“No wonder we hated each other,” March says. She reaches across the table and takes Susie’s hand.
“All I can say is, I’m glad my mother never found out.” Susie squeezes March’s hand, then withdraws it so she can get a Kleenex out of her purse. “I’ve really tried not to be angry at him, but I don’t think I could have been so generous if my mother had known.”
“Have you ever talked to him about it?”
“Him? My father?” Susie wipes her eyes, then blows her nose. “Are you crazy? You don’t talk to my father, you listen.”
Regina brings over desserts—on the house: chocolate mousse with sugar cookies wedged in along the side of the bowl, and a helping of plum pudding, in honor of the Founder. Regina sits down with them for a minute to talk about old times and discuss her pet project—the Harvest Fair down at Town Hall. Somehow, before Regina goes back to work, March finds herself announcing that she would consider running a booth that will raise funds for the children’s section of the library.
“Why did you do that?” Susie asks, when they’ve gotten their coats and paid their bill—with a thirty percent tip for Regina. They’ve left behind half-portions of everything they ordered, and are stuffed all the same. “You won’t still be here for the Harvest Fair. If you want my opinion, you should go home right now.”
“Well, thanks,” March says as they go outside.
The wind has died down a bit, but it’s still a raw night.
“When you come back to a town like this, people think you’re staying,” Susie says.
March wraps her scarf around her throat. “I don’t care what people think.”
“Okay, forget people. How about Richard?”
“Who?” March teases.
“You’re deranged.” Susie links her arm through March’s. “You’d better get serious.”
“I’ve been serious for so long I can’t stand it.” If she hadn’t been so serious, would she have agreed to come back to him, even though she was in the seventh month of her pregnancy? By then, she’d already lined up a baby-sitter and a diaper service; she had registered in a new mothers’ exercise class. Could she have booked a flight to Logan anyway? Could she have tried? “I need a break from my life, that’s what I’ve realized.”
This, of course, is what she’s been saying to Richard—it’s only a break; it’s nothing, only a little time apart.
“The definition of a break is a rupture,” Richard said to her, only yesterday, an answer which, of course, drove March completely crazy.
“What if Richard jumped on a plane? What if he arrived in the middle of the night and said you had to leave with him?”
“He’s taking his graduate students into the field next week, and he’d never disappoint them. Even if he wasn’t scheduled to do that, he wouldn’t appear in the middle of the night. He wouldn’t tell me what to do. Richard’s not like that.”
“Exactly,” Susie says. “I should have married him.”
They head for Susie’s truck, parked down the street from the Lyon Cafe, which is all but overflowing.
“What a party,” March says.
“Every drunk in town. Except for Alan. This is Hollis’s turf.”
“Thanks for sharing that.”
March gets into Susie’s truck and slams the door. Just hearing his name stirs everything up for her. It’s even colder in the truck than it is out on the street. March turns up her collar; she’s had too much wine with dinner, she realizes that now.
Susie comes to sit behind the wheel. “Look, if you want to kid yourself, fine. If you want to put something over on Richard, okay. But don’t think you’re going to fool me. You’re here because of Hollis. I don’t understand it, but I guess I don’t have to. Maybe you need to see him, to make certain he doesn’t mean anything to you.”
“I’m glad that being a reporter for The Bugle entitles you to psychoanalyze me.”
March opens the door, and without a look back, she heads off down the street. She’s furious, but when she really thinks about it, she’s angry because Susie is right. March is drawn to the Lyon Cafe, only a few steps away now, in hopes of seeing Hollis. Susie knows her far too well, although March herself isn’t certain whether or not she’ll really have the courage to act on her impulse, until Susie honks her horn, trying to get her attention. That’s when March walks through the door.
When March was growing up, the Lyon was a place other people’s parents went to, and only occasionally. It was an embarrassment to be a regular here, something no one wanted to admit. The draw of the Lyon certainly wasn’t the decor, which is still Naugahyde and wood paneling, with three deer heads attached to the wall above the rest rooms and public telephones. You came here to get drunk, simple as that.
