“I got it in school, and I couldn’t wait to tell Bunny,” I explained, struggling to hold in my own urge to giggle. “But when I got home, she wasn’t there. So I waited out on the front step.” I stopped and took a breath. It was a little frightening, this powerful need to howl. Bunny’s fight to keep it in was shaking the whole couch. “And when I saw her coming, I went running down the street, yelling”—I paused again and closed my eyes for control—“yelling, ‘I got it! I got it!’ ”
Bunny roared. “ ‘I got it! I got it!’ ” she gasped, then she roared again. “Everyone came out to look. The neighbors thought she was crazy.”
A damp, shrill giggle burst out of me. Once the first of it had escaped, I had to let it run its course. My whole body heaved. “I’m sorry,” I finally squeaked to Mrs. O’Brien. Bunny and I rocked back and forth together. We were having a kind of fit.
“Oh,” gasped Bunny, at last, getting control. Her eyes were streaming with tears. She nuzzled my ear. “Oh, what a time,” she said, sighing.
The two women on the opposite sofa had watched us silently. Now, Mrs. O’Brien wrote something in her book. “Well, I’m glad there was no trauma involved,” she said.
Afterward, Bunny and I fell quiet again. The laughing fit had wrung something out of me. I was wearied by the tension of sitting there, wearied by Mrs. O’Brien’s questions, wearied by Mrs. O’Brien herself. Except for our brief outburst, she had controlled the entire session. It wasn’t this way when I was alone with her, but with Bunny there, things were different. Mrs. O’Brien never said anything specific, but her whole manner gave the impression that Bunny and I were doing something very wrong. It was almost as if by her sheer size and her stony silences, Mrs. O’Brien had a kind of rightness about her. The room tipped in her direction, and the furniture, the tables, and most of all Bunny and I slid down to her feet.
When she finally announced that she had to go visit another girl in trouble, it was almost noon. As it turned out, Bunny didn’t have time to go home and change; she had to head straight out to the country club for lunch. I walked her to her car.
“I don’t think that went too well,” I said when we were outside.
“What’s there to go well?” she asked. “Nothing could go well with that busybody.”
“But I think she can help us. I mean, I really think she’s sort of sympathetic—she’s on our side.”
Bunny stopped at the door to her Pontiac. “On your side, maybe.”
“Well, that’s something, anyway.”
“Is it? Shouldn’t you and I be the ones on the same side?” She looked down and picked imaginary pieces of lint off the front of her uniform.
“We are on the same side, Bunny.” I reached for her hand and she looked at me again. “That’s crazy.”
She sighed. “Maybe.” She shook me loose and climbed in the car. “Anyway, Beach is the only one who’s really on our side.”
“Have you heard from him?”
“He’s around.” She turned the ignition. The car groaned several times before starting up. “I gotta get Eddie to look at this again,” she said. “Bye, now.”
As she was pulling away, I thought of something and yelled. She stopped in the middle of the street. I ran up to her window. “I wanted to ask,” I said. “What you said inside about tragedy and lost chances—was that me you were talking about?”
She frowned and thought for a moment, as if she couldn’t recollect what I was referring to. Then her face lit up. “Oh, no, not at all. You’re thinking too much. That was just philosophizing back there. It was all baloney. It was just to bother those two busybodies, to show them I’m smarter than they are. I could say the exact opposite tomorrow.”
“I thought so,” I said. “It didn’t really sound like anything you’d ever said before.”
The Scott’s Milk truck came down Oak and stopped behind Bunny. The driver, a bald man named Pete, who’s supposed to be the best bowler in town, had room to pull around. Instead, he sat there and honked.
Bunny looked in the rear-view mirror. “Jerkface,” she said. She turned back to me. “Besides, if I was talking about anyone when I said that, it was me. You’re too young.”
The driver honked again, this time leaning on the horn. Bunny poked her head out the window. “Shuddup, loudmouth!” she yelled. “Can’t you see I’m talking to my daughter?”
“Do you really feel that way?” I asked.
“Get out the way, goddammit,” screamed Pete. The top of his head was flushed red.
“I told you it was all baloney,” said Bunny. She looked in the rear-view mirror again. “Jesus Christ, this town is full of jerks. See you later.” She pulled away, with the milk truck on her tail.
FOURTEEN
I wasn’t entirely reassured by what Bunny had said. Her remark about lost chances wasn’t just baloney—nothing she said was ever just baloney. Since I’d moved to the Vernons’, she’d been acting differently, thinking differently, too. Part of it was just the fact that I wasn’t with her for hours every day. But something more than that was going on. She’d never been one to look back with regrets, but now, I sensed, regrets were starting to eat at her. Practically the first thing she’d said, that afternoon at the police station, was that she never should have come to this town. Then there’d been other remarks—quick asides, mostly, thrown off as if they weren’t meant to be listened to—about her childhood, her old boyfriends, even about my father. In her hours alone, she was recollecting, wondering what had happened, maybe even trying to pinpoint the moment things had started going wrong. Thinking like that can get you crazy.
I worried about Bunny, but, as had happened so often during the last couple of days, my thoughts kept drifting away. I really wanted to think only about Reverend Vaughn. It was wrong, I knew. I owed Bunny my full attention. I tried to discipline myself, to guide my thinking methodically back to the problems at hand, but it was no use.
Argyle socks. What made him decide to wear argyle socks? I’d seen them advertised in Life and Look, but I’d never seen a pair on a man in Katydid, at least not that I remembered. They were so … frumpy, and yet he made them work. On him, they looked sophisticated. Was that just luck and charm, or did he know what he was doing when he shopped? And his haircut. Yesterday, while we talked, he got excited, and the hair in front fell down over his forehead like delicate, yellow bangs. He needed to get clipped. But there was something sweet about his carelessness, something very lovable. I wondered h