Erica quickly interjected. “We can take care of ourselves. Go. Have fun.”
It had been fun, she told herself as the car sped her closer to home, surprised by the sound of her own voice. I would have slept with him had he asked, would have thrilled at his slightest touch, would have done everything we never did. She had forgotten how she had loved him. Would have jumped into bed with Jackson the way Erica hungers for that boy.
They had shared an innocent lunch. He looked elegant and handsome. Funny how men can get better looking, distinguished, gravitas, even though their heads are as gray, lines as deep, waists as soft, but we just get older. We live more in our bodies than they do. Boys give them up as young men, discarding the body to live inside their minds. But girls and their bodies become women and live in the same skin. Jackson and Margaret's conversation flirted with the edge of feelings, but never too far. In fact, Jackson nearly teared up when talking about his late wife, his son off in college, but she knew by his frantic suppressed joy that he had come to see her again; had she said the right words, they would have ended up in a tangle of blankets and regrets. Turning off the exit in the fading light of dinnertime, she wondered if Wiley loved her daughter so, and perhaps she had been too hard on Erica of late. She should get between her husband and her daughter before one or the other goes too far. Jackson had said, you broke my heart. Not in recrimination, more in sorrow for the passing of all time. And he had said, but it is sure great to see you again, you haven't changed, although they both knew this was a lie or a wish. Why hadn't she leapt yes when he asked her to run away with him when they were kids? How foolish to ask, to say now what should have been said then. She wondered what pledge of love Wiley had promised her daughter. Seized by the notion that she could save Erica some heartbreak, Margaret thought of nothing but her daughter, walking on the sharp edge of change.
Dusk bowed to darkness. Paul had switched on the porchlight for her. Leaving her bags in the car, she hurried through the door to ask, even before hello, where is Erica?
5
It all went down in 1968. In April, a man shot Martin Luther King in Memphis, and he saw the faces black and white steeped in mourning for all hope. Two months later, they killed RFK in the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles. Wiley studied the photographs in Life and Look of the stunned busboy on the floor cradling the fallen man, the flood of light on his face and his right hand closed in a fist, to the somber farewell days later, when the funeral cortege from New York to Washington passed through towns crowded with ordinary people waving goodbye. And later that summer the riots, the burning of the cities, and the police beating the shit out of the protestors in Chicago. The war in Vietnam, and dead bodies on the television set every night during dinner. The old man talking back to Cronkite or Nixon. “Those hippie bastards, look at ‘em, they think they're better than everyone else, think they're better than the boys going over there and getting shot up.” At the dinner table, his father focused past his wife's shoulders to the blaring television in the other room, while she just sat there with the funny pages, working out the puzzles.