Ty walked Molly back to the sign, and they kissed, taking a moment first to throw out the gum Ty had brought to mask their breath for their parents — not that his parents would ever notice, he said, but he didn’t know what hers might be like. It struck her then how much thought he had given to tonight. All of his tentativeness, which she had been waiting for all night, was in his kiss. She held her hands still on his back, wondering where under his shirt the unseen, damaged skin was, wanting to avoid touching it not out of squeamishness but simply out of a fear of offending him. She let him put his hands on her breasts over her sweater, but when he tried to pull out the tails of her shirt his hands were cold and she gently pushed them away. He didn’t pursue it. He counted on being stopped, maybe not right at that point, but at some point.
“See you,” he said curtly, trying to behave a certain way, but he had to turn his back in order to hide the fact that he was smiling.
Monday at school he asked if she wanted to go to the movies in Schenectady with him — he had his license and had pledged an unspecified future favor to his older brother in return for one evening with his car. Molly’s parents had a rule against unchaperoned dates involving cars, but the important thing to them was the rule itself, not its vigilant enforcement; so she told Ty to meet her in front of Annika’s house on Route 3, where she would spend the night. It was a deception that meant nothing to her, but she could see Ty’s confidence swell as she related the plan.
That Wednesday at the Vincents’, Dennis wasn’t there when she arrived, and in fact when Mrs Vincent came home at quarter to eight he still hadn’t been heard from. She insisted that Molly must be starving and that she stay for dinner. When Dennis came home at nine, his tie loosened, he seemed surprised to see Molly at the table, doing her homework.
“There you are,” his wife said, coming out of the kitchen. “Listen, I know you must have had a horrible day, I hate to ask you, but it’s Bethany’s bedtime now. Can you give Molly a lift home?”
He nodded somewhat glumly, turned and went back to the car without a word. Molly got in beside him. They were approaching the center of town when Dennis suddenly said — a little hoarsely, as if he had not spoken in quite some time — “Nine minutes, it takes, to drive from our house to yours.”
Molly looked at him. She wondered if she ought to be afraid of him, but he seemed so weary, so beaten, it was hard to feel any sort of tangible danger at all.
“You don’t say much,” he went on. “It’s hard to get a word out of you. It’s hard to figure out what you’re thinking about.”
He seemed to be in some kind of distress, and Molly felt genuinely chastened by it; she wanted to say something reassuring to him now but she had no idea what to say.
Then when they reached the intersection, instead of going straight through toward the valley, he turned left.
“I thought we could take the long way this once,” he said quickly. “I hope that’s all right. I just thought we could talk a little. We never really get to talk.”
They drove on the empty road, past the drugstore, the school, the silhouetted barns.
“Is that all right?” he said gently.
“Sure,” Molly said, and she was telling the truth. Whatever was happening now, in the car, surely it was not something she had ever seen before. She knew him well enough to be certain that whatever trouble she might be in now was not imminent, not physical, deferred.
“We’ll just go up to Route 2,” he said needlessly, “and then into the valley the other way. Maybe ten extra minutes at the most.”
“It’s fine,” she said quietly. Then, after a moment, she added, “I’m not scared or anything.”
But that remark seemed to scare him; he took a deep breath and flexed his fingers on the wheel. Maybe she had said the wrong thing, maybe he wouldn’t have minded her being scared — scared enough to demand he turn the car around, so scared that she would then tell her mother or his wife about it, and so bring an end, even a disastrous one, to something he had given up on ending himself.
It was important to the current of Dennis’s desire that Molly was so good with the kids. It meant that he could go on fantasizing for himself an alternate life, however farfetched, without the guilt of imagining the kids away as well. He was not made to be anybody’s mentor; Molly’s youth, to him, represented not something to be exploited but something indomitable, even frightening, a seat of power; and the pull of the thought of sex with her had to do, strangely, with the certainty that somehow, quite apart from any question of experience, she would be in control of it, above it all, above him, knowing the physical authority she had over him. A matter of decades, really, since sex — just the thought of it — had that power to make him feel panicked, ungoverned.
Molly may not have sensed all of this, but she did grasp right away that in this situation, where by rights he should have had all the power, he was clearly powerless. He was in the grip of all he had to lose, her approbation, the approbation of everyone he knew.
“A girl like you,” he said, “must really dream a lot about getting out of this town. You probably can’t wait to leave here.”
The headlights showed them nothing, just fresh blacktop and the broken line and the lit surface of the woods at every curve. She felt incapable of asking him what he wanted. She just had to go where he took her. Already she could see some of the lights of Bull’s Head at the bottom of the slope out her side of the car.
“I guess so,” she said. “It’s pretty boring here. Unless you want to go work for IBM, I guess.”
“Well, it looks like even that won’t be an option a whole lot longer,” he said casually, relieved to get on to a less dangerous topic, forgetting for a moment who her father was. He kept his eyes on the road.
“Let me ask you something,” he said. “Do I–I mean, I must seem really old to you. Not even real, somehow, in a way. I remember what it was like being your age, what parents appeared like. I hate to think that’s how I look now to people, to you. But you know, you’ve got it all going for you, everything serves you, the world is set up to be at the service of a beautiful young woman. As it should be. As it should be.”
Molly said nothing.
“Didn’t I start that out like I was asking a question?” he said, and laughed. “Well, I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, I guess that’s pretty apparent by now.”
She didn’t want to cut him off, and she didn’t want to do anything to bring it all to a resolution: she wanted to keep it going, not because she enjoyed being the object of it but because for these few minutes everything that was unreal seemed to have been scraped away, everything was vital and true only to itself.
“You’re a very secretive girl,” he said as they started down the hill. He was crying a little. She could not have been more amazed. He spoke as though to himself: “You keep it all private. You don’t say anything to anyone. You keep it all inside.” Suddenly she could feel the truth of this. Not only that, it became more true the more he said it; the more he showed of himself, the further he came out of his own self-control, the further she withdrew into mystery, without even trying to, without doing anything at all.
He stopped the car and turned it off just around the corner from the Howes’. She turned to look right into his eyes, which may not have been smart, she knew, but she couldn’t help it, she didn’t want to miss anything.