Philip. I looked away. It was a Sunday in the middle of Pennsylvania, the day already too bright and hot. The only things that marked distances here were telephone poles. New York-and Philip-might as well have been on another planet.
People savored Sundays in New York. They shopped at the overpriced stores, they rode their bikes, they ate ice cream. My father used to take the dogs to the dog park in Park Slope, loading them into the car we used to have and driving them all there, circling Grand Army Plaza a million times before he found a parking space. He’d sing on the drive, his head hanging out the window like he was a dog, too. And I remembered thinking, He’s fine. He’s completely fine. The dogs made him so happy-sometimes, I thought they understood him better than people did. They always sensed when he was about to go back into the psych ward-they’d lie around the couch in a tight circle, guarding.
Philip probably had a million friends and a crammed schedule. A fantastic life.
I clicked on my seat belt and pushed the car into drive. ‘All right. If you’re sure.’
The road was dry and sparse. We passed a few signs for Amish delicacies, shoo-fly pie and funnel cake and fresh soft pretzels. Stella instructed me to leave in the dust a car with a bumper sticker that said USA: Love it or leave it.
‘So why were you going to see the Punxsutawney groundhog, anyway?’ I asked, because the silence between us was thick and pointed. I wanted to blame it on Samantha-before she’d visited, everything between us had been fine.
Stella shrugged. ‘It was something to do. We needed to get out of Cobalt. Clear our heads. Our lives were getting complicated.’
‘Why?’
She mashed her lips together and made a few tsk noises. ‘Oh, you know. Normal things. Fights, affairs.’
‘Your almost-affair? That thing in the hotel room?’
She glanced at me, horrified. ‘How did you know about that?’
‘You told me. During my grandmother’s wake, remember? You told me when we were on the porch at the funeral home.’ The story was so weird, I’d never forgotten it.
‘I most certainly did not.’ Stella’s eyes bulged. ‘I never told anyone about that.’
‘You said you put your ring in your pocket,’ I reminded her. ‘And when he went to the bathroom, you left.’
Stella’s jaw became even more sharply pronounced. ‘Well.’ She ran her hands along the cords of her neck, then pinched the flap of skin beneath her chin. ‘Well,’ she said again.
‘It’s okay. It’s not like I said anything to anyone. I mean, I didn’t tell my father, or Samantha, or anyone like that, if that’s what you’re worried about.’
‘I did that because of what Skip did,’ Stella blurted out. ‘I was driven to do that…with that man. I never would have, otherwise.’
A few signposts went by. There was a fan-shaped tree alone in the middle of a field. ‘What did Skip do?’
Stella sighed. ‘Oh, you know. The usual. Classic soap-opera story. I found him with someone else. They were in the park next to the fire station. You know it, the one with the tire swing? They were there. Sitting on the tire swing together, she on his lap. Kissing. It was so stupid, I was driving by, just going…I don’t know. To the market, maybe. To the florist’s. And I just looked to my left and there they were. In front of everyone. I marched over to them and started screaming something, I don’t even know what, and then the fire whistle started blaring. That crazy air-raid fire whistle, you know, blotting out the sound. I kept screaming though, even though they couldn’t hear me, and the fire truck comes out of the garage but they can’t get past because my car is there, and I’m still screaming and Jack Baker, you know Jack-or no, I guess you don’t, he’s dead-he tried to get me to calm down but I couldn’t, I just kept screaming, and finally someone moved my car for me and the fire truck got out. I think, actually, it was an ice cream parlor that was on fire. The one that later became the Dairy Queen; the one we stopped at on the drive out of town.’
She made a small hiccup on the word town. ‘Can you believe that? An ice cream parlor on fire? Now, that’s just about the last thing I would imagine. A bar and grill, maybe. A…a…store that sells wood and matches, certainly. But an ice cream parlor? Now, that just shouldn’t happen.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I whispered.
‘Oh, don’t be.’ She waved her hand, stifling a sniff. ‘This is a silly thing to talk about. I don’t know why I’m going into it. Maybe it’s because I think this Chevrolet man or whatever his name is will rape me. Maybe I want to confess things, like you’re a priest.’
I drove for a while, thinking. ‘So who was it?’
‘Who was what?’
‘You know. Who was the woman Skip was with?’
She stared straight ahead at the flat, unimpressive road. ‘He was…well, he was with Ruth.’
I squeezed the steering wheel tight, paying careful, careful attention, because I was certain I was going to wreck the car. ‘My grandmother?’
‘Yes.’
I took a breath. ‘He was with my grandmother.’