by Lynn Hall
The thought of Karen slowed Tom’s hand until it moved in a dreamy circle within the already-clean casserole dish. But the front door slammed and brought him to life. He sighed as he recognized the voice shouting for him in the front hall.
“I’m back here, Floyd, in the kitchen.” Too late to duck him now.
Floyd and his sweaty aura filled the kitchen door. “What are you doing? Washing the dishes?”
“No,” Tom said. “I’m soaking my cuticles for a manicure.”
“What?”
“Nothing. Never mind.” Tom could feel Floyd waiting for an invitation to sit down, or for some friendly word, but he just couldn’t bring himself to run the risk of encouraging him. The slightest weakening of defenses was all Floyd needed. Tom scrubbed on, more slowly.
“How’s come you have to do that?” Floyd asked in a tone that suggested that dishwashing was the ultimate degradation.
“I don’t have to, Floyd. I offered to because Mother had to leave.” Tom’s exasperation swelled.
“Listen, I’ll wait around till you get through, and then we can go up to my house for a while, okay?”
A little more sharply than he’d intended, Tom said, “I just got through telling you my mother isn’t home, Floyd. I’ve got to stick around and keep the store open.”
“Do you have to?”
“Yes. I just said so, didn’t I?”
“Yes, but I’ve got something good to show you. Something really good. I never showed them to anybody else before, but I just decided to let you see them.”
Tom released the dishwater and began drying silverware. He avoided looking directly at Floyd, who was still standing in the doorway. With a great concentration of mental force, he tried to remove Floyd’s irritating closeness from the room.
“Don’t you even want to know what I’ve got to show you?”
“Since I can’t leave the store, it doesn’t make much difference, does it?”
“Yes, but it’s pictures. Of women. You know what kind I mean.”
Tom forced himself to look into Floyd’s face. For an instant he thought the face was whiter and more tense than usual, but then he wasn’t sure. It made him uncomfortable to look very long at Floyd’s face, and he seldom did it.
He tried to make his voice patient but steely. “Floyd, I cannot leave the house tonight. I have to work. I’m sorry.”
He made his way around Floyd and went into the shop. Floyd followed. Because there were no customers to wait on, Tom got out his tin of saddle soap and began cleaning the leather straps of the new hump-topped chest. Floyd stood around behind him.
There was a tinny edge to Floyd’s voice, as though he might be near tears or laughter. “Well then, old buddy, if you have to stay here and work, I’ll stay and help, okay?”
Tom wanted to moan. So many things were hovering in his mind, waiting to be thought about, that Floyd’s presence was growing unbearable. His vision of Karen becoming his first serious love; that was what he wanted to be thinking about as he sat there on the floor and worked the fragrant gold soap into the leather in his hands. He thought angrily, If Floyd had any sense at all, he’d know when he wasn’t wanted.
Aloud he said, “Maybe you’d better not wait around. Mom doesn’t like it very well when I have friends hanging around in the shop when I’m working. She says it doesn’t look good to the customers.”
The silence was long and complete before Floyd spoke again. Each word was an individual twang on Tom’s nerves. “How come you don’t like me anymore? You used to like me.”
I can’t stand it, Tom thought. He sounds as if he’s going to start crying or something, and I can’t even feel sorry for him. I just wish he’d go.
“I like you, Floyd.” It was the only thing he could say, and yet as the words hung in the air, he knew that not even Floyd could fail to know he hadn’t meant them. He sat clenching himself against the presence of Floyd until the front door slammed and an easy emptiness filled the house again. Slowly he relaxed. His hands began working against the leather again, and his mind picked up the strains of the music he’d been playing before supper. Karen came back into focus, and he smiled, thinking about the months to come.
4
The twilight was just reaching streetlight depth when Amber Showalter came out of the house and started down the hill toward the river. She walked slowly along the margin where the blacktopped road was joined to the grassy bank by an uneven border of dust. Her right hand trailed through the branches of the saplings that lined the stream. Every few steps or so her fingers closed and stripped off a moist rosebud of leaves, which she tossed away.
Halfway down the hill she met Floyd Schleffe. She paused and said, “Quite a few boats on the river yet tonight.” She didn’t like Floyd very much, but still, you couldn’t pass without saying something.
Floyd paused, looked back over his shoulder at the river, and grunted something, but he kept his face averted from Amber’s direct view. She was surprised. Usually Floyd looked at her so closely and so thoroughly that she wanted to cross her arms over her chest.
“You feeling okay, Floyd?”
“Yeah.”
They stood there for another minute while Amber tried to think of something else to say.
“Well, it won’t be long now, will it?” she said heartily.
“What?”
“School, of course. Just a week and four days.”
“Big hairy deal,” he snapped. With an abrupt movement of his shoulders he shut her off and trudged on up the hill. Amber looked after him for a moment, then shrugged, made a who-cares face, and continued down toward the river.
Amber was a plain girl, physically, mentally, and emotionally, and she was easily defeated. She knew she was going to lose tonight’s battle, but she also knew that she absolutely had to try. Although she didn’t understand the souring process that was beginning to take place within her round-shouldered body, she felt strongly that if someone didn’t love her pretty soon it was going to be too late.
