It’s only a matter of time. Besides, what school administrator in Philadelphia would renew the contract of a kindergarten teacher who’d been married to Nick the Dick?
“You live in Grandma’s old house,” she attempted to remind me. “You complain about it constantly.”
“I rent the place,” I said. “Uncle Butch owns it and I bitch because he won’t fix a damn thing. And if you want to talk about crime, look at my neighborhood. How many homicides do you think South Philly has a year? Probably more in a week than New Bern has in a year. Since Nick’s been in jail I’ve been mugged twice and had the house broken into three times!”
“Yeah, but there’s cops up there, lots of them.”
“Darlene, there are cops everywhere.”
“Sophie, think about it. This is a small town. You’re single. You really want to leave Philly for this?”
I stared at her. She was in the same boat as I was and suddenly she didn’t think New Bern was such a great town? What was this all about?
Like a mind reader, Darlene honed in on me. “Look,” she said, “I moved down here because Ma and Pa retired here. They put on the pressure, the guilt. ‘We’re old,’ they said. ‘Who will take care of us?’ So I came. Why not? I was single. But finding a man here is like winning the lottery. It just doesn’t happen.”
Mr. Wonderful flashed across my mind but I shoved him out. “Good, I’m not looking for a man. Ma and Pa have been after me to move down here, too. Why not? What do I have to lose?”
Maybe I could start over.
Darlene was looking even more anxious. “You don’t have a job,” she said.
“I teach school, Darlene. I can work anywhere. I’ve got all summer to find something, and besides, I’ve got the money Aunt Viv left me when she died. With what this place costs I could buy it and fix it up and still have a little money in the bank.”
Darlene didn’t look convinced.
“Look, Joey moved down with Angela and the kids. That didn’t turn out so bad, did it?”
“That’s different,” she said, pouting.
I got to the heart of the matter then. “Darlene, Nick’s not gonna be in prison much longer. You think I don’t know he’s carrying a grudge? You think he won’t haunt me, trying to make my life a living hell? You think I want to walk down the street every day waiting for the time I round a corner and there he is? Do you think I don’t see the looks on the faces of the people we know? They’re thinking, There’s Sophie, the pervert’s ex-wife. You think I don’t know this and feel it every time I walk out my front door? Darlene, the man took pictures of me naked in the shower. He videotaped us making love and sold copies on the internet for $14.95. It’s not the sort of thing you live down easily.”
I couldn’t bring myself to tell her how they didn’t just look, they yelled, hurling insults and obscenities at me. I didn’t want her to pity me, or worse, to be afraid for me. I was Darlene’s big sister, not a victim to feel sorry for and take care of. Not me.
But Darlene looked sad anyway, like she saw through me, like she was feeling my life and it hurt. Something inside me snapped then, and before I could stop myself, the words tumbled out.
“Even if I wanted to meet somebody, even if I actually met a man up in Philly,” I said, “what are the chances he’s seen those pictures of me? Even if he hasn’t, what chance is there he won’t know who I am? Everybody knows what Nick did, Darlene. I see it in their eyes. I feel dirty even when I’ve just bathed. Can’t you see what I’m telling you, honey?”
Darlene’s eyes filled with unshed tears and she nodded slowly.
“I want something new. Something fresh, where I don’t have to feel ashamed just walking around in my own neighborhood. I don’t want to live in the subdivision with you guys. I don’t want to bust up what you’ve got going with Ma and Pa. I just want to be somewhere where people love me.”
Darlene was crying now. She looked up at the broken-down house and back to me. “Okay,” she said, her voice soft with tears. “I get it. If this is what you want, at least have it inspected. Bring Joey and Pa over—let them check it out, too. And no matter what,” she said, straightening up and becoming her know-it-all self, “don’t pay the asking price. This dump has probably been on the market forever. Lowball ’em.”
I threw my arms around her chunky shoulders and hugged her. “Thanks, honey. Don’t worry. It’ll work out fine, you’ll see.”
We turned away then, walking back toward the car and jabbering away about shutters and paint colors. I was so lost in my new house trance that I almost missed it, the little prickle of awareness that made me look up and stare out ahead of us.
Mr. Wonderful from the chapel stood in the middle of the sidewalk, the folded up card table in one strong hand and two Scouts by his other side. His smile seemed to reach out and cover me. His presence felt like an electrical current that arced from his body into mine. I had the foolish urge to run to him and say, “Hey, guess what? I’m going to buy that old house around the corner.” But of course, that would be crazy. So instead I looked away, kept on babbling to Darlene and walked right past him.
“Okay,” she said, when we were a half a block away, “what in the hell was that?”
“What?”
“Don’t do that,” she said. “You know what. That guy. What was with you and that guy? How do you know him?”
“I don’t.”
“Sophie, that look, that energy between you two. You know him.”
“No, really, I don’t. I just bumped into him, that’s all.”
Darlene sighed. “That was fate,” she said. “He is your destiny and you walked right past him.”
“Like a fish needs a bicycle, Darlene,” I said.
“Start peddling,” Darlene said. “’Cause, honey, that was some powerful karma, if you ask me.”
“I didn’t. It wasn’t. And I don’t want any complications in my life.”
Darlene was muttering to herself. It sounded like she was saying, “We’ll see. We’ll just see about that.”
I looked down at the brochure from the dream house and forced my attention onto the things I could control in my life. I could make this dream happen. I could turn a pile of wood and weeds into a home. But turning a smile into a relationship, now that was just plain foolish. At least the house was a sure deal. A house doesn’t vanish like a puff of smoke. A house is real. You can reach out and stroke the wood, feel the walls solid and sure. A house is what it is; it doesn’t lie. A house doesn’t write letters from prison saying you’ve ruined its life. A house doesn’t threaten to hunt you down and kill you.
Chapter 2
M y brother, Joey, is a poet. I don’t know if Pa will ever recover from this. If Joey didn’t look and act so normal on the outside, I think Pa might’ve disowned him. As it is, Pa, the retired ironworker, just ignores the poetry part and tries to believe that Joey’s simply an English teacher, a college professor. Each year, when Joey’s newest book comes out, Ma carefully lines it up with the others on the top row of the bookshelf, and there it stays, never read by Pa and misunderstood by Ma.
Joey, for his part, doesn’t spout off rhymes or stare into space all misty-eyed like Darlene. Joey plays rugby on Saturday afternoons. He roughhouses with his kids, is openly affectionate with his wife and can fix anything. Pa holds this out as incontrovertible evidence that Joey is somehow just passing through a phase with his writing.
“Poetry, schmoetry,” Pa says. “He don’t mean nothing by it.”
Ma’s kind of flattered. It appeals