French Braid(12)

As for Robin, all he offered was, “At least he’s mannerful; I’ll say that.”

There was a brief silence.

“Alice loved her father very much,” her narrator said, “but sometimes she despaired of him.”

Then Robin drove to the Esso station to put some air in the tires, and Mercy traveled about the cabin collecting her sketching supplies. David, seated on the rug with a coloring book, told Alice, “I like Jump Watkins better than Trent. Don’t you?”

“Ah, well, Trent is a college man, don’t you know,” Alice said.

“He’s not a man,” David said.

Before Alice could explain that she had been speaking sarcastically, their mother added her own two bits from the kitchen. “Maybe not to you, hon,” she called, “but I can see Alice’s point: he’s way more sophisticated than Jump Watkins is.”

David and Alice exchanged a glance, but they didn’t say anything.

That was the night when Lily came back so late that everyone except Alice had already gone to bed. Alice was listening to the radio in the living room. (The cabin didn’t have a television set. She was losing her mind with boredom.) The program she had hit upon was some kind of request show; a DJ read out people’s letters and then played the songs they asked for. “Here’s one for Jerry from Kate, she misses him very much,” he said, and “The Man in the Raincoat” started up. Alice found this interesting. (What kind of person must Jerry be, if “taken my money and skipped out of town” brought him to Kate’s mind?) Then a pair of headlights swung across the dimly lit room, and a moment later she heard footsteps crossing the porch and Lily walked in the door. “You still up?” she asked Alice. “What time is it?”

“You’re asking me that?” Alice said. But when she heard her own tone, more a mother’s tone than a sister’s, she covered it quickly with “Have a good evening?”

“I had a wonderful evening,” Lily said. She flung herself on the couch next to Alice. She smelled of cigarettes—probably Trent’s, since her one attempt at smoking had made her throw up. “I did kind of ask about the going-steady thing,” she said. “He’d paid me this really sweet compliment; I’m not going to repeat it; and I said, ‘I bet you tell your girl back home that, too,’ and he said, ‘What girl back home?’ and I said, ‘Oh, now, I know you must have a steady girlfriend,’ and he said, ‘Why would I be sitting here with you, then?’ So!”

“So,” Alice said.

Lily’s mouth looked swollen, and her cheeks were flushed. She seemed extra perky and excited; sort of artificial. “Alice,” she said, “can I ask you a favor?”

“What’s that?” Alice asked warily.

“Suppose if Trent takes it into his head to, I don’t know, propose or something.”

“Propose!”

“Or, I don’t know. It could happen. I mean, this is not some little puppy-love thing. This is serious! So I’m just saying, suppose you happen to get wind of it. He asks you my ring size or something.”

“Lily—”

“Just let me say this! If he should mention it to you, could you let him know I’ve always wanted to be proposed to in a gazebo?”

“What?”

Lily leaned toward her, clasping her hands tightly in her lap. “Ever since I was a little girl,” she said, “I’ve pictured a guy in a gazebo asking me to marry him. I know it sounds silly, but…and guess what! Where Trent’s folkses’ lake house is, there’s this house next door even bigger and it’s got the prettiest little gazebo in the backyard. I couldn’t believe it! I happened to glance over when we were on his patio and I could not believe it.”

“Lily,” Alice said, “Trent is not going to propose to you.”

“You don’t know that!”

“You’re fifteen years old. Not even old enough to drive yet. And you met him just four days ago. Besides which, another thing is…Trent is not somebody you should trust.”

“You don’t even know him!”

“I know him well enough to see he’s a guy on the make. He’s stuck here with just his family, none of his friends nearby, and he spies this little underage girl hanging around all starry-eyed and ‘Ho-ho-ho!’ he says to himself. ‘What have we here?’ he says.”

“Now, that is just mean,” Lily told her. “You’re just jealous you don’t have anyone. Talk about stuck someplace! Just because you’ve got no one yourself, you want to ruin things for me.”

And she jumped up and stomped off to their bedroom, slamming the door behind her.

She’d been loud enough so that Alice half expected their parents to hear. She needed them to hear. She glanced hopefully toward their room, but their door stayed shut and silent.



* * *



—

“See if you can get your boy into the water,” Robin told Mercy over breakfast the next morning. “It appears he wants to stay on dry land and admire the lake from a distance.”

Mercy turned to look at David. He was dusting his Cheerios with spoonfuls of cocoa powder; he called such experiments “cooking.” “Is that true?” she asked him. “You don’t like going in the water?”