“No,” I said. “You were wonderful.”
Then he kissed me, a first-day sort of kiss, very hesitant and sweet, the way George might have kissed Emily had a kiss been written for them. It was not, however, a kiss between an editor and his daughter.
“Thank you,” Duke said.
“Thank you,” I said, or thought I said, then he took back my hand. We walked the path along the lake for a while and then turned back. We lacked both the time and ambition to go all the way around.
“Do you swim?” he asked me.
“Like a fish.”
“Then we’ll go swimming sometime.”
I stopped. He knew what I wanted to do before I knew it myself, because as soon as he said it I wanted to go swimming more than anything. “Let’s go now,” I said. “I’ll tell you, this has been one hell of a day. Let’s go swimming.” It was northern Michigan in the summer. There would still be enough light.
He looked at me. “We’re busy now.”
“We are?”
He nodded, moving a piece of hair from my forehead with his thumb. “We have plans.”
It sounded so much like a line from a play. We were going to go back to my room, and to pretend otherwise would have been acting.
He took out a pack of Marlboros and offered me one.
I shook my head. “I don’t smoke.”
“Would you try?”
“Smoking?”
He nodded. “It’s something we could do together. Just think how nice it would be to go outside during breaks and sit on the lawn. We could look at the lake and smoke.”
He lit two cigarettes with a single match, and then, exhaling, handed one to me. Jimmy-George had nothing on this guy. Nobody had anything on this guy. I took a small drag and coughed. My first cigarette.
“Just a couple of puffs or it will make you dizzy,” he said. “You’ve got to build up your lungs.”
We were walking again. I had a cigarette in one hand and his hand in the other. I couldn’t imagine Emily smoking, and I wondered if the director would have an objection, though surely I wouldn’t be smoking by the time the audience arrived. The way the embers brightened when we inhaled made me think of fireflies. When Duke stopped again we were back at the house where I was living. He took the cigarette from my fingers and put them both out in a pot of geraniums on the porch. Maybe I was a little dizzy. I hadn’t noticed the flowers when I came in or when I went out. That we were walking up the stairs holding hands seemed like the most natural thing in the world. For all I knew he had gone upstairs with the other Emily as well, the one who’d lasted only a day. He may have been taking me back to a bed he’d already slept in, and I couldn’t have cared less because it was my bed now.
“This is odd,” Joe says when he comes in the back door. The dishes are done and I’m on the couch sewing bits of everyone’s castoff dresses and favorite sheets and the random cloth napkin into quilt squares while Hazel sleeps. Thirty years fromnow I’ll have enough squares to make a quilt for each of our daughters.
“What’s odd?”
“We’re the only two people in the house.”
“Where’s Nell?”
“She went to Emily’s. I guess Maisie’s still trying to plug the calf.”
It might not sound like an overture but I stick my needle in the tomato-shaped pincushion all the same. People with children are attuned to the inherent sexual possibility of an empty house. For years we tried to schedule activities for all three girls at the same time: the weekly dance class, the 4-H meeting, the algebra tutor. A scant hour of overlap was all we were hoping for, but even when those bright stars aligned, one daughter so often refused to leave. There always seemed to be one girl who wanted nothing but to crawl into my lap for an hour while the other two were away. And so I would hold her. You don’t forget that, even if your daughters have grown and been gone for years and then come home.
“I would have thought they’d all rush back for the story.”
“We’ll pick it up tomorrow.”
“How far have you gotten?”
What came after that first night? “Well, I’m at Tom Lake, we’ve had the first table read, so I guess we’re up to Pallace.”
