'I'm Sarah Bracknell. Johnny and I are good friends. Going together, I suppose you'd say. May I sit down?'
'Johnny's girl friend?' Mrs. Smith asked in a sharp, almost accusing tone. A few of the others looked around briefly and then back at their own tattered magazines.
'Yes,' she said. 'Johnny's girl.'
'He never wrote that he had a lady friend,' Mrs. Smith said in that same sharp tone. 'No, he never did at all.'
'Hush, Mother,' Herb said. 'Sit down, Miss . -. Bracknell, wasn't it?'
'Sarah,' she said gratefully, and took a chair. 'I...'
'No, he never did,' Mrs. Smith said sharply. 'My boy loved God, but just lately he maybe fell away just a bit. The judgment of the Lord God is sudden, you know. That's what makes backsliding so dangerous. You know not the day nor the hour ...
'Hush,' Herb said. People were looking around again. He fixed his wife with a stern glance. She looked back defiantly for a moment, but his gaze didn't waver. Vera dropped her eyes. She had closed the Bible but her fingers fiddled restlessly along the pages, as if longing to get back to the colossal demolition derby of Job's life, enough bad luck to put her own and her son's in some sort of bitter perspective.
'I was with him last night,' Sarah said, and that made the woman look up again, accusingly. At that moment Sarah remembered the biblical connotation of being 'with' somebody and felt herself beginning to blush. It was as if the woman could read her thoughts.
'We went to the county fair...'
'Places of sin and evil,' Vera Smith said clearly.
'I'll tell you one last time to hush, Vera,' Herb said grimly, and clamped one of his hands over one of his wife's. 'I mean it, now. This seems like a nice girl here, and I won't have you digging at her. Understand?'
'Sinful places,' Vera repeated stubbornly.
'Will you hush?'
'Let me go. I want to read my Bible.'
He let her go. Sarah felt confused embarrassment. Vera opened her Bible and began to read again, lips moving.
'Vera is very upset, Herb said. 'We're both upset. You are too, from the look of you.'
'Yes.'
'Did you and Johnny have a good time last night?' he asked. 'At your fair?'
'Yes,' she said, the lie and truth of that simple word all mixed up in her mind. 'Yes we did, until... well, I ate a bad hot dog or something. We had my car and Johnny drove me home to my place in Veazie. I was pretty sick to my stomach. He called a cab. He said he'd call me in sick at school today. And that's the last time I saw him.' The tears started to come then and she didn't want to cry in front of them, particularly not in front of Vera Smith, but there was no way to stop it. She fumbled a Kleenex out of her purse and held it to her face.
'There, now,' Herb said, and put an arm around her.
'There, now.' She cried, and it seemed to her in some unclear way that he felt better for having someone to comfort; his wife had found her own dark brand of comfort in Job's story and it didn't include him.
A few people turned around to gawk; through the prisms of her tears they seemed like a crowd. She had a bitter knowledge of what they were thinking: Better her than me, better all three of them than me or mine, guy must be dying, guy must have gotten his head crushed for her to cry like that. Only a matter of time before some doctor comes down and takes them into a private room to tell them that -Somehow she choked off the tears and got hold of her-self. Mrs. Smith sat bolt upright, as if startled out of a nightmare, noticing neither Sarah's tears nor her husband's effort to comfort her. She read her Bible.
'Please,' Sarah said. 'How bad is it? Can we hope?'
Before Herb could answer, Vera spoke up. Her voice was a dry bolt of certified doom: 'There's hope in God, Missy.'
Sarah saw the apprehensive flicker in Herb's eyes and thought: He thinks it's driven her crazy. And maybe it has.
4.
A long afternoon stretching into evening.
Sometime after two P.M., when the schools began to let out, a number of Johnny's students began to come in, wearing fatigue coats and strange hats and washed-out jeans. Sarah didn't see many of the kids she thought of as the button-down crowd - upward-bound, college-oriented kids, clear of eye and brow. Most of the kids who bothered to come in were the freaks and long-hairs.
A few came over and asked Sarah in quiet tones what she knew about Mr. Smith's condition. She could only shake her head and say she had heard nothing. But one of the girls, Dawn Edwards, who had a crush on Johnny, read the depth of Sarah's fear in her face. She burst into tears. A nurse came and asked her to leave.
'I'm sure she'll be all right,' Sarah said. She had a protective arm around Dawn's shoulders. 'Just give her a minute or two.
'No, I don't want to stay,' Dawn said, and left in a hurry, knocking one of the hard plastic contour chairs over with a clatter. A few moments later Sarah saw the girl sitting out on the steps in the cold, late, October sunshine with her head on her knees.