“I know you’ve been through hell in the past year, but you can’t make it better by shutting yourself off from the world,” she said. “Promise me you’ll take care of yourself.”
“I promise,” Kate said, and she managed to smile as if that comment didn’t hurt. She stood and stared down the street long after Margaret’s car was gone.
As she walked slowly back up to her house, Terrence Simnic came down his front steps lugging two shopping bags. He set them down to open the door of the brown sedan parked in the driveway. As he shoved one bag in the backseat, the second toppled over and clothes spilled out onto the asphalt. Women’s clothes. Kate stared at the bra and panties tangled up with some sweaters. Terrence Simnic scooped them up, muttering under his breath. As he shoved them back in the bag, he looked over and caught her staring. Kate tensed, locking eyes with his, her body prickling with apprehension. He shoved the second bag into the back of the car, still staring at her, and then, maintaining eye contact, he walked slowly around to the driver’s side.
Kate broke eye contact and ran into the house slamming and locking the door. She stood there, trembling, until she heard the roar of the car engine. When she peered out the front window, his car had disappeared down the street beneath a canopy of trees.
Chapter Seven
Grace lingered when the bell for second period rang, glancing out the windows that overlooked the front of Wickfield High and then up at the big, round, industrial clock fixed on the wall in the long hallway.
A teacher shooing latecomers into her class paused with her hand on the door to stare at her, and Grace turned swiftly, messenger bag banging against her hip, hurrying away before the woman could ask where she was supposed to be. Spanish class, but that was in the opposite direction, and it didn’t really matter because she wasn’t going.
Damien was coming. He’d promised. “Going to drive on up and get you,” he’d said when she talked to him the day before, calling him from a borrowed cell phone. She couldn’t call him from her own phone. That wasn’t allowed, hadn’t been allowed once her parents knew about him.
“He’s twenty!” Her mother had said, repeating the number as if that meant anything.
“So what?”
“So he’s too old for you!”
“Dad’s five years older than you!”
Her father was quick to answer that. “The difference between fifteen and twenty is much greater than the distance between twenty and twenty-five.”
They’d met Damien exactly once, one time when she stupidly asked him to meet her out front of their building to go to the movies and her parents happened to arrive home together just as he pulled up to the curb in his dark brown Mercedes. They’d been polite, she couldn’t fault them for that, but her father had immediately asked Damien how old he was and her mother had said that Grace wasn’t old enough to date.
Even though they hadn’t had a problem when she went to the eighth-grade dance with Matt Glick.
“Wasn’t that a date?” she’d demanded in the hours-long argument that followed her parents forbidding her to go out with Damien, but her mother hadn’t been moved.
“Matt was your age, Grace. And you weren’t really dating.”
Which showed how little they knew, because she’d kissed Matt Glick in the closet at Emily Neeson’s party, though the quick, wet imprint of his lips against hers had all the romance of a postage stamp. They’d been playing spin the bottle in the family room, all giggling and hush-hush with Emily’s clueless parents just steps away, and someone nudged the bottle after Matt spun it so that it pointed at Grace.
Kid stuff. She could hardly believe that had been just two years ago. Things were so different since she’d met Damien. Not that it was Damien who made her change. That’s what her parents believed, but it wasn’t true. She was ready for change, thirsting for it, and maybe that was why the universe sent her Damien. Like he was her destiny.
He liked to talk about things like that, philosophy and stuff. Just because he didn’t go to college didn’t mean he wasn’t smart. Damien was really, really smart. She’d seen his acceptance letter to Princeton, so she knew it was true that he’d gotten in, and so what if once he got there he realized it wasn’t the place for him. Conformists, he’d told her. Conformists and wannabes, all of the students he’d met and most of the professors. “There wasn’t an original idea in the place.”
She’d told her parents this, thinking that they’d understand, that her mother, of all people, would share that sentiment, but her lips had tightened into a thin line and her father had said, “What a crock of shit.”
She hadn’t told Damien that, hadn’t told about the other words they’d used, like “posturing” and “insecure.” It wasn’t true, any of it. They didn’t understand Damien and they didn’t want to.
Grace walked quickly down one hallway, then another, both of them leading to the back of the school and the parking lot adjacent to the playing fields where she’d told Damien she’d meet him. Exiting the school was the easy part. She’d already scoped out the door near the gymnasium that she could use. Second period was good because for some reason no class had gym before third period.
The door to the gym teacher’s office stood open. Grace peered through the crack and saw Coach Wally Pembroke looking into the file cabinet, his broad back facing the door. She tiptoed past softly enough that she could hear his wheezing. He was supposed to be some sort of legend at Wickfield High. She’d heard other parents tell hers about how great it was that he was still teaching and how these kids were the third generation he’d taught in the town. Like it was some sort of accomplishment just to hobble about shouting, jowly cheeks turning red from the effort. He should be on an oxygen tank.
At the double doors, Grace shifted her bag and took one last look back down the hall before pressing carefully against the handle and exiting the building. She held the door so it wouldn’t slam closed, before walking quickly along the side of the brick building until she came to a corner where, with any luck, nobody looking out a window would be able to see her. She walked feeling as if there were eyes boring into her, half-expecting someone to call her name before she got as far as the parking lot, but nobody did.
She headed for a cluster of cars toward the rear, hunkering down between a dusty red pickup and a blue BMW, which just about summed up the differences in the town’s demographics, and slipped off her messenger bag to rest beside her. She wrapped her arms around her legs and tapped the toe of one sneaker against the asphalt. It would take Damien at least an hour and a half to get up here from Manhattan. And that was on a good traffic morning. All you needed was one slowdown and it could turn into a two-hours-plus trip.
The sound of an engine made her pop up, but it wasn’t Damien’s car pulling into the lot. Some ugly old green car belching out smoke from its exhaust pipe. She slipped back down between the cars, this time lying back, bag wedged under her head like a pillow.
It was a beautiful day. She hummed a cheerful Mozart sonata, playing the notes on the ground until she got caught in a tricky section and couldn’t remember the next measure. She looked up at the big puffballs of white clouds moving lazily across a bright blue sky. She shaded her eyes and made out the shapes in the clouds, remembering doing that with her mother when she was little.
They’d been lying on a beach then, up at Cape Cod, with the sand gritty between their toes and the sun like a blanket on top of them. “Do you see the alligator, Gracie?” her mother had said, pointing. “Look at its sharp teeth.”
She could remember the feel of the breeze against her skin and the distant caw of seagulls and how her father had been sitting nearby immersed in a book, his dark head bent over its pages. She had her own little yellow bucket and a blue shovel and she laughed as her mother sprinkled water over her head, cooling her off.