“What price range do you have in mind?”
I was still talking to an investment banker about what I would have to live on if I didn’t use any of Jane’s capital. But I could buy the house outright and then invest the rest, or I could put the money from the sale of Jane’s house down on the new place… I let all this swirl around in my head, and then an answer popped to the top of my brain, like the answer popping up to the window of a fortune-telling ball.
“Okay,” Eileen said. “Seventy-five to ninety-five gives us some room. There are quite a few for sale in that range since Golfwhite closed its factory here.” Golfwhite-which, logically enough, manufactured golf balls and other golfing accessories-had closed its Lawrenceton factory and moved all its people who were willing to move to the larger factory in Florida.
“I don’t really need anything awfully big or important-looking,” I told Eileen, assailed by sudden doubts.
“Don’t worry, Roe. If you don’t like it, you don’t have to buy it,” she said dryly. “Let’s get a start tomorrow afternoon. I’ll see what I can get lined up in that time.”
After I’d dressed in my lime-green blouse and navy blue pants and sweater, I had nothing better to do than drop in on my old friend Susu Saxby Hunter. The house she’d inherited from her parents was in the oldest part of Lawrenceton. The house had been built in the last quarter of the previous century, and had charming high ceilings and huge windows, negligible closets, and wide halls, a feature I was especially fond of for some reason. Wide halls are a great location for bookshelves, and Susu was wasting a whole lot of prime space, in my opinion. Of course, she had other things to worry about, I found out that morning. In a house the age of hers, the heating and cooling bills were extortionate, drafts were inescapable, curtains had to be custom-made because nothing was of standard size, and all the electric wiring had had to be replaced recently. To say nothing of the antiquated toilets and tubs that Susu had just replaced.
“But you love this house, don’t you?” I said, sitting across from Susu at her “country pine” kitchen table. Susu’s kitchen was so heavily “country,” including a pie safe in the corner (lovingly refinished and containing no pies whatsoever), that you expected a goose to walk in with a blue bow around its neck.
“Yes,” she confessed, putting out her third cigarette. “My great-grandparents built it when they were first married, and then my parents inherited and they redid it, and now I’m redoing it. I guess I always will be. It’s lucky Jimmy’s in the hardware business! The only thing it would be better if he did is if he were a licensed electrician. Or had a fabric store. Want some more coffee?”
“Sure,” I said, reflecting I’d have to view the renovated bathrooms quite soon at this rate. “How’s Jimmy doing?”
Susu didn’t look quite as happy as she had when discussing the house. “Roe, since we’ve been friends a long time, I’ll tell you… I’m not sure how Jimmy’s doing. He goes to work, and he works hard. He’s really built the business up. And he goes to Rotary, and he goes to church, and he coaches little -Jim’s baseball team in the summer. And he goes to Bethany’s piano recitals. But sometimes I have the funniest feeling…” Her voice trailed off uncertainly, and she stared down at her smoldering cigarette.
“What, Susu?” I asked quietly, suddenly feeling a return of my high school affection for this bright, blond, plump, scared woman.
“His heart’s not in it,” she said simply, and then gave a little laugh. “I know that sounds stupid…”
Actually, she sounded quite perceptive, something I’d never suspected.
“Maybe he’s just having sort of an early mid-life crisis?” I suggested gently.
“Of course, you’re probably right,” Susu said, obviously embarrassed by her own frankness. “Come see how I decorated Bethany’s room! She’ll be a teenager before I know it. Roe, I expect her to tell me any day that she’s started her periods!”
“Oh, no!”
And we oohed and aahed our way up the stairs to Bethany’s pretty-as-a-picture room, still decorated with childish things like favorite dolls-but the dolls were sharing space with posters of sullen young men in leather. Then we viewed Little Jim’s room, with its duck-laden wallpaper and masculine plaids. It seems to be the view of those who design “male” decorations that the male DNA includes a gene that requires duck-killing.
Then we moved on to Sally and Jim’s room, resplendent with chintz and framed needlework, an antique cedar chest, and ruffled pillows on the beds. A picture from their wedding hung by Sally’s dressing table, one of the whole carefully arranged wedding party.
“There you are, Roe, second from the end! Wasn’t that a wonderful day?” Susu’s pink fingernail landed on my very young face. That face, with its stiff smile, brought that day back to me all too vividly. I had known exactly how unbecoming the dreadful lavender ruffled bridesmaid’s dress had been, and my unruly hair was topped with a picture hat trailing a matching lavender ribbon. My best friend, Amina, also a bridesmaid, had fared much better in that get-up because of her height and longer neck, and her smile was unreserved. – Susu herself, radiant in fully deserved white, was gorgeous, and I told her so now. “That was the wedding of the year,” I said, smiling a little. “You were the first of us to be married. We were so envious.”
The memory of that envy, the thrill of being the first, momentarily warmed Susu’s face. “Jimmy was so handsome,” she said quietly.
Yes, he had been.
“Honey, I’m here for lunch,” bellowed a voice from downstairs. Susu’s plump face aged again. “You won’t believe who’s here, Jimmy!” she called gaily.
And down the stairs we tripped, stuck in a time warp between that picture-book wedding and the reality of two children and a house.
Jimmy Hunter quickly brought me back to the present. It had been a long time since I’d seen him close up, and he’d aged and coarsened. The basic goodwill that had always lain behind his character seemed to be gone now, replaced by something like confusion, laced with a dose of wondering resentment. How could Jimmy Hunter’s life not be idyllic? he seemed to be wondering. What could possibly be missing? I’d always thought of him as an uncomplicated jock. I saw I would have to revise this assessment of Jimmy just as I’d had to correct my reading of his wife.
“You look great, Roe,” Jimmy said heartily.
“Thanks, Jimmy. How’s the hardware business?”
“Well, it keeps us in hamburger, with steak on the weekends once in a while,” he said casually. “How’s the realty market in Lawrenceton?”
Of course everyone in town had heard by now I’d left the library, and heard and speculated about my legacy from Jane Engle.
“Kind of upset, right now.”
“You mean about Tonia Lee? That gal just didn’t know when to quit, did she?”
“Oh, Jimmy,” Susu protested.
“Now, sugar, you know as well as I do that Tonia Lee would cheat on her husband any time it came in her head to do it. She just did it once too often, with the wrong man at the wrong time.”
As right as he might be, he said this in a very unpleasant way, a way that made me want to defend Tonia Lee Greenhouse. Jimmy was the kind of man who would say a woman deserved to get raped if she wore a low-cut blouse and tight skirt.
“She was unwise,” I said levelly, “but she didn’t deserve to be murdered. No one deserves to be killed for making some mistakes.”