In bed in his childhood home, Dennis would tell Molly the things he was privy to as a kind of civic figure in Ulster. He told her that the woman who had taught her kindergarten class was having an affair with the man who ran the hardware store, and who was just about to declare bankruptcy. He told her that the kid who used to work at the Mobil station had not joined the Marines at all — he had left town with money stolen from his parents, who made up the story to cover their shame. He told her how many times in the last month the town sheriff had been called out to Annika’s house, to try to settle down her parents. He wasn’t being insensitive; he had no idea Molly and Annika were friends, because she never mentioned her life at school, except for scheduling purposes, and he never asked about it, not wanting to have his sense of his own perversion stirred up by any reminder of how young Molly really was.
“You know what I wonder?” Molly said. She lay on her stomach, and Dennis sat beside her tracing with his fingertips the unflawed skin from her shoulder blades to the backs of her knees. “Has there ever been a day when you’ve come here, fucked me, and then gone home that same night and fucked your wife?”
The tracing stopped. “What would you want to know a thing like that for?”
“It wouldn’t bother me, really. I was just curious about it. Don’t you think it’s an interesting question?”
“No.”
“What, too intimate?”
He sighed. “‘Fuck’ seems like such an angry word to me. Anyway, no. That’s never happened. It’s a pretty easy situation to avoid. She has a very exhausting life just now. I know it must be hard for you to imagine a life like that, but just wait.”
That was the last time she ever saw him.
The golf course closed shortly after someone drove a car on to it at night and did doughnuts on the fairways. One of the officers of the charity organized by the IBM spouses was caught stealing from it to make her own mortgage payment; not long afterward the charity voted to dissolve itself.
On a Friday afternoon in March, misty and warm, Molly got off the bus at the stop nearest the Vincents’ and walked up to the front door with her jacket tied around her waist. She knocked, and a few seconds later Joyce Vincent opened the door. She was not dressed in one of the smart, boxy suits that generally indicated she was going back to the office. Nor, Molly saw, was she wearing any makeup. In fact she had been crying, which made her silence now all the more unsettling. The children were not in sight behind her. She stood in the doorway staring up at Molly — who was now taller than she was — with a look of utter disbelief, as if the girl were someone she had been told was dead.
“I’m here,” Molly said, confused.
Joyce’s head pulled back slightly at the sound of Molly’s voice. There seemed to be something she wanted to say but a few seconds went by and she couldn’t get it out. The corners of her mouth turned down. Then she slammed the door in Molly’s face.
Molly waited on the porch. There was no sound within the house. In a minute or two she turned to face the street, and the meaning of what had just happened began to bear down toward her as if on wings. She tried to figure out what had to happen now. For one thing, she had no way to get home. She knew a few shortcuts through the woods but it was still four miles at least. Lightheaded, she descended the porch steps.
As she grew more and more tired she really only wished that the trip were longer — that it would take her days of solitary hiking, sleeping under the moon, to get back home. She didn’t have any idea what a woman in Joyce Vincent’s position might do. All she knew was that she liked Joyce and was sorry she had been hurt. That hadn’t been the intention. If there were two worlds to live in, then everyone’s feelings could be spared, which is how Molly would have wanted it; but now the two worlds had fused back into one.
It was twilight when she finally walked through her own front door. At first she thought no one else was home because she heard no sounds from the television or the kitchen, no voices, no hiss from the dishwasher. But when she turned the corner into the living room, her mother and father were sitting there, Kay with her face turned away, Roger with his fist held up to his mouth. They sat in their chairs like two characters from the last act of Our Town.
The phone rang.
“Don’t answer it,” Roger said.
Instead she went up to her room. They didn’t follow her. She stayed there most of the weekend.
It turned out that Dennis’s parents’ house was so ideally suited for secret trysts that within months of its vacancy it had been discovered by the high-schoolers in Ulster too; they used it to get high, or when it was too cold for the playground, or for the same purpose as Dennis and Molly. Someone must have seen them arriving, or leaving, or in the act. It could have been Annika and her boyfriend for all Molly knew. She never found out.
Monday morning Kay didn’t come out of her room. Molly wanted to talk to her but she understood it would have to wait. She herself had slept a lot the last two days, at first as a refuge from depression but later out of a developing sense that the worst had happened and so there was really nothing more to worry about. Her father didn’t say a word to her either. He tried to make his silence seem like punishment but she could see that the truth was he had no idea what to say. It was the sort of offense that made all his authority seem like a fiction, lighter than air. Then, as she was on her way out the door for school, Roger said to her, “Have you told any of your friends about this?”
“About what?” she said.
His nostrils flared. “Don’t make me say it.”
But that was what she wanted; if she was to be shamed, she had decided, she didn’t want to be shamed by euphemisms. Still, she felt sorry for him then. “Of course I haven’t,” she said.
“Good. Don’t. We have to figure out a way to keep this all under wraps.”
But it was too late for that already. Joyce Vincent had considered the matter and had settled upon the course of public exposure as retribution for her husband. For one thing, she had thrown him out of the house and needed an explanation for it. Her defaming him, on the phone and then in person with all her friends and family, was mostly retributive, because she felt that he had disgraced her irremediably — that her home had been blown apart not by a sexual folly but by the proof it provided of his utter lack of regard for her, what she did and what she went through. Had he betrayed her with someone she had never met, or even someone she just didn’t know very well, she might have found a way to put it behind her; instead, though, in the evenings, after the confused, tearful children were put to bed, Joyce sat up helplessly sorting through the memories of the hundreds of times she had welcomed Molly into her home, kissed the girl, gossiped with her, played the mother to her because her own mother was known to be unreliable, done small favors for her, entrusted her children to her. She heard the voice that said she was punishing the kids by kicking their father out — that a better person than her would find a way to forgive even this, for their sake — but Joyce was who she was and there was only so much that could be asked of her. She couldn’t think which was worse: if the two of them, lying together, had smiled lewdly at their conspiracy to mock and degrade her, or if they had never even given a thought to her at all.