I began to count my own.
At least Martin didn’t try to get to the plant early on Saturday, but he felt he should go in, especially since he’d been out of town. “I think my weekend hours will decrease now things are beginning to shape up at this plant,” he told me over our morning coffee, “especially now that I have a reason to stay away.”
I tried to smile back, but my attempt must have been miserable failure.
“Roe,” he said seriously, “it’s me that got you into the trouble last night, and for that I am so sorry. He wouldn’t have come here if it wasn’t for me. I hope you don’t hate me for that.”
“No,” I said, surprised. “No, never think it. I’m just tired, and it was very upsetting. And you know-you do have to tell me why you brought a gun when you came to spend the night with me.”
“I’ve had a hard life,” Martin said after a moment. “I have a job that requires me to do difficult things to other people, people like Ulrich.”
I closed my eyes briefly. This was all probably true, as far as it went. “All right,” I said.
“Do you think you’ll feel like going to that banquet tonight?”
I’d forgotten all about it. Of course, I wasn’t wild about going, but on the other hand, when I pictured my mother asking me why we hadn’t come, I just couldn’t come up with a believable excuse.
“I guess so,” I said unenthusiastically. “I’d rather drag myself there than think about last night.”
“Don’t forget to wear your hair up,” Martin reminded me later as he gathered all his things to stow in his company car. “What time should I come by?”
“I think cocktails start at six-thirty.”
“Six-thirty it is. Dressy?”
“Yes. Everyone can bring two other couples as guests, so there’s usually a decent crowd, and there’s a speaker.”
I was leaning on the door frame, and Martin was halfway to his car when he dropped the things he was carrying and came back. He held my hand.
“You aren’t off me because of last night?” He looked at me steadily as he asked.
I shook my head slowly, trying to analyze what I did feel, why things seemed so grim. “I just realized I’d taken on more than I’d anticipated,” I said, giving him the condensed version.
He looked at me quizzically. I was so tired that my judgment was impaired, and I went on. “You’re a dangerous man, Martin,” I said.
“Not to you,” he told me. “Not to you.”
Especially to me, I thought, as I watched him drive away.
I had completely forgotten to make an appointment to get my hair put up. Of course, all the hairdressers who were open on Saturday were fully booked. But with some wheedling and bribing, I got my mother’s regular woman to stay open late to work with my mane. I would be done barely in time for the dinner.
That suited me just fine. I climbed wearily up my stairs and went back to bed. It was becoming a habit.
When I woke again at two o’clock, the gray day didn’t look any more inviting, but I felt much better. I decided to cram the night before into a mental closet for the time being, to take some pleasure in going to a social function in Lawrence-ton with Martin for the first time. I was human enough to relish the anticipation of eyebrows lifted, of envious women. I was convinced any woman with hormones would want Martin.
I even turned on my exercise tape and got at least halfway through it before getting fed up with the dictatorial instructress. Madeleine watched me, as usual, her eyes round and disbelieving. She followed me upstairs for my shower, watched me put on my makeup and dry my hair. I changed my sheets, too, and ran a carpet sweeper over the bedroom hurriedly.
I would be running so short on time I decided to put on everything but the actual dress before I left for my hair appointment. So I looked through my closets. I’d wear the dress I’d worn the year before. Martin hadn’t seen it, even if everyone else had, and I’d only worn it that once. It was green, and after simple long sleeves and a scoop neck, the bodice descended to a point in front, and the short skirt flounced out in gathers all around. I’d have to wear black heels… I needed some of those shiny lame-looking shoes that were so popular now, but I didn’t have the energy or time to go shopping. Black would have to do. I had a little black evening purse, too. So I put on the right bra and slip and hose, and a dress that buttoned down the front over them.
I hurried out to my car and started across town to my mother’s hairdresser. I’d looked up an address before leaving home, and I took a little detour. There was the Ulrich house, a three-bedroom ranch style in one of Lawrenceton’s prettier middle-class neighborhoods.
And there was a FOR SALE sign in the yard.
Chapter Fourteen
“HOW DO you want it done?” Benita asked briskly. It was clearly the end of a long day for her. Her own red hair was wild and dark at the roots, and the beige-and-blue uniform all the operators at Clip Casa wore was rumpled and-well, hairy.
“Could you do it like this?” I’d spent my waiting time leafing through professional magazines.
“Yes,” Benita said briefly after a thorough look at the enigmatically smiling model, and set to work.
It was one of those hairdos with the braid miraculously inside-out. French braiding, I thought it was called. I’d never understood how that was done, and now it was about to be accomplished on my very own head. In the picture the model’s hair wasn’t pulled back tightly but puffed around her face. The length of hair at the base of the neck was also braided, and the model had a ribbon around the end. I had no fancy bows, but Benita had some for sale, including a gold lame one I thought would be pretty. I didn’t know if Martin would like the hairstyle, but it struck me as very fashionable.
Plus, it didn’t seem possible that my hair could come loose, as all too often happened when I put it up myself.
“Roe,” drawled a voice close by, and I recognized the apparition under the dryer as my beautiful friend Lizanne Buckley.
“I haven’t seen you in a coon’s age!” I said happily. “How are you doing?”
“Just fine,” said Lizanne in her slow sweet way. “And you?”
“Pretty good. What have you been doing?”
“Oh, I’m still down at the power company,” she said contentedly. “And I’m still dating our local representative.”
Lawyer J. T. (Bubba) Sewell, whom I’d met in a professional capacity, would be home from the Capitol for the weekend, and he and Lizanne were also going to the realtors’ banquet, she told me. In fact, Bubba was the speaker.
“Are you two engaged?” I asked. “That’s what someone told me, but I wanted to hear it straight from the horse’s mouth.”
Lizanne smiled. She had a habit of that. She was stunningly beautiful, and no slave to the bone-thin convention of female figures. She was just right. “Oh, I expect we are,” she said.
“Someone’s finally going to walk you down the aisle,” I marveled. Men had tried for years to marry Lizanne and she would have none of it, the world being the unfair place it is.
“Oh, I don’t think we’ll get married in a church,” Lizanne demurred. “I haven’t been in one since Mamma and Daddy died, and I don’t expect to go. I believe Bubba sees that as my only drawback, a politician’s wife not going to church.”
There was no possible response, and Lizanne didn’t expect any. I felt like someone who was walking over a familiar sunny beach, only to discover that it had changed into quicksand.
“I hear you’ve been dating that new man at Pan-Am Agra,” Lizanne said after a few minutes. Lizanne heard everything.