She shook her head to clear the memory away. She had work to do. She’d go in, change into running clothes, take a run, then come back and shower and get to her office. She pushed the door open. It was dark inside, all the shades down, and cool after the humid air outside. And big. Too big for her right then—commodious enough for a head with a spouse and several kids. All of a sudden she didn’t want to be alone in it, even for the few minutes it would take to change to running clothes. She put down her suitcase in the foyer, turned around, and headed for her office.
The campus was empty. All afternoon, working in her office, Rachel waited for the phone to ring. Twice she reached for it to make the call to Bob. Each time, she stopped before she picked up the receiver. You’re being dumb, she told herself. What difference does it make who calls first? Still she didn’t call, and when she was hungry at dinnertime, she went to a restaurant in the nearby village of Fieldington to eat. She still didn’t want to be alone in her house. The hostess seated her at a table next to a middle-aged couple. Rachel took comfort in the fact that they hardly said a word to one other.
Back on campus, the lights were on in Eudora Easter’s apartment. Eudora was the chair of the Art Department, twenty years older than Rachel, and the only other black woman on the staff. Rachel stopped the car by the side of the drive and crossed the lawn in the twilight, hungry for her company. Their friendship had blossomed at the end of last year when Eudora had gone out of her way to thank Rachel for daring to break precedent by allowing Claire Nelson to stay another year. Eudora had been on the faculty forever—only one year fewer than the Plummers. During all that time, no girl had ever stayed on after her senior year. “But you gave me the chance to do what needs to be done to make sure that enormous talent of hers gets a foundation,” she told Rachel. “I don’t trust anybody more than I trust myself to make that happen.” Eudora dressed in costumes that, no matter how outlandish, always seemed just right for her. She was a large woman with a round, soft body and a beautiful face whom Marjorie Boyd had hired when Eudora was still thin—right after her husband drowned absurdly in a swamp during a Reserve Marine Corps exercise two weeks after their honeymoon—and since then she had given up dieting.
But before Rachel was halfway across the lawn, the lights went out in Eudora’s living room in the front and, an instant later, came on in the backroom Eudora had converted into her private studio. Rachel turned around and walked back to her car. She knew better than to intrude on Eudora’s painting time.
On the other side of the lawn, the lights in Francis and Peggy Plummer’s apartment were out. The Plummers and Eudora had lived just across a small lawn from each other all those years. It warmed Rachel to think about the deep Plummer-Easter friendship. She figured the Plummers were still driving home from the Cape and wondered what they were saying to each other after living apart for almost half a year.
Home at last, she went straight upstairs, turned on all the lights in her bedroom, got in bed to watch the Red Sox game, and promptly fell asleep. She woke up long after the game was over, switched off the TV and the lights, and lay back down in the dark, wondering what it had been like for her dad getting in bed alone the first time after her mother died. She saw an enormous darkness in which her father reached to touch the empty space beside him. She wasn’t surprised; it had happened every first night she was alone again after a weekend with her husband.
But this time it was different: she got up out of the bed and padded down the hall in her bare feet to one of the other bedrooms, climbed up into a single bed, surprised at herself for being so weird, and promptly fell asleep again.
ON TUESDAY MORNING the sky was blue, the air fresh, a perfect September day. The faculty would return; the campus would be busy again. And this morning she would interview a candidate for business manager to replace the geriatric, incompetent, beloved man whom Marjorie Boyd should have let go but didn’t, leaving that nasty job to Fred Kindler. The business manager was also the chief financial officer in Rachel’s scheme, a critical part of the team she needed to create around herself. Maybe this was the one.
He was a retired CFO of a successful mail-order business who’d grown sick of playing golf all day. His CV and references convinced her he had the necessary sophistication to think outside of the box about the finances of what was actually the combination of a school, a hotel, and a kind of orphanage. So, before she broached the subject of the school’s history of poor discipline regarding finance, and the one-million-two-hundred-thousand-dollar accumulated deficit, Rachel asked him some questions about how he would interact with the faculty. She explained that the teachers savored their autonomy and had a tendency to hold their issues as more important than “business” ones, and was about to tell him she could use some help in modifying this aspect of the culture, when he interrupted her and went on and on about how if you just give people the data they always catch on to the truth. She waited for a chance to tell him that she agreed—unless the data came via the way he was pontificating at her now, but he just kept on going, and by the time he finished, she was pretty sure he didn’t have what it takes to be the business manager of Miss Oliver’s School for Girls.
She gave him one more chance. “Our teachers can be a bit resentful of all the people they know who have twice the money and half the brains,” she said. “How would you react to that?” She was hoping for a laugh. Instead he got a little huffy right there in his chair, and it crossed her mind to suggest he check with her husband: maybe the sporting good business could use his expertise. Instead she told him she would get back to him and stood up. He left, shaking his head.
The next day the students arrived.
SIX
It was the vodka, Claire Nelson thought, walking toward Rachel Bickham’s office on the first day of school. Without the vodka, she never would have told. Did Amy’s father leave the bottle out on the counter when he stumbled off to bed just so he could sneak downstairs and out onto the porch and catch her giving a drink to Amy? He was weird enough. What would he have said when he found out Amy was only drinking tonic? But he never did come downstairs and so she poured another vodka tonic for herself and another straight tonic for Amy and then another and another.
And then they ate the ice cream.
“Ice cream and vodka!” Amy said. “Good nutrition makes you strong.” She had no idea there was no vodka in her tonic. “Only forty billion calories,” she giggled. They fed each other chocolate ice cream until it was all gone. It was smeary on their faces, and there were hundreds and hundreds of stars in the black above them, and the soft air carried the rich smell of Long Island Sound up to them from the beach. So maybe it wasn’t imagined alcohol that Amy was drunk on, maybe it was her happiness. “We’re going to do this every Labor Day weekend until we are a hundred and ten years old,” she said to Claire. “You and me. Promise?”
Claire burped. “Abshiludely!” She crossed her heart, and burped again, this time on purpose.
“Oh yes!” Amy said. “And always for dessert a burping contest!”
“Until the day we die!” Claire said. She stood up, opened her mouth, and spread her arms, a singer about to perform, and burped a perfectly satisfactory burp, and Amy responded with a louder one, which Claire tried to exceed in volume and length, but nothing came out. She swallowed air until it hurt and tried to expel it, but it got stuck somewhere down there, and then Amy stood up, leaned over, and, sticking her butt way out behind her, produced not a burp but instead an explosive, heroic, and very loud fart into the silence. Both girls dived to the floor. They were laughing too hard to stand.
When the laughter subsided, they spread their arms out, their fingers touching, and looked up at the stars, and while Amy was thinking how much fun it was, how liberating, to act like a jerk, to be an asshole on purpose, just for the fun of it, like boys do when they want to fool around, Claire felt that sudden lightness she always got when the Oh what the hell words came up in her brain like headlines, and she knew right then she was going to tell Amy everything.
Amy had said, “I won’t ever tell.” But that’s what Claire had said. And look what had happened! Twice now, once last year, and now this.
But