Until last year she had lived on the hope that when Robert Short began dating, it would be with her. Robert was the idolized tyrant of her bicycle years. But now he was going steady with last year’s homecoming queen, and Amber had torn herself free from that old hope.
The Great River High School’s coming senior class totaled thirty-seven, twenty-two of whom were girls. Of the fifteen boys, nine were definitely paired up with someone else, and the other six were out of the question for a girl with any pride at all.
For Amber and the other leftover girls, there were few alternatives. They could date boys from nearby towns, but that usually required a girl friend who had a cousin in the other school, or a similar lucky connection. They could date younger boys, but that was almost as damaging to the reputation as dating one of the out-of-the-question boys, like Floyd. Or they could band together in the evenings and insist to one another that all Great River High boys were stupid anyway and they were perfectly happy to wait till college. This is what most of them did, and sometimes they included Amber, but she lived in Buck Creek, five miles from Great River, so it was usually more trouble than it was worth to the other girls to include her.
When the Naylors had moved to Buck Creek last February, Amber was overwhelmed with relief. She could not have been happier about the coming of Tom if his arrival had been announced by a star in the east. She knew the Great River caste system well enough to know that even a few dates with Tom Naylor would be enough to lift her into respectability at school and to negate her failure with Robert, which of course everyone knew about.
Nothing had happened between Tom and her at first, but she was patient. Wait till summer, she told herself. Then she would have him all to herself down in Buck Creek, away from everybody else. Three whole months to work on him.
But now it was almost time for school and competition to start again, and still Tom’s green-speckled eyes had yet to focus on her and really See her. The summer days had slipped away. Tom w
orked in The Cottage or drove around making deliveries. Amber walked as slowly as she could up and down the melting blacktop road in her shorts and brief tops. Sometimes she wore her swimsuit down through town and splashed around a little in the dirty water near the boat docks just to make it look authentic, but she felt exposed and obvious, walking past The Cottage as nearly naked as that. And it hadn’t done any good, anyhow.
Tonight she wore white shorts and a white knit top and pastel sandals. Her skin had a respectable tan by now, and her hair was sun-streaked to the point where she could almost think of herself as blond. She felt as nearly pretty as she had in a long time. Exciting promises swelled with the deepening dusk. Tonight. Maybe tonight…
Her breathing became uneven as she walked slowly, in the center of the road, between The Cottage and the hotel. The lantern lights were on above the sign in the bay window, so the shop was open, which meant that Tom was in there, since this was Sewing Club night for his mother as well as Amber’s. The shop was open, and anybody could saunter in and look around at the antiques, talk to Tom. It would be the most natural thing in the world for him to say, “Wait around a little while till I can close up, and we’ll go get something to eat.”
Amber felt a faint sickness, not because it might happen that way but because she knew it wouldn’t. That would be too good. Things didn’t happen that way to her.
She stood as long as she dared between The Cottage and the hotel, and then, aware that the younger kids on their bikes under the streetlight were watching her, she went on around the corner of the hotel and into the restaurant-bar. Peggy had been one of the shadowed figures among the bike bunch, and Amber wanted to stay clear of Peg, especially tonight.
With absentminded expertise she wove among the empty tables toward the horseshoe-shaped bar at the back of the room. Beulah was tending bar tonight, or rather, Beulah was hunched over a hand of euchre cards at one end of the bar with the only customers in the place—Floyd Schleffe’s father and two other men who worked in the silica mine.
Amber reached behind the bar and got a can of Pepsi and a glass of ice. She left two dimes on the ledge of the cash register. Beulah had made reluctant motions of leaving the card game, but Amber said, ‘‘Don’t bother, Beulah. I’ve got the right change.”
As she started to walk away, Beulah called, “Hey, Amber,” and motioned her back with a toss of her head. She fished into her uniform pocket and handed Amber a quarter. “Hit it for me, will you? G3 and anything else you want.”
“Thanks.” Amber fed the jukebox, first punching G3 for Beulah, then, with a feeling of luxury and anticipation, playing the two other songs that were, for Amber, poignant with the flavor of this summer’s nights.
She took her can and glass to the table in the far corner of the room, where she could look out through the window toward The Cottage and toward her younger sister. Two of the older boys were looming over Peggy’s bike. Every few minutes one of them touched her, mussing her hair with a handful of grass or twisting her arm up behind her back. Beneath their horseplay was a current of something serious, something Amber resented, something that made her feel restless, aching, ready to go over to The Cottage and make an effort even though she was almost certain she would make a fool of herself.
As soon as the songs and the pop were finished, she went outside again. It was almost full dark by now, but not quite. A pale blue mist lay over the river while a darker blue filled the Buck Creek valley. Amber felt the night, felt strengthened by the coming dark. She drew in a lungful of blue air and held it until her pulse was steadied for battle, then started across the street.
A car was coming down the hill. She paused to let it go by.
