Toward 10 p.m., Cath corners Polly by the ice machine: “What about that thing we talked about?”
Polly waits a beat, as if puzzled, as if it’s so inconsequential as to have slipped her mind. “Oh, that.”
“Do you have my money?”
“No.”
“Tonight is the deadline.”
Polly shrugs. “What can I do? You didn’t give me very much notice.”
“I’m going to tell everyone.”
“Fine.”
“Not just Adam. Everybody.”
“Okay.”
“You’ll have to leave. This is a small town. People won’t want to come here once they know. Casper won’t be able to keep you on.”
She shrugs. “I’ll let him be the one to tell me that, if that’s okay with you.”
Her coolness infuriates Cath. She’s the nervous one now, worried that her bombshell is all fizzle, no pop. She has to make good on her threat, or she’ll look like a fool. She is a fool. She has blackmailed Polly into doing the best thing. No more secrets, from anyone.
Well, almost no secrets. Just the one, and it’s a happy one. Happy secrets are okay.
*
That night, Polly doesn’t slip Adam the usual Adam and Eve note signaling that she hopes for a visit from him. He’s puzzled, she can tell, but she needs to be alone and sit in the quiet of this new life. She walks home, finds herself humming. She likes it here, in Belleville. She’s happy to stay. Maybe not forever-forever, but for a good long while.
She’s having a glass of wine at her metal-top table when she hears a slight tap. She smiles. Adam jury-rigged the door this morning, but it doesn’t really lock. She’s had her alone time and now she’s glad he presumed he could drop by.
“Come in,” she calls out. “It’s not like I could lock it now if I tried.”
Only it’s Cath.
“If you’re going to stay, you better give me some money,” she says without preamble, her words a slurry rush. There’s booze on her breath.
“I am staying,” Polly says. “And Casper says if he has to let one of us go, it’s going to be you.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Ask him.”
“Then you damn well better give me some money.”
“I don’t have any money.”
“That’s not what I heard.”
“I can’t be responsible for what you’ve heard. I don’t have any money.” A pause. “Although I guess I’ll have a lot more when I’m the only one waiting tables at the High-Ho.”
“What about your husband?”
“My husband’s dead. As you know. I killed him, and I don’t care who knows anymore. My sentence was commuted. I was defending my own life, in a sense.”
“Not him. The one who came looking for you. I bet he’d pay something for what I know.”
Polly laughs at this. She’s not sure what’s funnier, the idea of Gregg having money or Gregg giving it up. Does Cath think there’s going to be a custody battle over Jani? “Go ask him. Heck, take him, he’s available. Make sure you use a condom, though. His sperm is pretty determined.”
“I bet you got knocked up on purpose.”
Polly sees herself in the bathroom in her apartment four years ago, staring with dismay at a beaming pregnancy stick, so pinkly confident that it was sharing good news. She had killed a man, gone to prison, endured public shame, reinvented herself. But she couldn’t bear the idea of an abortion. At the time, she told herself it was because of being raised Catholic. With her parents dead—there were those who said Polly’s conviction put the final nail in her mother’s coffin—she should have been free of the church. She was already down for one mortal sin, why not another?
Because, in the back of her head, she couldn’t help being curious: What would it be like this time? How hard could it be, compared to what she had already done and endured? She felt guilty even thinking such thoughts, disloyal to Joy. But the truth was, she wanted the experience of being mother to a normal kid. Even if the father was Gregg.
And Jani was a good kid, although Polly loved Joy a little bit more. Mothers aren’t supposed to say that, feel that, but Polly can’t help acknowledging the difference. Jani’s a sweetheart, a natural-born winner. She’d be fine. Joy needed her.
When she answers Cath, it’s with a heat generated by these memories, the losses she has known. The father who dried up like a cornhusk, the mother who followed him too quickly, her heart doubly broken. The two daughters, neither one with Polly now because she has done what is best for them.
“No, I don’t play it that way. But maybe you should. It’s probably the only way you’ll ever get a man to stay, getting knocked up. Good luck with that. Adam says you’re a rotten lay.”
*
The dew is heavy, Polly’s feet are drenched by the time she knocks at the door to room 3. The rain that has been threatening all night starts to fall in sheets and there are thunderclaps, full and close, almost loud enough to drown out the sirens in the distance. It’s the last day of August—actually the first day of September—and the first true cold front of the season lies behind this storm. Almost every Labor Day weekend, it seems, the first true cold front arrives.
“Rabbit, rabbit,” she says to the night air. But maybe it only counts after you go to sleep and wake up?
Adam opens his door, sleepy, confused. He’s really handsome. She considered his looks too bland the first time she saw him, but now she thinks he’s the best-looking man she’s ever known.
“What the—? What time is it?”
“I missed you.”
“But—”
“I told Casper today. He doesn’t care. Everyone knows about us now. Everyone who matters. Turns out he knew all along. Guess we’re not the supersleuths we thought we are.”
“I think you mean stealthy,” he says. “Not sleuths.” He looks uneasy.
“Sleuth, stealth. Let me in, college boy. I’m soaked.”
She is on top of him when the second wave of sirens start.
“Whatever’s burning, they must have had to send for another crew,” he says, his hands pressing hard into her shoulder blades. “From Millsboro or wherever. I wonder how anything can burn in this rain.”
“Who cares,” she says, moving faster. “We’re safe.”
She stays all night, into the morning. He’s the one who suggests they go out to breakfast at the diner on Main. She contemplates last night’s dress, still damp from the downpour.
“I can’t go out in that.”
“We’ll swing by your place.”
She and Adam stroll hand in hand toward the center of town, public at last, rooted at last, a couple. No more shadows, no more hiding. The morning feels as if the world is new, bright and crisp and ready for back to school. But an acrid smoke lingers in the breeze, making her nostrils flare with memories of Ditmars. He used to come home smelling like this. A combination of smoke and chemicals, sometimes even a whiff of death, although he always swore the sweetish scorched smell was from insulation, not people. And there was no question that Ditmars knew what people smelled like when they burned.
Yet, for all her knowledge, Polly is not prepared to turn the corner and see rubble where her apartment once stood. Everything—everything—is gone. Smoke is rising from the debris, the volunteer firefighters still bustle about, their long night still not over.
It’s shameful, but she starts to weep for her small array of possessions, the first things she’s been allowed to choose for herself. Her bed, her quilt, her table, her blue glasses. The silk bathrobe. The sundresses from the Purple Heart. Tiny things, material things, objects that can be replaced. But they could have been the building blocks of this new life.