are all these kids so damned mad? It is like the kids want to attack us adults for something that they think we did to them way back or something that we are going to do to them now first chance we get, but they are scared of us, so they wait until Halloween and they do it this way, making it look legitimate and almost legal.