“He’s in love with you.”
“Yes, and he never lets me forget it, either.
I shouldn’t have talked about him that way. He’s nice but it’ll be a long time before-” She shrugged. “He’ll make somebody a nice husband.”
“I take it that’s not a quality you’re especially interested in at the moment.”
“I told you, I want kids and a family life. But that doesn’t mean I’m willing to settle for some timid little guy who lets me walk all over him.”
I stood up and walked back to the door. She watched me, her dark gaze impossible to read.
She was a formidable young woman.
I said, “You happen to remember where you were Friday night?”
“Are you asking me if I killed Sara, McCain?”
“Something like that, I guess.”
“Well, I’ll tell you something. I thought about it enough. I thought about each and every one of the girls he threw me over for. He almost always came back, though. Even with Molly, he came back. Even with Princess Sara, he came back.” This time the cold smile was for herself. “The trouble was that the bastard never stayed long.” Then, “Just a sec, I’ll walk out with you. I need to change boots. These ones Donny gave me are a half size too small. Isn’t that just like him?”
Sweet Emma and sweet Amy were sitting out on their porch glider. Emma was reading the paper and Amy was darning socks. One of their cats sat on the porch railing watching me. The day was starting the long stretch into dusk, the shadows deep and somehow lonely, a certain melancholy creeping into the laughter of kids playing in a nearby front yard. All too soon moms in aprons would be on front porches calling them in for supper, wash-^th-hands-first, as the first stars came out and the night grew chill. A clunker Plymouth packed with teenagers raced by, Elvis way up high.
You could see Amy had been crying. David would never leave this house. Not except in body.
“Good afternoon, ladies.”
“Good afternoon, Sam.” They both spoke as one and then smiled at each other about it.
Emma said, “We got his room all ready for you yesterday, but with all the excitement about Brenda…”
“Well, you had time to hide all the evidence, that’s for sure.”
Amy said, “We didn’t throw anything away.
We really didn’t, Sam.”
“But you do have a secret, right?”
“How did you know?” Amy said.
Emma scolded her sister with a hard blue glance. “Now he knows we have a secret, Amy. Thanks to you.”
“He already knew we had a secret, didn’t you, Sam?”
“Well, the way you made such a fuss about cleaning it up, I figured something was going on.”
“It’s nothing we’re proud of, believe me, Sam,” Emma said.
“Well, I didn’t notice you turning any of it down last night, if you’re so ashamed of it, sister.”
Nice to know that even saintly women got into the occasional blood feud.
“Do I get to know what you’re talking about?”
“Would you like some lemonade, Sam? I made it from fresh lemons about an hour ago.”
“No thanks, Emma. But I would like to know what you two are talking about.”
The sisters looked at each other and then back at me.
“Why don’t you go up to his room and look through things,” Emma said, “and give us a little more time to talk through this stuff.”
“So I don’t get to know what all this is about?” I kept my tone light but I really was curious.
“You go up and look through his room,” Amy said, “and we’ll decide if we’re going to tell you or not. It’s-nothing we’re proud of, Sam.”
I smiled. Sitting on their glider. Darning socks. Sweet as a sentimental magazine illustration. What kind of secret could they have?
“You wouldn’t be communist spies, would you?”
Emma: “Oh, Sam.”
“Or be running a bawdy house?”
Amy: “Sam, what a dirty mind you have.”
“Or be running a white slavery ring?”
“Help yourself to the lemonade if you want, Sam. You know where the refrigerator is.”
I passed on the lemonade, making my way up the interior stairs to the second floor and David’s room. Instead of teenage idol pics, his walls were covered with hot rods.
Street rods, most of them, mostly Fords from the 1930’s cut down and sculpted into mythic beasts of style and grace. His small bookcase held hot-rod magazines arranged carefully by date, and a dozen or so paperbacks lurid of cover and violent of copy: “Speed, switchblades… and sex! Today’s teens on the prowl!” They seemed to be the prose equivalent of drive-in movies. Egan had no doubt identified with the troubled protagonists.
Closet, desk, bureau didn’t reveal anything useful. His aunts bought most of his clothes at Sears; his better shirts-presumably he’d chosen them himself-had come from J. C. Penney’s.
Underneath the desk were two shoeboxes I hadn’t noticed while I’d been looking through the drawers. I drew them out and sat down on the bed and went through their contents. I looked out at the dusky sky. I wondered how many times Egan had sat on this bed staring out at the same backyard-garage-alley scene. It was a comforting sight. Home in a small town. I wondered if he’d taken solace in it or if his bitterness and self-pity had made peace impossible for him.
The first box contained maybe four dozen photographs of hot cars he’d taken at the drag strip in Cordoba, Illinois. It was in the second box that I found the love letters.
I spent half an hour going through them, interrupted twice by yoo-hoos shouted up the stairs by the Kelly sisters. Was everything all right? Did I want to stay to supper? Was I sure I didn’t want some fresh-squeezed lemonade?
The letters came from a dozen different girls in Black River Falls and a few surrounding towns. He’d taken his show on the road, apparently. Most of them were awkward and pained of expression, and heartbreaking in their earnest pleas for his attention and love. I could imagine him sitting in his room late at night, beyond the comfort of liquor and easy sex, making himself feel better by going through these letters. It wasn’t as simple as egotism. Not with the life he’d had.
These were objective affirmations of his worth and for the first time I felt as sorry for him as I did for the girls who’d loved him. To at least a few people in this life, he mattered. He was the somebody he’d always longed to be.
The most literate letters were from Molly. She reminded him that she had loved him since that time in seventh grade when he’d asked her to slow dance at a school mixer. She reminded him of how she’d been able to get him to cut way back on his drinking and how she’d convinced him to go to the board of education soon and see how he should go about taking a high school equivalency test. Rita’s were rock-and-roll treatises that sounded very much like the copy on the paperback covers… speed, switchblades, and sex. She shared his “greed for speed” and enjoyed all the “wild and dangerous places” they’d made love in. And like Molly, she reminded him that she’d loved him a long time, too, since ninth grade and that he was only truly himself when he was with her. Rita mentioned that she’d even given up her best friend Molly because of him.
At the bottom of the box were a few dozen photographs of Egan in his school days. The pictures told the tale. Half of them featured Molly, the other half Rita.
Despite this obvious rivalry, neither had ever thrown him over. I thought about my waning addiction to the beautiful-and absent-Pamela Forrest.
Sometimes you’re the only one who doesn’t know she’s never going to fall in love with you.
The two girls were more interesting to look at than Egan. He’d always looked pretty much the same. He’d aspired to James Deanhood since 1955, when Dean became a popular actor.
But the girls… for such beauties, neither had been especially pretty in young girlhood. Their bloom would come later. Molly had enough braces on her teeth to shred a car fender and was thin to the point of looking like a poster kid encouraging you to stamp out world hunger; Rita was plump and squinty-eyed and unsmiling. There was a kind of symbiosis here, the three of them. There was even one photo-they were in maybe seventh grade-ofthe three of them together, one girl on each side of him, a tetherball pole in the background, the girls smiling as if they were friends.