In June, Beth Ann came back from Albuquerque. She found out from Francie where Perry was living and wrote down his phone number, and took a bus to the town nearest him in Vermont. He picked up his phone one night when the band was practicing — everyone’s instrument was instantly silent — and he stood there wishing they would make noise again when he realized who was on the phone. “Whether you want me or not, I’m almost to your house,” Beth Ann said. “Will you come get me?”
He went to the drugstore where the bus had left her off, and got her. She had on a black cap and a trench coat. Her eyes were bloodshot, and her skin was filmed with sweat, as if she had walked to Vermont instead of taking the bus. They walked back to his car without touching. “I actually knew your number,” she said. “The reason I called Francie first was to see if she was still living in New Hampshire, or if she had moved here with you.”
“She’s still in New Hampshire,” he said. “What made you think she’d be with me?”
“Everybody knows how you feel about Francie except Francie. Or maybe she pretends not to know. I don’t know.”
“Francie’s having a show in New York next month,” he said.
“I don’t want to be filled in on the news.”
“Should I talk about politics?”
“Do you read the newspaper?” she said. “What’s the point of being so isolated if you pick up the paper?”
“What are you doing here?” he said.
They drove without speaking all the way back to the house. He was glad that T.W.’s band was there because that would give him something to do other than listen to whatever she had to say. They would be eating dinner by the time they got back — he could sit down and eat, and not talk much.
“T.W.’s band is at my place,” he said.
When they got inside, T.W. was on the phone. “Here he is, wait a minute,” T.W. said, holding the phone out to Perry. “There’s Beth Ann!” T.W. said, giving her a kiss on the forehead. “Good to see you.”
Perry was talking to Nick, who had just become a father — a long, blurted story about how Anita was all right and how they had an enormous baby that Anita and the midwife hadn’t been able to deliver at home. “They took her out in the ambulance bent like a boomerang,” Nick said. It sounded as if he was crying. “This kid is eleven pounds and some ounces, I can’t remember how many. One, I think. The kid looks like he’s ready to take off crawling.”
“Well, congratulations, Nick. What are you naming him?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t written down anything yet. Call me back if you think of a good name.”
He hung up. “Nick and Anita had a baby,” he said to Beth Ann.
“Hey,” said T.W., “you ought to see Delores’ kid now, Beth Ann. She’s the prettiest little girl I’ve ever seen. Delores is living in New Hampshire with Carl Fellows, on a farm his grandfather used to run. I think they’re getting married. Is that right, Perry?”
Perry shrugged.
“Hey, what happened to Zack?” T.W. asked.
Perry rolled his eyes, and not wanting to hear, he started for the kitchen, where two people from the band were cooking spaghetti sauce. He heard her say, “Zack is dead.”
“What are you talking about?” T.W. said.
“He fell off a rock in the Sandia Range. I’m not kidding you.”
“What did you say?” Dickie said, coming out of the kitchen, dripping tomato sauce from a spoon.
“He really is,” Beth Ann said. “He’s dead.”
“Is he buried?” T.W. said. Perry looked at T.W., wondering why he asked such a thing.
“Of course,” Beth Ann said.
“Where?” T.W. said.
“In Albuquerque.”
“He is not dead,” Dickie said. “Look at her: she’s smiling.”
“I’m smiling because it’s so horrible, and because I told you in such an awful way.” She was no longer smiling. She went over to the sofa where Perry had just sat down and slumped beside him. “He’s been dead for four months,” she said.
“Fuck it!” Dickie said. “Fuck it — he didn’t fall off a mountain.”
“I don’t know,” Roger said. Roger had just come out of the kitchen. He had joined the band a little while before and hadn’t known Zack.
“Oh fuck it!” Dickie said, and walked to the front door and went outside. Roger went after him and looked out the door for a minute, then quietly closed it.
“Why didn’t you call us?” Perry said.
“I wasn’t thinking. It didn’t even hit me that I had no reason to be in Albuquerque until a few days ago. I sat around a rented room for four months. I called his parents, and they came out and put on a funeral. It was horrible. His mother was taking sedatives, and we all had to hold her up for three days so she wouldn’t fall over. When she left she said to me, ‘I’m not even going to see you again, ever in my life,’ as though I was her kid.”
The phone rang. Perry picked it up. “We’re naming her Belinda,” Nick said. “This is really embarrassing, but the baby’s a girl. I don’t know what I was talking about. I haven’t had any sleep for almost two days.”
“Tell Anita we’re happy,” Perry said. “T.W. and the band are here. We’ll come around soon and inspect the kid and see for ourselves if it has a penis.”
“What’s he talking about?” T.W. said to Beth Ann.
Perry hung up. He sat on the floor by the phone, thinking of all the times he’d cursed Zack. He hoped that he had never said that he wished he would fall off a mountain.
“I’m going to eat dinner,” Roger said. “If anybody else can eat, they’re welcome.”
They sat in the living room, smelling the sauce. T.W. pulled a guitar slide out of his case. Joints were tightly packed inside it. He looked at it and said, “I guess that’s not the thing to do,” put it in his pocket, and got up and went into the kitchen. Perry and Beth Ann could hear Roger, feigning cheerfulness, saying, “Would you like me to get you some spaghetti?”
“Maybe I ought to go after Dickie,” Beth Ann said.
Dickie came back, with leaves and mud and bark sticking to him, as they were finishing dinner. He bit into a piece of cold garlic bread. He tore a square of paper towel from the roll that was in the center of the table and rubbed it over his face. “What was that spastic asshole doing climbing mountains?” he said.
The phone rang, and no one got up to answer it.
Roger went to the door the next evening, when Delores and Carl showed up. The others had organized a softball game on a neighbor’s field, but Roger had been feeling sick to his stomach, and he had stayed around for Borka’s arrival. Borka played electric bass with the band, and he was thinking about moving in on her. He loved her wavy gold hair and the little pierced earrings she wore, a moon in one ear and a star in the other. She had won his heart when she did an imitation of Viva in Bike Boy for an audience in a bar between sets, calling Bike Boy an “old movie.” When he went to answer the door, he thought it was her. It was Delores and Carl, and he didn’t know who they were. They introduced themselves and came in and sprawled on the sofa, and alternately commented on how nice the house was and argued about whether it was wrong to have left Meagan with Francie. Carl said it was, and Delores said that Meagan knew very well who Francie was, and was just bluffing when they left. Roger told them that he would have to excuse himself (he had been lying on the couch before they took it over) to go stretch out because his stomach felt funny. “Papaya leaf tea,” Delores said and instantly pulled a box from her canvas bag. She went into the kitchen and brewed it for him. Roger began to formulate questions to find out who they were.