I can pretend I’m looking for something special to buy for a birthday present, she thought. Or I could say something about both of our mothers being at Sewing Club tonight. Or something about school.
The car, which on closer view became a Jeep, turned left at the corner and stopped in front of The Cottage. A man got out and went inside.
“Damn,” Amber said through clenched teeth. As the customer disappeared through The Cottage door, her courage began to seep away. She knew she couldn’t stand there till the customer was gone. Peggy and the others were looking at her, probably giggling about her chasing Tom.
In a fury of disappointment she turned and started up the hill toward home. She tried to aim her loathing at the customer, but it didn’t hold. It slid back onto herself. She was the one who messed up everything she tried to do, who couldn’t even walk into an antique store and speak to a boy from her class without coming all unstrung. But tonight her ego was too tired to take on this extra weight. She couldn’t dislike herself any more than she already did, and so she disliked Tom.
As her sandals clapped up the hill, one long slow step at a time, she felt her mood begin to lift. It was Tom who was stupid, for not recognizing what he was passing up. Tom was to blame for having forced her into this situation tonight. The higher up the hill she climbed, the lighter was her burden of self-disgust.
5
After Floyd left The Cottage, Tom put away the saddle soap, slid the partially cleaned trunk behind the cash register, and wandered across the hall into the darkening living room. The empty house invited him to the piano, and his lonely mood put melodies into his head.
At first he toyed with a couple of popular songs, picking out the tune first with his right hand, then filling in tentative chords with his left. When he hit it right, a chill of solid pleasure rode up his spine. The final notes of one song suggested the opening notes of another.
Among the keys his fingers found Tchaikovsky’s “None But the Lonely Heart,” and as he played he began to feel beautifully sad, one man, isolated, calling through the music to some unknown being whose aloneness was the other half of his own. He drew out the last chord and let it settle undisturbed in the air of the darkened room.
“Play it again.”
The voice from behind startled him, but not as much as it might if it hadn’t been softened to match the mood of the room. Tom turned.
A young man in a white T-shirt sat on the floor of the hall, just beyond the living room door. His arms stretched forward easily over his knees. He sat immobile and entirely at ease on the wooden floor.
Tom tried to see his face, but it was shadowed. Still, he was pretty sure it was someone he didn’t know, a customer, probably from somewhere else. Tom felt both odd and right when he turned his back on the figure and played the song again. This time when he finished he stood up, and so did the man in the hall, not awkwardly but with a smooth forward-falling motion as though he often sat on floors.
They stood in the hall, under the light. The man appeared to be in his early twenties; his face looked younger, but his eyes looked older. He was almost as tall as Tom, but because he was built squarely, he gave the illusion of being much shorter. Skin, hair, and eyes were shades of brown and tan, and when he spoke, he looked directly at Tom with a level, clear gaze.
“Hi. I’m Ward Alexander, from over by Sny Magill. I didn’t mean to interrupt your playing. You’re very good, but you probably don’t need me to tell you that.” He offered his hand, and Tom shook it.
“Tom Naylor. Glad to know you. Was there something I can do for you?” They drifted into the shop.
“I was looking for a kerosene lantern,” Ward said, “but I’d just as soon listen to you play. That’s the first good music I’ve heard since I got back. And it’s a Tchaikovsky kind of night out.”
While Tom looked around the shop for the lantern he knew was there, somewhere, his mind was registering small pleasant shock waves. He wondered that anyone in Buck Creek would have recognized the music, and he wondered further that anyone but himself would feel that way about it, and would say so to a stranger.
He found the lantern and set it on the counter. “Did you say you live around here?” He knew he was not just making conversation with a customer, and he knew Ward Alexander knew it, too.
&nb
sp; “My folks farm up on the other side of Sny Magill. I’ve been staying with them—I just got out of the Air Force—but I’m fixing a place of my own.”
Tom listened, and his ear caught a note of things unsaid. He said, “I wouldn’t have taken you for a farmer,” and immediately flushed at the unintended rudeness.
But the tan young man gave an easy laugh and said, “I’m not.”
They talked for a few minutes more, about The Cottage and how long Tom had lived in Buck Creek and where he had come from.
When the lantern was paid for and wrapped in brown-and-white Cottage wrapping paper, Tom followed Ward to the door. He didn’t ordinarily prolong contact with customers, but now he felt a sudden strong reluctance to allow the house to be empty again. They stood on the front steps for a quiet moment while Tom felt and relished the friendly warmth that radiated from the form beside him and came in through his own warm bare arm.
Abruptly Ward said, “How long do you have to mind the store?”
“Oh, I could close up any time now. Business hours are pretty flexible in Buck Creek.” He chuckled. Hope was rising in him. If this man wanted to prolong their visit, as Tom did, that must mean Ward was also aware of potential friendship.
Ward said, “Come on then. Blow out the candle and come join me in a beer.”
With an elation that surprised him, Tom switched off the shop lights and the sign light, and followed Ward. They paused outside the Jeep while Ward set the lantern package inside, then crossed to the hotel and went into the bar.