But he was literally hanging on her mother’s every word, leaning forward, laughing, smiling. Oh, they were having a grand old time. Over salad she could still convince herself that this was a big nothing, that her mother was just trying to be sociable. By the time they were finished with dinner (Bethany’s special Chilean sea bass in hoisin sauce with baby bok choy, which was so good that even Willow liked it), she knew. Willow realized by the blush on her mother’s face-and an interesting smile that Willow wasn’t sure she’d ever seen before-that Bethany did in fact like Mr. Ivy. By dessert Willow wanted to be sick. She couldn’t take it anymore.
“So what time is Richard coming this weekend?” she asked. “Didn’t you say he was coming? That he might spend the night?”
Her mother looked at her with a cool smile. They knew each other so well.
“Richard’s my ex-husband, Willow’s stepfather,” Bethany said to Mr. Ivy, who had stopped chewing. “And no, he won’t be spending the night. Nor has he ever, as Willow well knows.”
Bethany and Mr. Ivy exchanged a look, a kind of knowing smile.
“It was her second marriage,” said Willow. “Did you know that?” Oh, she felt it, that dark meanness, that black hole inside her. She was chastened for a minute by the look on her mother’s face. It wasn’t anger; it was pain.
“Um,” Bethany said. Her mother looked down at her plate for a second. She had a death grip on the napkin in her hand. Willow noticed that Mr. Ivy had leaned back in his chair and looked down as well.
“My first husband,” Bethany said finally, “Willow’s father, died when she was three.”
He looked up at her, but she didn’t meet his eyes. “I’m so sorry,” he said. “That must have been… really difficult.”
Bethany issued that little embarrassed laugh she had when things weren’t funny but she was trying to make light. “It was a long time ago.”
“Yes,” said Willow. “She’s forgotten all about him.”
When Bethany looked up again, Willow saw her awfulness reflected in her mother’s eyes. Willow knew she was a terrible girl for saying that; her mother missed her father every day. She knew that; Bethany talked about him all the time. How he had a beautiful singing voice, how he loved to clown around and make them laugh, how he could cook, how he loved to read and always believed that Bethany would be a successful writer, long before she’d finished her first novel. Willow knew all this, and she couldn’t stand to see that look on her mother’s face.
I’m sorry, she could have said. I’m sorry, Mom. And her mother would have accepted her apology and put on a good face for the rest of the meal. Then she’d come to talk about it all later. But Willow didn’t apologize. She just looked down at her plate, pushed around the bok choy she had no intention of eating. She wouldn’t put a bite of her mother’s food in her mouth, even though she liked it and was really hungry.
Outside, the rain that had been threatening for days with an on-and-off drizzle had finally committed. It was hitting the roof and windows so hard that it sounded like the pounding of feet.
“Wow, that rain is really coming down,” said Mr. Ivy. He cleared his throat and rubbed his forehead. He probably had a sinus headache.
“Isn’t it?” said Bethany. She jumped on the sentence like a drowning person looking for a lifeline. Her voice sounded tight and faint.
Willow let her silverware clank to the plate, and she pushed her chair back loudly. “Can I be excused?” she asked.
Her mother looked at her darkly. “Please, Willow, be my guest.”
She made as much noise as possible stomping from the room. She pretended to storm up the stairs, but then she snuck back down to stand in the hallway outside the door to listen.
“I’m really sorry, Henry,” said Bethany after a minute.
“No, don’t apologize. Really,” he said. “I get it.”
“It’s my fault. I did kind of spring it on her,” she said. “I don’t know what I was thinking.”
“Maybe you were thinking we’d all have a good time,” he said. His voice was soft and comforting.
“I was hoping.”
“Should I go?”
Willow heard her mother sigh.
Yes! Yes! Go! Get out and don’t come back.
“You know, Henry, I can see why you’d want to. And probably I should tell you yes, for Willow’s sake. But I don’t really want you to go. And I’m not sure Willow should act that badly and get what she wants. I think it might be time, though I know things have been hard for her, that she grows up a little.”
There was a moment of silence. They were touching; she could feel it. Maybe they were holding hands. Or, God forbid, kissing!
“I’d like to stay,” he said. “Can I help you clear the table?”
If Willow could have shrieked with rage, she would have. Instead she went quietly back upstairs. Inside her room she flung herself on her bed and started to weep. She couldn’t even say why she was so upset. Eventually she cried herself out and lay spent on the bed, hating her mother, hating The Hollows, hating her whole miserable existence. Was there anyone on earth more miserable than she was right now? She doubted it.
The rain was hammering on her window. The sound of it was frightening and depressing, so she turned on the television but found that the cable was out. Of course it was. She threw the remote across the room, and it landed harmlessly on the basket of laundry she was supposed to have put away before dinner. She sat on the edge of her bed, feeling trapped and sorry for herself. Then at the window a flashing light caught her eye. A rhythmic flashing-light, then dark. Light, then dark.
She walked over to the window and looked down. In the glow from the front porch stood Cole and Jolie, under a large umbrella. Cole was flashing the light, and Jolie was holding the umbrella. She had that smile on her face, the one that Willow just couldn’t resist. It promised a good time, no matter how awful everything else was. And then there was Cole. His smile promised something else altogether. She waved to them both and held up a finger. She grabbed her raincoat from her closet and moved quietly down the stairs. She could hear her mother and Mr. Ivy laughing. She didn’t feel the slightest twinge of guilt as she slipped out the front door.
“How is it that you’ve never married, Mr. Ivy?” She’d been alternating between calling him Henry and Mr. Ivy. He liked the way his name sounded from her mouth. Usually the question would bother him, make him feel self-conscious. But there was something about her, something so wide open and nonjudgmental that he found himself really thinking about it.
“I don’t know,” he said. “Always in the wrong place at the wrong time or never in the right place.”
He’d successfully pushed back his thoughts about Marla Holt to come to dinner. He’d decided after he hung up the phone with Bethany that whatever cosmic force had decided he wasn’t allowed to be happy could just fuck right off. He liked Bethany Graves, and she seemed to like him. And he’d be damned if he was going to go home and brood over what had happened to Marla and what he might have done to prevent it. What good did that do now?
Then, on the way over, he’d heard on the radio that the medical examiner had confirmed that the bones found did in fact belong to Marla. She was up there. She had been up there all this time. Even that he’d managed to put into a box within himself. He’d look at it later.
“Have you ever been in love?” Bethany asked.
He’d had too much to drink, which for him was more than two glasses of wine. He was on his third, and he had that warm, light feeling. From the flush on Bethany’s face, he’d say she was feeling the same. They’d been touching since Willow went upstairs. He’d dared a soft caress to her arm. There was a quick lacing of fingers while she told him about her husband who’d died so young, leaving her with a small child. Since they’d moved from the table to the couch in the living room, the desire to kiss her was almost an ache. The air between them was electric.