Tonight, the place is packed; there isn’t a table to be had, so March makes her way to the bar, excusing herself politely, and when that does no good, finally pushing her way through. She signals to the bartender, and once she gets his attention, shouts her request for a glass of red wine.
It takes a while to adjust to the noise level. There’s a Celtics game on the TV above the bar, and a loud, cheerful argument going on right next to her—something to do with borrowing a motorboat—which may well turn nasty as the night progresses. There’s a jukebox going too, although all anyone can hear of the music are the drums and the bass, pounding. March grabs a stool when one of the guys next to her finally leaves, and at last, she can sit down and look around. Maybe Susie’s wrong; March can’t imagine Hollis in this drunken crowd, playing darts or debating the merit of the Celtics’ back court.
Susie has come into the Lyon, and she easily makes her way to the bar, since she knows most of the people drinking here tonight. “Hey, Fred,” she says to the bartender. “I’ll have what she’s having. What is it you’re having?” she asks March. “An anxiety attack? Sheer lunacy?”
“Red wine.” March grins.
“That’s what I’ll have,” Susie tells Fred. “You know,” she says to March, “if you had your own car, I would have left you here. For spite.”
“You could, you know,” March says. “I’m perfectly fine. And besides, he’s not even here.”
“Oh, yes he is.” Susie nods to a comer. “He’s right there.”
Be careful what you wish for, Judith used to say to March all the time. But it seems that March has already decided not to be careful. At least, not tonight.
“At the last table.”
He’s got his chair propped up against the wall, and although there are five other men sharing the table, he doesn’t appear to be in the same universe. Certainly, he’s not listening to those men. He’s been watching March Murray ever since she walked through the door.
March turns away so quickly that she knocks over her glass, then has to wipe at the spilled wine with a cocktail napkin.
“It’s not too late to leave,” Susie urges.
March would have missed him entirely if he hadn’t been pointed out to her, but now that he has been, she realizes that the difference between him and the other men at his table, most of whom are employed by the Department of Public Works, is not so much in what can be seen. Those men are also wearing old boots and jeans, and like him, they haven’t bothered to remove their coats, since people who come to the Lyon like to pretend they won’t be staying, even if they’ve settled in for the night. The difference is that the air around him seems charged, perhaps by anger, by heat and light. The difference is the way he can look at someone, the way he’s staring at her right now. One look from him is more substantial than the wooden bar she’s leaning her elbows upon. It’s realer than the bottles of whiskey lined up behind the counter; realer than the pull of fabric as Susie tugs on her jacket.
“You don’t want to finish this game,” Susie shouts, because the argument next to them concerning the motorboat is getting more heated. “Let’s get out of here.”
At the moment, March doesn’t need much convincing. She’s shaking, she really is. She’s p
utting something on the line, and she’s frightened by her own actions. Wanting to see Hollis and actually being in the same room with him are two different things entirely. Now that they’ve decided to leave, it’s not easy trying to make their way to the door. The place is packed, incredibly crowded and smoky. Susie is waylaid by Bert Murphy, the sports editor at The Bugle, and while Susie is enmeshed in some newspaper gossip, March looks back at the far end of the room where Hollis had been sitting, in spite of her resolve to get out of the Lyon with no damage done. But he’s not there, and the effect of his absence is that her heart drops into her stomach, where it stays until she realizes that he’s walking right to her.
It is sometimes possible to look at a person and see inside, although this happens so rarely it’s always a shock, like a form of electricity traveling from one soul to another. It can only be glimpsed for an instant, but in that instant you can see the core of a person, even in the middle of a crowded barroom, as he comes up beside you, while the jukebox is playing a country-western song you’ve never heard before and will never forget. It happens quickly—seeing all that hurt and disappointment—it’s as fast as a breath drawn and released. Just as fast, he closes up; you couldn’t get inside Hollis for anything now. Not with a hammer or a chisel; not by begging on your knees.
