“I just told her I wanted to come home. Daddy, don’t be mad at me.” She slowly drew off her mask and turned to him.
He said, “Well, I guess I am. It’s hard not to be mad at you, for Christ’s sake. I planned this, I planned all this, you know. I mean, I know it isn’t much,” he said. “It’s sort of pathetic, even. But I planned it.” He paused. “You shouldn’t have called your mother,” he announced, and he grabbed her hand and said, “C’mon, we’re gonna call her before she leaves.”
“No way, José,” she said, and she stepped back.
Wade sealed her hand in his huge one and pulled her toward the stairs and up to the long narrow unlit hallway on the second floor. They walked rapidly past the frosted-glass doors that led to the Office of the Selectmen, Office of the Town Clerk and Tax Collector, to the end, where the sign on the door said simply POLICE. Wade pulled out his keys and opened the door and snapped on the light. It was a small efficient cubicle with pegboard walls and a large window, a file cabinet and a gray metal desk and chair, with a straight-backed chair beside it. There was a locked glass-enclosed rifle rack with two shotguns and a rifle on one wall and on the other a geological survey map of the forty-nine square miles of Clinton County that made up the township of Lawford, New Hampshire.
Wade closed the door solidly behind him, flicked on the overhead neon light and sat down in his chair facing the desk; Jill plunked herself into the chair beside the desk, crossed her legs and rested her chin on one fist, as if lost in deep thought. Quickly he dialed the number, put the receiver tight to his face and waited while it rang. I will just tell her, he thought, that she should forget it, stay home, Jill’s only acting up a little because she has not kept up with any of her friends here and she is kind of shy and this is her way of dealing with shyness, that’s all. Simple. Nothing to worry about, nothing that was Wade’s fault, nothing to be mad at, and certainly no reason to drive all the way up here to Lawford, for Christ’s sake. She should stay home in Concord in her fancy new house with her fancy new husband and watch TV or something and forget about him, forget about him and Jill, forget about everything that had happened.
The phone buzzed like an insect, over and over, and no one answered, until finally he concluded that Lillian and her husband had already left for Lawford, and at once he felt flooded by anger, overwhelmed by it.
“She’s gone already!” He slammed the receiver into the cradle and stared at it. “Fucking gone already. Couldn’t wait.”
“Yes.”
“That’s all you got to say, ‘Yes.’ “
“Yes.”
“She won’t be here for at least an hour,” he said. “Think you can stand it that long?”
“Yes.”
“Well. Where do you expect to wait for her? Obviously downstairs with the other kids isn’t good enough for you.” Wade was locked into an old familiar sequence: his thoughts and feelings were accelerating at a pace that threw him into a kind of overdrive, a steady high-speed flow that he could not control and that he knew often led to disastrous consequences. But he did not care. Not caring was only additional evidence that he was in this particular sequence again. But there was not a damned thing he could do about it, and not a damned thing he wanted to do about it, either, which was yet a third way that he knew he was in this particular gear again.
“You can sit right here, dammit, sit right here in the office and wait for her all by yourself,” he told his daughter. “That’s fine with me. Dandy, just dandy. I’m going downstairs,” he said, and he stood up.
Jill looked toward the window. “That’s fine with me too,” she said in a low voice. “I can wait up here fine. When Mommy comes, just tell her I’m up here.” She uncrossed her legs and stood up too, and putting her mask back on, she grabbed the chair with both hands and dragged it over to the window. “I’ll wait here. That way I’ll see her when she comes and can come downstairs myself.” She lined the chair up against the window and sat down again, and with the mask still covering her face, she peered out the window into the darkness.
“Jesus, Jill, you really are tragic,” Wade said. “No kidding, tragic. Sitting there in your tower like some kind of fairy princess or something, waiting to be saved from a fate worse than death.”
Jill turned toward him and said calmly, “I’m a tiger, Daddy, not a fairy princess. Remember? You bought the costume.” Then she went back to looking out the window.
“Yep, that’s my doing, all right,” he said, and he wrenched the door open and stormed out. He slammed it behind him, rattling the glass, and stalked down the hallway to the stairs.
Passing through the crowd in the hall, ignoring the noise and the faces, the few waves and nods tossed toward him, Wade made his way across the room to the door. He arrived there just as Margie Fogg entered. She wore a dark-green down jacket over her white waitress’s uniform and was probably hoping to see Wade here. Not wanting it to seem so, however, to him or anyone else, she had come with her boss, Nick Wickham, despite his usual designs on her. The same age as Wade, Margie had been one of his girlfriends back in high school, before Lillian — though it was not until years later, when both he and Margie were married to other people, that they had actually ended up in bed with each other. They were old friends by now, however, and possibly too familiar with each other ever to fall in love, but in the absence of particular strangers, there were many cold and lonely nights when they depended on each other’s kindness.
She touched Wade’s shoulder as he brushed by her, and when he turned, Margie surely saw at once, as we all did with Wade, that he had gone to someplace deep inside himself, a place where he was kept from doing more than merely recognizing her. His deep-set dark-brown eyes had a membrane laid over them, and his thin lips were drawn tightly over his teeth, as if fighting to hold back huge and derisive laughter. Over the years, Margie Fogg, like many of us, had seen that expression enough times to know how to respond intelligently, which was simply to get out of the way and stay out of the way until he came looking for her again.
She pulled her hand back as if she had touched a hot stove and went directly into the hall, with Wickham coming along behind her, toothpick slanting jauntily from under his dark drooping mustache.
She should have known, she later told me. Wade was out of it that night, the way he can get, but with his daughter Jill in town with him, and with him stone sober, it was strange, and she should have known that something important had gone sour for him, one more thing, maybe the one that finally, truly, because of what it added up to, mattered in a way that none of the others had, not the divorce itself and all that ugly business with the lawyers, not losing his house the way he did, and you know how he loved that little house he built, and not Lillian’s moving down to Concord. “I just should have known, that night at the town hall. Not that it would’ve made any difference,” she said.
She reached across the table and took my fork from my hand and cut a bite off my slice of raisin pie and popped it into her mouth. “Sorry. I love Nick’s raisin pie. Let me get you another fork.” She laughed. “I can’t help myself.” She is a tall large-boned woman with a broad Irish face, downturned green eyes and pale skin. Due to her size, perhaps, and the suddenness of her movements, she looks awkward, but she is in fact uncannily graceful and a pleasure to watch move. Her frizzy hair is the color of cordovan, and she had it tied back in a loose thatch with a piece of black ribbon, showing to advantage her long and handsome white neck.