“Excuse me,” a voice interrupted her eavesdropping, and she looked up to find a nicely manicured hand hovering in the air between them. Reflexively, she reached up to take it.
“Yes?” she asked as her hand was pumped up and down a few times. There was something familiar in the face that belonged to the hand, but she couldn’t place it.
“My girls are Pilar and Zara?” She pointed at the two little girls Lilah had run off with. The three of them were wrapped in towels in a circle, eating red, white, and blue Bomb Pops. “Are you Lilah’s . . .” She let her voice trail off, uncertain just who Zell was to Lilah.
“Neighbor. I’m her next-door neighbor. Her dad was busy today, so I said I’d take the kids off his hands.”
“Oh, well, that’s . . . nice.” She glanced over at the girls and back at Zell. “I think that Lilah had invited the girls over to play, and I had said yes, but then I thought I better find out whether you would approve, but now I see that . . . that’s probably not possible.”
“Yes, I doubt Lance—that’s her dad—would want extra kids over. He’s working from home these days, and well, it’s a bit of a difficult situation.”
The woman gave a cynical laugh. “Oh, I understand that,” she said, then more to herself, added, “All too well.” The little boy a few chairs away delivered a belly laugh as if on cue.
“What did you say your name was?”
“Oh, sorry, where are my manners? Jencey Wells.”
Zell squinted at her, trying to make sense of the different last name and the grown-up face. She had known a Jencey once, a girl the same age as her son Ty. That girl had been the little queen bee of the neighborhood, calling all the shots and determined to take the world by storm. All the boys had crushes on her, including her own son, though he would never admit it. Then all that unpleasantness had occurred, and she’d been spirited away in the night by her parents, hidden away in some college up north. Zell heard she’d turned into a Yankee, married some man up there with tons of money, and hardly came home to visit. Folks said her mother, Zell’s old friend Lois Cabot, barely knew her own grandchildren. Jencey Cabot was a cautionary tale passed around among the grandmother set.
“You’re not . . .” Zell started to ask.
Jencey gave her a wide, false grin and said, a little too loudly, “Yep, it’s me! Jencey Cabot.”
“Well, Jencey, how nice. You here visiting?” she asked. “I’m sure your mama is just tickled!”
“Yes,” Jencey said. “We, um, came to visit.”
“I’m Zell Boyette. You knew my sons, John Junior and Ty?” She almost said, “I think Ty had a crush on you,” but held her tongue. No one cared about that now.
“Oh sure, Mrs. Boyette, how are they?”
“They’re fine, doing fine. JJ’s married to a lovely girl. They’re both building their careers and absolutely refusing to have any grandchildren for me.” She didn’t mention Ty, and thankfully, Jencey didn’t ask after him. Ty wasn’t as . . . upwardly mobile as his brother.
“Well, please tell them I said hi,” Jencey said. She glanced over toward the bathrooms with a grimace and took a step in that direction. Her girls were coming out, laughing and jostling each other. One of them turned on the outside shower and stuck her head under it, being silly.
“Jencey?” Zell heard the young woman with the little boy say, stopping Jencey before she could make her exit. The girl was up off her chair and over to where Jencey and Zell were in no time. She wrapped her arms around the startled Jencey, then stepped back to give her a good look. “I can’t believe it’s you! You’re here! You’re back!” she marveled.
“Bryte?” Jencey asked, looking as stunned as her friend. Zell was witnessing a reunion. “Bryte Bennett? I can’t believe it!” Jencey reached out and gave her friend another hug then pulled back to give her a good look. “You’re all grown up.”
The other young woman, another child whose mother had once been one of the women Zell whiled away her summer days with, laughed and said, “So are you!” Zell couldn’t believe she hadn’t recognized her, either. But now that she heard the name, she thought, Of course.
“You look just great!” Jencey said to Bryte. “I mean, really beautiful.” There was a note of incredulity in her voice, overshadowing the compliment, if you asked Zell. But both young women had all but forgotten she was there.
Bryte colored. “Um, thanks.” She looked down at the little boy hovering at her knee, taking the chance to veer the conversation away from the uncomfortable fact of her beauty. Zell remembered this girl as being sort of plain as a child. She’d certainly grown into the name; light emanated from her now.
“This is my son, Christopher,” Bryte said. “He’s almost three. And you? I heard you have kids?”
Zell started to speak, to point out something that would loop her back into the conversation, to make her presence in their midst necessary. But she thought better of it. She listened to the two younger women talk, feeling superfluous not unlike the discarded towels, the crumpled juice boxes, the wet footprints that appeared on the concrete, then just as quickly faded away.
JENCEY
The girls were coming out of that dirty bathroom sans flip-flops, and she’d been about to go warn them (again) about the dangers of foot fungi when someone called out to her. She turned to take in this person who knew her name, her brain taking a few seconds to register just who she was seeing. She hadn’t expected to run into Bryte here, though now she realized it had always been a likely encounter. Bryte had never intended to go far.
Deep down she’d known that this moment—or one close to it—would come. She couldn’t wind up back in her childhood neighborhood and not run headlong into the people from that childhood. In hindsight, taking the girls up to the pool might not have been the smartest move. But she’d been desperate to take their minds off things. When they were playing in the pool and making new friends, they weren’t asking her what would happen next. And at the pool she wasn’t under her mother’s watchful, concerned eye.
Bryte had married Everett. Of course she’d known that. Her parents had gone to the wedding, urged her to come, too. “Bring Arch,” they’d said, as if Arch’s presence would alleviate the awkwardness. But she’d been nursing Zara and begged off, saying it was just too hard to travel with a nursing baby. It had been a lie that no one could argue with. She’d sent the happy couple an expensive silver tray.
She examined the little boy holding on to Bryte’s hand—Bryte and Everett’s child, how strange it all was—and looked for a trace of Everett. The hair and eye colors were the same. But mostly he just looked like Bryte. This heartened her some, gave her the courage to keep standing there making small talk with the girl she had once both loved and betrayed, and who had ultimately betrayed her right back. But could it really be called betrayal? Now that they were older, she wasn’t as certain that’s what it had been.
She knew what real betrayal was now. An image entered her mind: Arch behind the glass in prison.