The teacher looked away and Jeannie whispered to me from behind the geography book.
"My mom wants you to come for supper," she said.
The teacher looked back at us. Her name was Miss Harris and she was lean and kind of leathery and hard eyed. She frowned and shook her head. We were quiet. Miss Harris went back to correcting papers. The room reeked of silence.
"Sure," I whispered.
Jeannie nodded.
Miss Harris had her head down, making notes in the margin of a blue book. I could see the thin white line of her scalp down the middle of her head where she parted her hair and pulled it back tight.
"Friday night?" Jeannie whispered.
Miss Harris's head jerked up and her eyes darted around the room.
"This is a time set aside for you to study," she said loudly. "Obviously some of you think it's gossip time. You are wrong, and if you continue, you will be here late after school."
I was industriously taking notes on my Nero Wolfe novel. Jeannie appeared entranced with her geography book.
Me? Dinner with Mrs. Haden? And Jeannie?
An eraser came sailing past me from the back corner of the room and bounced off the back of a chubby girl with a hair ribbon, who was sitting right in front of Miss Harris.
"Ow," the girl said.
Miss Harris got to her feet.
"What is your problem, Betsey?" she said.
"Someone threw an eraser at me."
"Sure," I whispered to Jeannie.
She smiled and nodded.
"Do you know who threw it?" Miss Harris said.
"Joey Visco," Betsey said.
"Mr. Visco," Miss Harris said.
Joey Visco said, "Miss Harris, I didn't throw nothing."
"I didn't throw anything," Miss Harris said.
"I know it," Joey said.
There was a lot of giggling.
"See me after class, Mr. Visco," Miss Harris said.
"But I didn't do nothing."
"After class," Miss Harris said, and went and rested her hips on her desk and folded her arms and stared at us silently.
Chapter 31
It was a pretty bad neighborhood. Mean-looking dogs behind chain-link fences. Chickens in some of the yards. Streetlights few and far apart. I wasn't comfortable. But I figured if Jeannie could live there, I could walk through it.
I didn't want to go to dinner at Jeannie's house. But her mother had invited me, and I couldn't just say no, so here I was.
Mrs. Haden met me at the door and I put out my hand like a well-brought-up boy. She took it and then pulled me to her and gave me a hug. I had very little experience at being hugged by a woman. She was wearing a lot of perfume.
"Oh, you dear thing," she said. "Jeannie's told me so much about you."
I nodded.
"And you're so handsome too," Mrs. Haden said.
I sort of nodded and sort of shrugged.
"I just had to meet you and thank you for saving my little girl," she said.
I didn't know what to say, so I nodded again and smiled as hard as I could.
"Come in, sit down, would you like a Coca-Cola? Jeannie, get him something while I look in the oven."
"Want a Coke?" Jeannie said.
"Okay," I said.
She and her mother both went to the kitchen. They looked sort of alike. Except Mrs. Haden was about twenty years older than Jeannie and looked like she might have had a hard life. She was still kind of pretty. Her hair was long. She was slim, and she wore a lot of makeup. She had on a black dress with no sleeves and black high-heeled shoes. It seemed very fashionable to me, and I wondered why she dressed up for dinner with her daughter and a fourteen-year-old kid.
Jeannie and I drank our Coke uneasily in the living room. Jeannie's house wasn't much. I'd been there once before with Jeannie when her mother was at work. The house was shaped sort of like a railroad car. There was a little front porch. Then you went in the front door into the living room, through the living room to the kitchen, through the kitchen to a bedroom, and in a little L off that bedroom there was a bath and another bedroom.
Mrs. Haden had cooked a chicken and some white rice and some frozen peas. We sat at the kitchen table. There was a candle lit on the table. Mrs. Haden was drinking some pink wine. "I'm sorry I can't offer you some," Mrs. Haden said. "But I couldn't without your father's permission."
"That's okay, ma'am," I said. "I don't enjoy wine so much."
Actually I didn't know if I enjoyed wine or not. I wasn't sure I'd ever had any.
"Oh, you will," she said, and drank some from her glass.
"Yes, ma'am," I said.
"Jeannie says you don't have a mother," Mrs. Haden said.
I ate some chicken. It was kind of dry.
"Yes, ma'am."
"You live with your father?" she said.
"And my two uncles," I said.
"Isn't that interesting," she said. "Three brothers raising a child."
"Actually they are my mother's brothers," I said. "My father and them were friends and when my mother died, they moved in to help out."
"Do you remember your mother?"
"No, ma'am."
"Three men and a boy and no women," she said.
She drank the rest of the wine in her glass.
"Oh, there's women," I said. "My father and my uncles all have a bunch of girlfriends, but none of them has got married."
Mrs. Haden gave herself some more wine.
"A house full of boys," she said.
"I guess so."
"Probably living on peanut butter sandwiches and cold beans from the can," Mrs. Haden said.
"We take turns cooking," I said.
"You too?"
"Yes, ma'am."
"Do you suppose they'd like to come here with you next time for a home-cooked meal?" Mrs. Haden said.
"I guess so," I said.
"Well, that's what I'm going to do," she said. "I'm going to invite them for a home-cooked meal."
I looked at Jeannie. She smiled blankly. I nodded.
"That would be nice," I said.
Chapter 32
Susan and I left the bench and walked up to the little bridge over the swan boat lake. We stood leaning our forearms on the railing and watched the boats and the people and the ducks, green and quiet in the middle of the city.
"It sounds like Jeannie's mother might have wanted to promote you as her daughter's boyfriend," Susan said.
"I think that was one thing she wanted," I said.
"And the other?"
"I was a way to three eligible bachelors," I said.
"Two for one," Susan said. "A boyfriend for her daughter and one for her. She seems in retrospect a woman who needed a man, who thought all women needed a man."
"She stayed a long time with one of the worst men in the world," I said.
"To some, a bad man is better than no man," Susan said. "I stayed a long time with the wrong husband."
"I think you've changed since then," I said.
"Yes, I think so," Susan said. "Did your father and your uncles go for dinner?"
"They did," I said.
"What was that like?"
"They went the way they went to PTA meetings and stuff," I said. "They didn't want to go. They didn't expect to enjoy it. They didn't enjoy it. But they were polite about it."
"Did she flirt with them?"
"Oh, my, yes," I said.
"Was it embarrassing?"
"Yes. It didn't seem to embarrass my father or my uncles, but it embarrassed the hell out of me and Jeannie."
"She get drunk?"
"Yes."
"Any of them ever ask her out?"
"No."
"They say why?"
"No."
"You have a theory?"
"She drank too much. And she wasn't very bright. And she was needy. My father and my uncles never much admired needy."