Del squinted at me. “Well, we were supposed to go back to Anne’s, but then she canceled. Said she was too tired.”
“Do the police know how she died?” I asked Del. “How she got there to the trailer?”
“Officer Paul was there at the funeral,” she said. “He’s not so bad when he’s not in his uniform.” She raised her eyebrows at me, and I laughed.
Del pushed herself out of the chair. “We’re going back to Mary Rae’s mother’s house today,” she said. “She wants us to have Mary Rae’s clothes. To go through and see if we want anything.”
“That’s weird,” I said.
“No more weird than how you’re folding that shirt,” Del said. “You should come with us.”
Maybe she’d seen my wedding ring right away and had simply refrained from mentioning it. She walked over to the kitchen area and pulled open the refrigerator. “Remember when we used to buy boxes of Cracker Jack and dump them out because we only wanted the ring prize?”
I held my hand out. “It’s real,” I said, a little ashamed of the emotion in my voice. “We got married.”
Del shut the refrigerator door and crossed her arms over her chest. “You’re kidding me,” she said. “Right?”
Her eyes were wide, but something about her stance, her expression, made me wary. It was as if she were merely acting surprised, as if she had known about the wedding and was waiting for me to tell her so she could pretend to doubt me.
“You don’t really seem surprised,” I said.
“I don’t?” Del cried. “Seriously? This is a huge surprise to me.”
We stared at each other, and I could see Del holding her surprised expression, waiting for a cue to let it drop.
“What do you think?” I said. “Why don’t you say congratulations?”
“Congratulations!” Del said. “I guess. If that’s what you want.”
“Yes, it’s what I want. I wouldn’t have done it if it wasn’t.”
“Then wonderful,” Del said. “Perfect timing.”
“What do you mean by that?” I said.
“I mean you timed it so well, right on the day of a funeral.”
“I didn’t know that girl,” I said, but I did know her, and she was part of it all, in some strange way.
Del and I stood in the middle of my bedsit, watching each other.
“So are you going to come with us to her mother’s house?” she said. “Mrs. Bell?”
I smoothed the shirt I’d folded on the bed. “Maybe,” I said.
Randy picked us up an hour later, his red Firebird like a tropical fish at the dirty curb.
Del opened the passenger door and held the seat up so I could climb in back. Alice was there, wedged into the corner, as if afraid of being in close proximity to me. She and Randy had had little time to express their irritation about my presence before Del opened the car door.
“Hi, Alice,” I said.
She didn’t even bother offering her Milton girl version of a smile in return. She appraised me as if I’d worn the wrong outfit or said something offensive.
In the front seat Del was talking to Randy, pattering on about the funeral, and the parts she thought were nice, and then she looked at Alice. “I liked what you said about Mary Rae,” Del said.
“I made most of that up,” Alice said, quietly. “For her mother.”
Del smiled. “I thought so.”
Randy pulled out a fifth of blackberry brandy, and he passed it to the backseat to Alice, who tipped it back to take a long swallow. “What?” she said to me, though I hadn’t said a word. “We need some kind of fortification.” She held the bottle out to me. I accepted it and took a drink, the brandy sweet and burning the back of my throat.
We’d come to a streetlight, and Randy twisted around in the driver’s seat.
“Del said you weren’t a snob,” he said in his low voice.
We drove down Route 13 and into Milton, but we kept driving, Randy, Alice, and I drinking the brandy, and Del taking a rare sip, so that I didn’t feel the need to chastise her. We ended up at a local park, the lot recently plowed of snow, the woods surrounding us marked with hiking trails. I could hear the whine of snowmobiles, and Randy said how much he missed going out, how he had to sell his snowmobile to pay for technical school. “So I could have steady work for the rest of my life,” he said, without any hint of sarcasm.
We sat in the parking lot like teenagers. Alice lit a joint, and the car filled with the smoke. If Randy or Alice noticed the ring I wore, they didn’t mention it, and Del kept quiet about the whole thing, so that it seemed almost as if it had never happened. The sun came out for a moment above the bare trees and lit the inside of the car—the salt on the car windows, the strands of our hair, full of static and stuck to the upholstery—then disappeared again behind the masses of gray clouds.