Page 48 of Starlight & Dark Nights

It’s an honest, straightforward answer, and Bill wants to ask her so many different questions. It’s unusual for a man who barely knows a woman to just approach and start peppering her with personal questions, but these are unusual circumstances, so Bill goes ahead with it.

“I have to know…how did you manage, Maxine? How did you get through the first days and weeks? If you don’t mind my asking, of course.” Bill nearly blushes as he realizes that he’s just asked a widow to relive the early days of her biggest loss.

Maxine smiles at him softly. “I woke up, I got my toddler out of her crib, and I made a pot of coffee. I had friends who checked in. Some days I wasn’t sure I would make it or that I wanted to, but then the baby I was carrying would kick me and it was a hard reminder that life goes on.” She shrugs. “It just does. It has to.”

Bill nods as he takes this in. He’s still standing with his hands in his pockets when a sprinkler across the street kicks on loudly. “But what’s this I hear about you leaving Stardust Beach with some professor?”

This makes Maxine laugh. “That sounds like I’m running off with another man, which—I can assure you, Bill—I am not.” She pauses. “Professor Morse is in his sixties and he has some really big ideas. When I realized that NASA had let my husband die, I needed to do something. The protests at the Cape were something small, but then I stumbled into something bigger. This is a movement. This is an opportunity to get in on the ground floor with people who want to make this country a better place. People who want to make a difference. I need that, Bill. My kids need that. Our country needs people who are invested in its improvement, and not complicit with its demise.”

Bill feels as though her words are somehow canned; they sound to his ears like propaganda handed out by whoever is leading this charge to “fix America.” But what does he know? Maybe all these beatniks banging on about change know things that Bill Booker doesn’t.

“So you’re going to go with him, but…I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”

“Professor Morse and his wife have been very kind to me and the children. I’m taking all my belongings up to my parents’ house in Virginia, and then I’ll join them in Alabama.”

That clears things up for Bill, though it was never his business anyway to understand whether Maxine had already found love again. He’s just worried about her, and the thought that some smooth talker might have preyed on the weakness of a lonely, broken woman has tugged at his heart. But this sounds like Maxine knows what she’s doing.

“Wait,” Bill says, backtracking. “What do you mean about NASA ‘letting’ Derek die? How do you figure?” He frowns at her, puzzled. “Again, if you don’t mind my asking.”

It’s Maxine’s turn to look puzzled. “You know the same things I know, Bill,” she says, her hazel eyes holding his gaze and burning him with intensity. “You tried to stop the mission right before launch, and they wouldn’t listen to you.”

“How do you know that?”

Maxine looks at the sprinkler across the street, and then back at Bill. A flicker of amusement passes over her pretty features. “I just do. I would venture to say that everyone in Stardust Beach knows things that other people think are secrets.”

Bill feels naked as she stares at him with her hard gaze. He wants to ask what she means—what she knows—but he doesn’t. Hearing the words cross Todd Roman’s lips that day at lunch had been startling enough. To hear that the gossip mill was turning hard and fast enough to spread details to the wives and widows of the entire neighborhood fills Bill with mortification. And worry—certainly word will get to Jo this way.

Bill pulls his shoulders straighter and sucks in a big breath. He nods. “You’re right. We all know things and hear things, but we don’t always know or hear the truth.”

“Mmmm,” Maxine says, sounding noncommittal.

“Anyhow,” Bill says. “I wanted to stop and offer to help you with anything you need as you get ready to leave.” He gestures at the stacks of boxes in her garage. “Feel free to put me to work.”

As he offers, Bill isn’t sure why he’s doing it: is he being a kindly neighbor? Is he seeking some sort of redemption for the fact that his delay in speaking up may have played a part in Derek’s death? Is he trying to do something good to balance the fact that he and Jeanie have done something bad—a sort of karmic retribution? He decides to chalk it up to doing a plain old good deed.

“Thank you, Bill,” Maxine says, taking a step back from him. Their conversation has ended, and he can tell that she needs to get back into the house where the children are no doubt waiting. “I appreciate that. And I’ll definitely let you know.”

Bill walks away slowly, turning back one last time to see Maxine closing the door to the garage for the evening. He got the distinct impression that the two of them are somehow comrades in arms; two outcasts, two wrongdoers, just attempting to put one foot in front of the other as they go about their lives and try to survive.

Everyone is judging Maxine for throwing her kids into some sort of cockamamie scheme to travel America and protest random things, but certainly anyone who knows what Bill has done is judging him as well. He’s not only the man who didn’t speak up soon enough before a tragic accident, he’s also the man who is married to one woman, but passionately kissing another in a stairwell at work while tragedy is about to occur.

But the thing that really sticks with him as he walks home in the encroaching darkness is this: if every woman on the Cape knows about him and Jeanie, and if Todd Roman has even heard about it, then how long until Jo knows?

His blood runs cold and he picks up his pace. He suddenly wants to be nowhere but home.

CHAPTER21

Jo

Frankie isbusy with her husband that evening, so it's no bother for Jo when Bill says he'd like to be the one to go for a walk. In fact, it's better for her if he goes and she manages bedtime for the children, as it gives her time to think while Kate negotiates extra stories, Nancy tries to hide the book she's reading beneath her pillow, and Jimmy ignores Jo's pleas to wash behind his ears and not to forget the back of his neck while he's getting ready for bed.

The letter she'd received from Martin Snell a few months earlier has been in her mind consistently ever since, and yet she can't bring herself to write what the literary agent had asked her to. Ever since the day she'd gotten the letter--the day after she and Bill had a falling out over the fact that he felt betrayed by her stories for the magazine--she's felt like she has a pill lodged in her throat that she can't quite swallow.

Nothing has fully distracted her from this sensation of unease, but she's had moments of feeling like herself. For instance, Jo and Nancy had embarked upon a mission to sew a dress together for Nancy's first middle school dance, and by the time the event rolled around in early May, they'd created a beautiful baby blue chiffon dress with little pink rosebuds sprinkled all over it. Nancy had been proud to have her parents drop her off at the middle school gym to meet her friends, and for that one evening, Jo had been entirely satisfied with something that she was involved in.

Her blooming friendship with Jude has also been a balm for her soul. Ever since meeting Jude two years prior, Jo has carried around a feeling in her heart that something wasn't quite right with Jude, and she's been extremely concerned about the other woman's drinking. So to have Jude open up to her and share her feelings has been incredibly gratifying, and Jo can only hope that her support has meant something to Jude. She thinks that it has, as she's noticed and felt an openness from Jude on the occasions that they're together.

But aside from these small distractions, Jo has been living with a kernel of doubt in her heart for six months now. She knows what she saw the night of the accident at Cape Kennedy when she stumbled out the door and found Bill with Jeanie Florence, and she knows she also saw her husband sharing what looked like an intimate moment with Jeanie in the parking lot of The Black Hole. Warning bells went off the very first time Jeanie called their home, despite the fact that, after meeting her, Jo actually quite liked the younger woman, and Jo does not take this little bit of women’s intuition lightly.

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