There was nothing wrong back then, nothing, or so it seemed then. And for Wade, looking back from a point twenty years later and then studying this young couple in front of him, it still seemed that nothing had been wrong. Those were wonderful times, he thought, truly wonderful times. After that, things all of a sudden started going wrong. They were only kids, he and Lillian, and they did not know how to repair anything, so when something in the marriage broke, they just went out and got divorced, and then came the army and his getting sent to Korea instead of Vietnam like he wanted, and all the rest followed — their getting married again, Jill, more troubles, getting divorced a second time: the long tangled painful sequence that had brought him, at last, aged forty-one, to where he was now. He was a man alone, hands jammed in pockets against the cold, while his only child, against her mother’s wishes, grumpily spent one weekend every month or two with him. The rest of the time his thoughts were mostly locked on his work, day in and out, drilling wells for Gordon LaRiviere — which he found boring, difficult and, because of the low pay and LaRiviere’s peculiar personality, demeaning — and being the part-time police officer for the town as well, which seemed to him almost accidental, an automatic consequence of his solitary condition and of his having been made an MP in the service.
Wade still believed in romance, however. That is, he had somehow managed to sustain into his forties a romantic view of love. Thus he looked back upon those few brief years when he was in his late teens and early twenties, when he and Lillian were happy just from being in the same room with each other, as the model against which the rest of his life had to be measured. And held against that warmly golden glow, his present life looked grim and cold and terribly diminished to him, and increasingly he found himself regarding men like Jack Hewitt — handsome young men in love with handsome young women who loved them back — with something like envy and, to avoid rage, sorrow. He had made the connections himself many times late at night lying in his bed alone — between rage and sorrow, and between sorrow, envy and romance — and he had tried to dispel his painful feelings by changing his view of love. But he could not. There was the love he had known with Lillian when he was very young, and that was perfect love, and there was the rest, which was a diminishment.
But by God none of that sadness kept him from being a good cop. Abruptly, he passed Jack’s rifle back to him. “Don’t leave your truck there,” he said.
Then he turned and went back inside, where he saw right off that LaRiviere had already chosen the winners of the costume contests and was parading them up onto the stage at the far end of the hall. People were clapping their hands, some more enthusiastically than others, for some were the parents of the joyful winners and others the parents of hard losers. Pearl Diehler’s daughter, the fairy godmother with the wand, was among the winners, but her son, writhing in agony next to Pearl and directly in front of Wade, was a hard loser. Pearl clapped with energy for a few seconds, then turned her attention to the vampire at her side.
Wade looked for Jill up on the stage with the winners. There was a boy dressed like a hobo up there, and next to him a clown of undetermined gender, and scowling and clawing the air behind the clown came a larger more theatrical version of Pearl Diehler’s vampire, and bringing up the rear, no doubt the winner of Best Costume, was a tall kid covered with feathers and wearing a huge yellow cardboard beak, a reasonably successful attempt to look like a popular television-show character.
Jill was not there, Wade observed, and he began to search for her in the crowd of children who had not won a prize. Most of them had remained in the loose circle LaRiviere had herded them into while he made his selections, but a few had wandered toward the additional amusements, the apple-bobbing tank, the long white table where refreshments were being set out, the ring games. But Wade could not find Jill anywhere among them.
Maybe she went to the bathroom, he decided, and he made his way through the crowd in the direction of the rest rooms to the right of the stage, when suddenly there she was, standing alone in the corner next to the pay phone, looking forlorn, tiny, abandoned. She had kept her mask on but had unbuttoned the top half of her costume, exposing the green-and-white ski sweater underneath, and she looked oddly disheveled.
At once Wade realized that he should not have left her alone without first making sure that she had found a friend among the kids, and he said to her in a hearty way, “Hey, sweet stuff! How’s it going? What’re you doing way over here by yourself?” He put his arm around her and drew her to his side and peered out and scanned the room as if looking for an enemy to protect her from.
“Some party, huh? Sorry I lost sight of you for a few minutes,” he said. “I just had to step out for a smoke. You find anybody you know here? There must be some kids here you used to know from school. They got school here tomorrow,” he added. “You want to go in with any of them? See your old teachers?” he said. “Want me to take you by? Be more fun than hanging out with me all day.”
“No,” she said in a low voice.
“No what?”
“No, I didn’t see anybody I know here. And no, I don’t want to go to school here tomorrow,” she said. “I want to go home.”
“C’mon, Jill, will you? You are home. There’s lots of kids you still know. You were playing with a whole bunch of kids Labor Day, don’t you remember?”
“They’ve changed,” she said. “They’re different.”
“Kids don’t change that fast. Any more than you do.”
“Well, I’ve changed a lot,” she declared.
Wade looked down at her. She was staring at her feet.
“Hey, what’s the matter, honey?” he asked quietly. “Tell
me.”
She said, “I don’t want to be here, Daddy. Don’t worry, I love you, Daddy, I do. But I want to go home.”
Wade sighed heavily. “Jesus. You want to go home.” He looked at the ceiling, then at his feet, then at his daughter’s feet. “Listen, Jill, tell you what. Tomorrow morning, you still want to go home, I’ll drive you down,” he said. “Okay? But not tonight, not now. It’s too … it’s too late, for one thing. Tomorrow, we’ll see. What the hell,” he said, perhaps warming to the idea. “I’ll tell LaRiviere I’m sick or something. He owes me one. Maybe we can find something to do in Concord tomorrow afternoon, maybe we can go to the movies or something. And if you really and truly still want to stay down there, then I’ll drop you off and come back up here alone,” he said somberly. “And we’ll just wait till the next time or something. Though by then it’ll be Thanksgiving …” He trailed off. “Well, anyhow, we’ll work that one out when the time comes,” he said, chopping the air above her head with his right hand. “Right now, okay. If tomorrow you want to stay down there in Concord, it’s okay.”
She was silent for a few seconds. Then she said, “I called Mommy.”
“What?” Wade stared down at her in disbelief. “You called her? You called Mommy?” He glanced over at the pay phone as if checking the evidence. “Just now you called her?”
“Yes.”
“Jesus. Why?”
“I… because I want to go home. She said she’d come and get me.”
“Come and get you! Shit! It’s a damn hour and a half drive up and another hour and a half back,” he said. “Why’d you make her do that? Why didn’t you talk to me about it first, for
God’s sake?”
“See, I knew you’d be mad,” she said. “That’s why I called her to do it, because I knew you’d be mad, and I was right. You are mad.”
“Yeah. Yeah, right, I am mad,” he declared. “It’s … it’s spoiled,” he said. “It’s just being spoiled, this kind of stuff. Your ma doesn’t want to come all the way up here just to get you when you’re supposed to be spending the damn weekend with me. What’d you tell her, for Christ’s sake?” He shoved his hands into his pockets and rocked back and forth on his heels. “Jesus.”