laugh. “I did some of the nasty things get a boy’s attention.”
Dee said, “That’s so fucked up.”
Melanie kept going, on a roll. “Used my feminine wiles! Did some nasty stuff.”
Avery said, “Oh, shut up, please.”
Dee said to Avery, “Bitch is full of herself. I think she’s love-struck.”
“Well, where is he, then?” Avery said to Melanie. “Where’d the boy go?”
“He leave in the morning?” Dee asked. “’D’ you go out for breakfast?”
“Uh-uh,” Avery said. “He was out in the living room watching television when Zach left, and I’m pretty sure I heard him leave a little after.”
“Watching television?” Dee said, looking accusingly at Melanie.
Melanie said, unfazed, “He couldn’t sleep.”
Avery said, “Really.”
Melanie took a neatly folded slip of paper out of the pocket of her shorts and read it aloud, “Can’t sleep. See you tomorrow. You were wonderful.” She lingered long over each syllable of wonderful, drawing an “Oooh,” from Dee.
There was another knock at the door, followed by a shout. Avery said, “I’ll get it,” and jumped out of bed.
When she opened the door, she found Chack and Billy. Chack, as always, in khaki slacks and a madras shirt, Billy in loose-fitting greenish polyester pants and an orange T-shirt that read “Kill Me” in clashing red letters. Billy’s face looked like he might be serious about the message on the T.
Avery said, “Chack, you know, I got to tell you, nobody in this whole fucking country wears madras except Indian guys. What the fuck is that about? Where do you even find that shit?” When Chack’s expression went from cheerful to dumbfounded, she said, “Forget it. I’m having my period. Party’s in my room,” and she left them standing in the doorway as she headed for the bathroom, her head fuzzy and her back and shoulders a little stiff and tingly.
In the relative quiet of the bathroom, behind the locked door, she pulled down her pajama bottoms and panties, sat down heavily on the john, and then ripped a clump of toilet paper off the spool and slammed it between her legs. While she peed with the toilet paper clutched angrily in her fist, she stared at the opposite wall with enough intensity to burn a hole through it, but there wasn’t a thought in her head. She sat slightly crouched, her back hunched over a little, her hand between her legs, her eyes on the wall, hovering above the familiar watery melody as if suspended in time. She ached a good bit down there. She felt raw. When she was done, she washed her hands and then hesitated in front of the medicine-cabinet mirror. She straightened out her hair, massaged her eyes hard and deep, and then stood there with her hands over her face in the shifting patterns of dark. She wanted to slap Melanie, and not for the sappy you were wonnnnderfulllll but for the gleam in her eyes when she said it, like she was all in love with Grant after one night.
You were wonderful. What was that about? With Melanie, he’s you were wonderful. With Avery, he’s an animal. What was that? Really? Avery looked at herself in the mirror and saw that she was glaring and that her face was red. She grabbed a clean washcloth off the shelf above the john and gave herself a cat bath. She had slept in an old short-sleeved blouse over an equally old pair of pajama bottoms, and she straightened the blouse as she stepped out into the hallway. She heard a loud outburst of laughter, and when she got to her room, she found Billy standing on her dresser, barefoot. She said, “What’s this?” and Chack said, “He’s illustrating his diving technique.”
Melanie said, “Crazy bastard dove into the apartment pool.” She was stretched out on the bed next to Dee.
Billy jumped down from the dresser. “I was slightly drunk,” he said to Avery. “Were you at the party?”
Billy was cute—a little dopey but basically sweet. Avery sat beside Melanie. She said, “What are you going to do when you run out of stunts, Billy?”
Billy touched his heart, as if he were about to pledge allegiance. “Who? Me? What?”
“To call attention to yourself,” Avery said.
Billy said, “What do you mean?” He lifted himself onto her dresser.
Avery said, “Please don’t sit on my dresser.”
Billy slid off the dresser and then leaned back against it.
Dee said, as if suddenly developing interest in the conversation, “She means when you run out of crazy stunts, what are you going to do so that people notice you?”
The room got quiet for a moment while Billy shifted from foot to foot, looking a little confused. Chack, who was sitting on the floor by the window, looked up at Billy with what appeared to be interest, as if he were genuinely curious about how his friend would respond.
When the silence got awkward, Melanie said to Avery, “What are you, like on bitch pills this morning?”
Avery said, “I’m just asking.”
Dee said to Melanie, “Who wears a T-shirt that says ‘Kill Me’?”
Chack jumped up and shouted, “My man does!” He picked up Billy and tossed him onto the bed, on top of Melanie and Dee, causing shouting and laughter as Billy scrambled to the floor.
“Okay, okay, okay,” Avery said. “Everybody out. Really. Let me get dressed.” She went to the door and held it open. “I’ll be out in a few minutes.”
Dee said, “I have to go anyway,” and kissed Avery on the cheek as she left the room. “I’ll call you later,” she said. “I want more details.”
Billy and Chack filed out after Dee. Melanie waited a second. On her way out of the room, when the others were out of hearing range, she whispered to Avery, “Dee’s so jealous I swear she’s turning fucking green.”
Avery closed and locked her door, fell into the bed, and curled up under the covers, where she lay in silence for several minutes. From the living room, she heard Chack and Billy chatting with Melanie for a while before they left together, laughing back and forth out in the hall, talking loudly about something that had happened at the party. When the apartment was blessedly quiet for a few minutes, she felt herself getting sleepy again. She burrowed down under the covers, pulled her knees to her chin, and drifted toward sleep nestled in an inarticulate funk.
KATE and Lindsey were talking politely in the kitchen, seated across from each other at a round oak table with claw feet, and Hank was in the living room on the sofa, sipping a cup of coffee as he watched Keith sprawled across a throw rug over a jigsaw puzzle, a semicircle of scattered pieces spread above a partial rectangle, blue-black at the top edges, black and yellow at the bottom. Keith lay on his belly as he worked on the puzzle. He had sorted the pieces into piles of similar colors, and his legs kicked lazily at the air, as if he were slowly jogging somewhere. He examined a pair of emerald-green shapes and then looked at the cover of the puzzle box propped against the coffee table. Hank said, “What’s it going to be, bud?” and the boy quickly showed him the box cover picturing a black highway cutting through a sage-covered desert. “Sweet,” Hank said, and Keith tossed the cover down on the rug and went back to work.
What would Tim think, what would he say, if he could see this scene, if he knew the way things were? He’d be pleased to see Keith doing a jigsaw puzzle in his living room. He loved the boy. There was a connection because Tim never got the son he wanted and because he and Hank were so close. He’d like to see Kate and Lindsey talking over coffee on a Sunday morning. That much he’d like anyway: Keith working on a puzzle, the women talking in the kitchen, his little brother relaxing with a cup of coffee on the couch.
Hank was a teenager the first time he met Kate, and that thought troubled him a little. Tim started dating her when she was still in high school, her senior year, and she was five years older