She was sitting at a black plastic table that had come with the house, built into the living/dining room wall. The top of it was designed to look like marble. But it didn’t really look like anything but plastic pretending to be marble.
“You don’t talk?” He said this in the same tone of voice somebody might use to say, “You’ve been to China?” Chummy, like me being a Southern female who didn’t talk made me interesting, as opposed to a complete freak.
I shook my head.
“She ain’t mute or nothing. She just don’t talk, cuz she don’t want to.”
Cora relayed all this for informational purposes only. She had been explaining this situation to newbies for over ten years now, and she was beyond bored with the whole thing.
He reached out and squeezed my hand. “Well, you keep gathering them thoughts till you got something good to say, hear?”
Mr. Farrell was very nice. Very charming. I would have smiled and squeezed his hand back, except that I hated him, because I really did not understand why he was here with Cora when he had a perfectly beautiful family at home.
I took the ten dollars and a library book and left. When I got outside, I noticed that Mr. Farrell’s Saab wasn’t parked in our driveway. Apparently Mr. Farrell had decided that it was better not to advertise his affair to the entire neighborhood. Still, I wondered how he had gotten here. I couldn’t see him walking all the way from his house on the far outskirts of town.
That gave me an idea about what to do with all the spare time I suddenly had to fill now that Cora was not going to the bar that night. I walked down dark country roads, untamed by streetlamps. Taking a page from that Harriet Tubman biography that I had read, I followed the North Star through the woods until I emerged from the glen in back of Farrell Manor—that’s what they had renamed it: Farrell Manor. They had even taken the Glass Plantation sign down and replaced it with one that had “Farrell Manor” written in gold cursive letters against a green background.
The house was large and white, with columns and everything, as if it was trying to do its best Gone with the Wind impersonation. And I imagined that if and when I ever saw an actual human being on the large porch they would be dwarfed by the house’s enormity. I won’t go too far into the detail of the house, because I don’t remember it as well as I used to. But even by Hollywood standards, it was enormous. I believed Corey’s stories about all its bedrooms and the live-in maid as soon as I laid eyes on it. And when I walked around the perimeter, I saw that the Farrells had also put in a tennis court, which was such a foreign thing in a town like Glass that it felt a little like staring at a spaceship.
Light peeked out from every heavily curtained window. I wondered what they were doing up there. Was Veronica inside, or had she followed her father to our house again?
No, I decided, she hadn’t. I hadn’t seen her car outside our house, and really, what reason did she have to follow Mr. Farrell that night?
She knew where he was.
. . .
After about a month, I got used to being Monkey Night again, and I gave up any illusions that the treatment would stop.
I’ve noticed in life that regular folks seem to really like people who hold them in cold disdain. I think this explains the popularity of a lot of people who I don’t think should necessarily be popular, like Martha Stewart and most of the English aristocracy.
From Veronica’s first day at Glass, she had made it clear that she hated the school and that she found the students in it to be small town, provincial, and boring. And the other students loved her for it.