“I never thought I’d see you here,” Hollis says. For some reason, March can hear him perfectly above the din. “Not your kind of place, is it?”
“Maybe it is,” March says. “It’s not as bad as I thought it would be.” She wishes she had thought to wear something other than this dreadful black sweater and an old pair of jeans; she wishes she had combed her hair. “I hear you’re letting my daughter ride one of your horses.”
“Is that your daughter?” Hollis acts as though he hadn’t the faintest idea.
“As if you didn’t know.” Why is it that he still has to look so good? What gives him the right to talk to her with such arrogance, as though after all these years he continued to be the most important thing in her universe, the single shining star?
“Did she tell you I was still waiting?”
“Oh, sure.” March tries to be lighthearted, but that’s not the way she feels. “And I’ll bet you never looked at another woman again.”
People are pushing by them and there’s absolutely no privacy, so when Hollis nods March follows him over to a less populated space, beneath the mounted deer heads. The only people who crowd them over here are those weaving past on their way to the rest rooms. One guy, who’s quite loaded, greets Hollis and thanks him for his support on the town council, but Hollis doesn’t even acknowledge the council-man’s existence, and March is so distracted that if she were ever asked to identify the guy in a court of law, she wouldn’t be able to. She didn’t even glance at him. Standing there, she can feel the reverberation of the jukebox in her legs. Susie is right—she’s crazy. She’s completely deranged.
“You’re the one who didn’t wait,” Hollis says.
Over by the door, Susie spots March and she waves like mad, but Hollis has moved closer, blocking Susie from view.
“Me?” March says. “Why didn’t you write or call after you left here? Why didn’t you come back for me?”
She’s done it without thinking, and there’s no way to take those words back. She should have said, Screw you, I waited plenty, I waited years, and even that was too long. Instead, she has admitted some sort of defeat; she can tell because Hollis still smiles the way he used to whenever he won.
“You went to California,” Hollis reminds her. “You were the one who got married.”
“You got married too,” March reminds him right back.
Hollis drinks from a can of Coke, which is warm by now, not that the taste bothers him.
“That was nothing,” he says.
“It was definitely something.”
Hollis comes closer. “No,” he tells her. “It wasn’t. I got married because you wouldn’t leave him. That baby was more important to you than I was.”
“It wasn’t like that,” March begins.
“It was exactly like that.” He’s even closer now; March can feel the heat from his body against hers. “Or maybe I was more important but you couldn’t admit it.”
Susie has finally joined them; jostled by the crowd, she’s taken forever to get across the room. Now, she leans against the wall and observes Hollis in what she believes to be a nonjudgmental manner.
“Fancy meeting you here,” she says.
“Hey, Sue.” He nods without interest. She’s a bitch who’s never been on his side; he doesn’t intend to pretend otherwise.
“I was telling March how Alan can’t come here, not even on Founder’s Day, because you frequent the place.”
“Oh, yeah?” Hollis gives March a look. He’s extremely pleased; first March admits how much he hurt her, and now Susie reveals that she and March had been discussing him. Unless Hollis is mistaken, and he doesn’t believe he is, the only reason March came to the Lyon was to look for him. She came to him.
“Where couldn’t you go because of Alan? Let’s see. The dump? The liquor store on Route 22?”
A bitch, just like he thought.
“Alan made his choices,” Hollis says.
“That’s crap.” Susie is getting all self-righteous, but she can’t seem to stop herself. “He decided to lose everything that was ever important to him—have it all taken away—so he could drink himself to death in a shack? Some choice.”
“You feel so bad for him?” Hollis says. “Go visit him, Sue. I bet he’d love to celebrate Founder’s Day with you.”
“Fuck you,” Susie says. Her cheeks are bright red.
