In school everyone cleared a path for Molly as if she were on fire. She felt the eyes on her at her locker, in the girls’ bathroom between periods, felt the silence she created wherever she walked. At lunch she arrived early and sat at her usual table; when Justine and Tia got there, they coaxed each other with impatient glances for a minute before Tia finally said, in a whisper, “So is it true?”
Molly shrugged. “Yeah, it’s true,” she said.
They weren’t really sure what to ask after that. Molly had found the limits of their apathy; in their eyes, she had gone too far — there were kids involved, after all — and for what? Dennis himself had never been considered one of the best-looking older men in town anyway. But they suppressed any desire to ask for details, sexual or otherwise. It was the hostility of the whole thing — the way Molly must have known all along, as they were finding out only now, that their own supposed intimacy with her was really just an indulgence, a lie — that surprised and, ultimately, estranged them. As for Annika, she never came to lunch that day at all.
It wasn’t bad, Molly thought stoically as she sat alone on the bus at the end of the first day, this sort of amazed ostracism. Because all it signified was that she was not one of them. She had always known it. Now everyone knew it.
But she wasn’t familiar with the other feelings that feelings of difference engendered. They were not about to esteem her for taking them all by surprise. They would not long be content to leave her alone. Whispers behind her back, which turned into accusations in her face: she didn’t really care. Ridiculous pranks: someone poured a can of motor oil through the vent in her locker. Someone painted the word WHORE on her gymlocker door. Then one morning she opened the front door of their house and the word had been painted there too.
Roger called in sick to work that day, to think and repaint his door and try to find some safe point of escape for all the fury he felt inside him. If he could have he might have tried to find and beat Dennis Vincent — Roger had never beaten anyone in his life, but he had rage on his side, and Vincent was a small man; and even the alternative, which was taking the beating himself, was bound to be more cathartic than doing nothing. But Dennis had vanished: quit his job, left town with a car full of clothes; wherever he was he kept phoning his former home, asking to speak to his children, but his wife forbade it. She did not want Kevin and Bethany, if she could help it, to grow up with any version of the catastrophe other than her own. Dennis never tried to contact Molly; perhaps he was too afraid one of her parents would answer the phone. Or perhaps he had come around to blaming her somehow for the whole thing. In any case, he was probably not very far away; but when it came to such an exotic task as locating a man who was in hiding, Roger Howe had no resources at all.
A full week went by before he suddenly appeared in the doorway of Molly’s room, finally seized by the courage to talk about it. Molly had had a lot of time to prepare and had decided that this conversation was at least going to have the merit of complete candor.
He stood with his back to the dresser, his hands behind him. Molly sat on the bed.
“I suppose the first thing I should ask you,” he said, “is whether this, whether you were forced or in any way felt you were under duress, threatened …”
“No.”
He nodded, neither pleased nor displeased, his lips pressed together. “Because I know that an adult can be a real figure of authority, and can trade on that—”
“No, it wasn’t like that. No one forced me to do anything.”
“You wanted to do it?”
“I did it of my own will.”
“Whose idea was it, whose initiative?”
“His.”
“And at some point he expressed this idea to you.”
“Yes. But in a conversation. He didn’t force himself on me or anything like that.”
“How long did it go on?”
“About six months, I guess.”
“You guess. Were you — was it your — well, never mind about that. I don’t know why it matters. How long was it supposed to go on?”
“Sorry?”
“When was it going to end? When you went to college? Or was it going to continue after that?”
“Probably not.”
“Probably not. So you just thought it could go on indefinitely. Did you really think you wouldn’t get caught?”
“Yes, actually. I really did think that. Maybe that was stupid.”
“You didn’t want to get caught, on some level? Maybe to get Joyce out of the way? Or maybe to ruin Dennis’s life, because you were really—”
“No, Dad. I honestly didn’t think anyone would ever find out about it.” She paused, and in the pause reminded herself of her resolve to leave nothing unsaid. “That was the whole point of doing it. To not get caught doing it.”
Roger sighed, and walked to the window. “So you weren’t in love with him.”
“No,” Molly said, and couldn’t quite suppress a small laugh that went along with it. He spun around.
“Don’t you laugh at me,” he said, his voice shaking. “Don’t you do that. You think I like asking these questions? The only reason I’m doing it is because I still think it’s important for some reason that I know more about what’s happened to my family than the woman at the drugstore or my secretary at work or your classmates at school.”
Molly’s strength wavered. She’d never seen her father like this — suffering beyond his ability to try to pretend otherwise. Still, while she was genuinely sorry for the pain she had caused him, she also couldn’t help thinking that that pain was outsized, misdirected, that for some reason she couldn’t figure out he was intent on making this an even bigger deal than it really was.
“But I couldn’t expect you to give a damn about that,” he said. “How you can sit there, with that blank expression on your face—”
“I can’t help the expression on my face.”
“—and just blithely ruin two families, and you don’t even seem sorry about it.”
“Ruin? How are we ruined?”
But he didn’t pay attention to that. “Dennis Vincent was a friend of mine, you know.”
“I never heard you—”
“I considered him a friend of mine. Which just makes the whole thing that much—” He stopped himself. “Well, this whole thing is my fault somehow, I won’t run from that. But the point is I don’t see how we can stay here now. I’m laughed at everywhere I go.”
“Daddy, I don’t—”
“I can quit work, of course. What are they going to do, fire me? But it’ll probably mean turning down the job in Armonk.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s the worst possible time to sell the house, of course, but we’ll have to take the hit—”
“We were ruined already!” Molly said. Her own calm was in pieces now. Roger, his eyebrows low, folded his arms and stared at her. She had found her way through his defenses, to the anger at her there, and she was no longer so sure that candor would be their salvation. But she pushed on.
“I mean, what is it you think you’ve lost? You’re not friends with the Vincents anymore, that’s true; and I’m not a virgin, that’s true too, but if it makes any difference to you, I wasn’t one before either. As for the rest of it, this town will be a ghost town in a year, everyone knows that. I really can’t believe that all the people in Ulster who are going to be broke and unemployed soon, if they aren’t already, are as concerned with your daughter’s sex life as you think they are. What do they care? And this house is breaking up anyway. Richard’s gone, I’m almost gone, you’ll sell it in a year either way. There’s not much left of it to break up. All these things were already happening. So why are you making such a big thing about me and Dennis?”