“You’re right,” Jay says. “It is bad timing.”
At the curb outside Mr. Carr’s one-story house, Lon offers to talk to the rest of the neighbors, starting with the house to the right of Mr. Carr’s. Jay is looking to the south, where Arlee is tending the memorial site. Overhead, the clouds have parted, white sunlight peeking through their cottony strands. Arlee has shed her yellow windbreaker, laying it beside her on the concrete. She looks up and sees Jay, but doesn’t say anything, not right away, her hands keeping busy, and he has a stinging, disconsolate worry that she too is angry with him. He didn’t realize until this moment how deeply he thinks of Mrs. Delyvan as more than just a client, or rather the depths of care and concern that word can hold, something, in fact, close to love. Perhaps it’s this little-known facet of practicing law that truly threatens his legal career. When it comes to love, on the other side of his wife’s death Jay is a foundling, a newborn, thin skinned and pink, sure of nothing save the sting of loss, the B side of every breath he takes. And for a man like Jay, whose cynicism is only skin deep, little more than a pose, a cover, it occurs to him that he will eventually be made to reconcile love with loss, one way or another. As he looks closer at the parade of crepe myrtles down Ledwicke, the carefully tended lawns and proud homes, lived in and loved by settlers, pioneers who, a generation before Jay, had paved the way for everything he has in his life, starting with the power of protest, the example they gracefully laid, brick by brick–and as he thinks of Arlee on her knees, caring for the memorial of a girl she didn’t know–it dawns on him that he may have kept Pleasantville on his desk not for the money, his supposed way out, but for a back way in, a way back to himself. He wants Pleasantville to survive the hits it’s taken in recent years. He wants Pleasantville to survive, whatever change is waiting around the corner. “Go on,” he tells Lonnie, speaking softly. “I’ll catch up.”
As Lonnie starts for the house next door to Mr. Carr’s, Arlee stands slowly, pushing herself up and waving off Jay’s offer of help. “Well, aren’t you having one hell of a month, Mr. Porter?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, you’re doing the right thing, whether you know it or not.”
She pulls a small handkerchief, white with a pattern of faded blue hyacinths tracing the edges, from her pants pocket and wipes a few pebbles of dirt sticking to her hands. Her pink camellias now hold a humble place at the foot of the memorial. Above them, the clouds close in again, but the smell of rain is gone, leaving behind the damp, milky, sweet scent of wet grass. Jay shoves his hands into his pockets, wishing in the cool gray air that he had on a real coat.
“Can’t help feeling I’ve let you all down.”
“Why? ’Cause Magnus Carr lost faith?”
“He’s not the only one.”
“Folks is scared, that’s all, don’t even know half of what they’re scared of, it’s just a feeling out here that the ground is unsteady, that Pleasantville, as most of us have known it, is in trouble. First, there was the whooping and hollering over the bayou development, if it’s even real, and what it might mean for us. And now this thing with Neal, the idea of a Hathorne mixed up in this,” she says, gesturing toward the marked spot where Alicia Nowell was last seen, the corners of the paper notes lifting in the breeze. “And when folks get scared, they act out, make bad choices. We’ve made that mistake before, in our first fight with ProFerma. We’d been so stunned by the freeway coming through, our first big loss as a community, that when it looked like we couldn’t keep ProFerma out, we just kind of gave in. Sam went in and negotiated a good number of jobs for the community, the best we thought we could do. But you see how that turned out in the end. Now folks is henny-pennying that the sky is falling, moving too fast out of fear. You still got plenty of clients,” she says assuredly, reaching out to pat his forearm to show her support. “You’ll do what you need to do with this trial, and then we’ll finish up what we started on the other thing.”
“Nobody out here really thinks Neal did it, do they?”
“They don’t know what to think.”
“Let me ask you something,” he says, swinging wide of the question of whether she believes Neal did it, and asking, instead, “You know A.G.?”
“What in the world are you asking about him for?”
Jay shrugs, playing at nonchalance, mild curiosity. “There’s a story there.”
“More than one, in fact.”
“Start with Sam then, what you know about it. Why’d the two fall out?”