“I’m shocked.” Hollis shakes his head, but he’s smiling. It’s so easy to rile people like Susanna Justice; they’re like push-button dolls.
“I mean it,” Susie tells him. “Fuck you.”
“Susie,” March pleads. Hollis and Susie were always like this; you couldn’t keep them in the same room for more than a few minutes before they started in on each other.
“I think I’ll have to be the one guy in town to pass that offer by,” Hollis says.
“Are you staying here?” Susie Justice asks March. “Because I’m leaving.” Susie already has her keys in her hand, and she jangles them like a bell. She takes a good look at March. “You’re going to stay, aren’t you?”
“I’m having one more drink.” March is making certain not to glance over at Hollis. “That’s it.”
Susie leans forward, so she can whisper. “You’re insane. I hope you realize that. Be smart when you leave. Call Ken Helm for a ride. Don’t do this all over again.”
“She never liked you,” March says as they watch Susie make her way to the door.
“Not one bit,” Hollis says. “You did, though.”
March looks away.
“You still do,” Hollis tells her.
“Oh, really?” March laughs. She’s always been surprised by his vanity and his pride. With anyone else she’d be repelled, but with Hollis emotions were so rare that whenever one showed, March couldn’t help but be charmed.
“I knew you’d come back, but I thought I might be eighty before you got here, hobbling around like Jimmy Parrish,” Hollis says, nodding to an old man at the bar.
What nerve, March thinks. “Believe me. I’ve done perfectly fine without you.”
March’s voice is cold; in another instant, she’ll stomp away, as she sometimes did when she was a girl. Hollis must sense this, because he puts his hand on her arm.
“Well, I haven’t,” he says. “Not without you.”
He waits till that sinks in, then lets go of her. If she’s going to walk away, she’s going to do it now. But instead, she goes on looking at him. And then he knows, just as he’s always known. At the core, they’re identical. People who didn’t know the family often judged them to be brother and sister. It was their dark eyes. Darker than midnight, that’s what people used to say to their faces. Black
as whatever hole he crawled out of, they used to whisper when they thought Hollis couldn’t hear.
As the hour grows later, the clientele of the Lyon has become more disorderly. Conversations are incoherent; misunderstandings have begun to arise. Before long, there is sure to be a brawl, as there is at every Founder’s Day celebration. The bar is now filled past capacity, and people keep right on coming. There is Regina, the waitress from Dimitri’s, who waves when she sees March. There’s Larry Laughton and his wife, Harriet, who own the lingerie shop, and Enid Miller, who works at the library and can hush small children with a single look, and Mimi Frank, who styled so many heads today at the Bon Bon that she has a perfect right to down a few beers.
There are a dozen boys and girls that Hollis and March went to school with, all grown-up and drunk as can be, but March doesn’t notice any of them. Hollis is leaning toward her—he has to in order to be heard above the din, or at least, that’s what March is telling herself. Surely, he’s not doing it solely to get close to her; that’s all in her mind. Her extremely warped mind, since she’s got everything to lose and nothing to gain. She tries to remind herself of that, the life she leads, the responsibilities she has, and yet when he says, “Let’s get out of here,” she nods as if she were a rational woman. She lets him grab her hand so he can lead her through the crowd.
The people they pass by are enjoying the party; they’re not bothering to think of tomorrow or even today. But that doesn’t mean several women who’ve set out to have a good time don’t notice what’s going on. Mary Anne Chilton elbows Janice Melnick, and over at the bar, Alison Hartwig turns away when she sees Hollis and March together and she orders another whiskey sour. These are just a few of the women who know that when Hollis drives, he keeps the windows in the truck rolled down, no matter how raw the weather. If he can’t take you back to your place—if you’re married, or living with someone, or if you and the kids have been forced to move back in with your mother—he’ll bring you to Olive Tree Lake, and park in a spot where it’s so overgrown you can’t see the stars.
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