‘I tried to have sex with that Philip kid from down the street, but he didn’t want to. He’s not going to have sex with you. His whole family wears special religious underwear.’
‘I don’t even know him,’ I protested. ‘And I don’t want to have sex with anyone.’
She barked a laugh. ‘Sure you don’t. That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.’
‘Here you go.’ Stella shuffled into the sitting room with a coffee mug. ‘Some nice hot chocolate.’
‘It’s ninety degrees out,’ I answered.
‘Oh, now. It’s good for you. I made it with whole milk. You need to gain some weight.’
My father and Petey had just left to see my grandmother’s body. Stella decided to stay home with Steven and me, and no one fought her on it. Everyone, I’d noticed, was being extra-nice to Stella. Perhaps it was because she’d discovered my grandmother was dead when she came into her room to rustle her out of bed for breakfast.
Upstairs, Steven made the floor thump with what sounded like jumping jacks. Earlier, he’d gone running, crunching down the gravel road and disappearing onto the highway. To my knowledge, this was the first time he’d ever run in his life. I pictured him out there, gasping, cars narrowly passing him at sixty miles an hour. I saw him in camouflage, running an obstacle course, out of breath while the other recruits easily scaled a twenty-foot wall.
‘So.’ Stella sat down across from me. ‘Tell me about yourself, Summer.’
‘There’s nothing to tell.’ I looked down at my hot chocolate. It was the kind with mini-marshmallows, which I hated.
‘Sure there is! I bet you’ve got tons of things to tell me about you.’
Her glasses were on crookedly, which made her look a little drunk.
‘I’m pretty boring,’ I answered.
‘That’s too bad.’ Stella pulled a pack of cigarettes from her front pocket and lit one. She took a drag and eyed me. ‘Do you want a little?’
I shifted my gaze in the other direction. ‘It’s all right.’
‘Come on. It’ll relax you.’
I lowered one eyebrow. ‘There are all sorts of health warnings on the box.’
‘These? Nah.’
I took the cigarette from Stella to avoid an argument. She looked overjoyed. As I put it to my lips, I glanced at the stairs, both in hope and fear that Steven would come down and see. ‘Thanks,’ I said, handing it back to Stella.
‘You want your own?’
I shook my head no. We sat in silence for a few moments, Stella smoking. A car horn sounded. Stella cleared her throat. ‘Nice day,’ she remarked, even though we were sitting indoors, couldn’t see out the heavily curtained windows, and even though I was pretty sure it was still overcast out. ‘Hope we get a day like this for the funeral. And I hope people bring over a lot of hot dishes.’ She leaned back. ‘Minnie Elkerson makes the best pierogis. And Marcy makes a good ham. And Liza makes cabbage rolls. You ever had a cabbage roll?’
‘Nope.’
‘What? No. Never?’
‘No. They sound disgusting.’
She exhaled. ‘Ruth used to make terrible cabbage rolls. She was Suzy Homemaker, but her cabbage rolls smelled like shit.’ She leaned back into the cushions. ‘At least this holiday, I can make my own cabbage rolls.’
‘Well, that’s good.’ It sounded as if Stella really hated her sister. She hadn’t said one nice thing about Ruth since we had arrived.
Stella looked at me. ‘And you’ll come for Christmas this year, won’t you?’
‘Sure,’ I said, but I didn’t mean it. Upstairs, Steven made an unusually loud clunk. There wasn’t anything wrong with exercising, nor was there anything wrong with wanting to enlist in the Marines…at least, I didn’t think so. But this had come on so fast, and Steven seemed so possessed. That was what made it so scary.
‘You got a best friend?’ Stella asked.
I thought of Claire. ‘Not exactly.’
‘What does that mean?’
I sighed. Every time I went along with Claire to the diner, Claire looked at me with pitying, questioning eyes. Are you having a good time? Are you having a good time? It was pathetic, how willingly she gave me the benefit of the doubt. All I thought of was how she’d told me my mother had resigned from her position at Mandrake & Hester. How plaintively she’d said, Maybe we could help one another. It felt like she continued to say it, inside, every time we were around each other.
‘I don’t know,’ I mumbled. ‘We’ve grown apart. We’re into different things.’
‘My husband was my best friend when we were growing up,’ Stella said. ‘But back in thirty-nine or forty-the twelfth grade, I guess-we went through a period of hating each other, too. He thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who were quiet, who didn’t swear. A year later, when we were nineteen, we fell in love again.’ She stubbed the cigarette out on a large, lopsided pea-green ashtray. ‘I guess you never met my husband before he passed, huh?’
‘I don’t think so,’ I answered. ‘I mean, unless it was when I was really young.’
‘His name was Skip. We got married six weeks after we re-met. He was a crane operator in a rock quarry.’
‘Like Fred Flintstone?’ I blurted.
‘Exactly!’ Stella grinned. ‘Only, working in the quarry didn’t make you much money. I had to take on all sorts of jobs to make ends meet. I was an assistant to a lawyer downtown-now that was a good job, but then he died. So I became a hair-washer at a beauty salon. It was my idea, you see, and, as far as I knew, no one else was doing it. There should be a girl who does the hair, and a girl who washes it. Now, everyone does it.’
‘That’s true,’ I said slowly. ‘The last time I had my hair cut, there was a girl who washed my hair.’
Stella shook her head. ‘I should’ve patented that idea. My life could’ve been so different. Anyway, I worked there until it closed. Then, I had a friend who was getting into the Jane Fonda workouts. She got me into them, too, and got me teaching aerobics at the Y.’ She leaned back into the couch. ‘I had a pink leotard and leg warmers and everything. That’s back when I was in better shape.’
‘What did my grandmother say about that?’
‘Oh, you know.’ Stella’s expression shifted. ‘She never came to any of the workouts or anything.’
‘But didn’t you live here? In this same town?’
She shrugged, ignoring me. ‘So anyway, Skip was from a couple towns away. First time we met, we were in ice-skating lessons together. Our mothers couldn’t pry us apart. But he thought I was too coarse for him. He liked girls who wore twinsets, who didn’t swear. We were friends until twelfth grade, when he started going steady with Muriel Johnson. I hated her-she was a twinset girl. And you know what her yearbook motto was? She is pretty to walk with and witty to talk with.’ Stella snorted and shook her head. ‘I wouldn’t speak to Skip when he was with her. Then there was that accident.’
‘Accident?’ It couldn’t have been the same accident my father was in. She had to be talking about a different era.
Stella nodded. ‘Muriel went out on the Doyle boys’ pond that November, because she’d bought a new ice-skating skirt that would twirl around when she spun-of