Jonathan Dee - Palladio

Word filtered quickly back to Ty that Molly had mentioned his name in conversation in a nondismissive way; he began turning up in places she knew he had no reason to be, never saying more than “Hey,” though he let his eyes stay on her longer now — nothing aggressive about it, just a loosening of his self-restraint. She did nothing different, and this, apparently, was all that was expected of her. Even though she had initiated whatever was going to happen, even though he had by all reports never been in this position before, he seemed to take it for granted that he would assume the role of the pursuer. A week went by. Then one evening Molly was in her room when Kay yelled upstairs to her that she had a phone call.

“Some boy,” she heard her mother saying as she came down the stairs.

“And so it begins,” said Roger.

Ty sounded dull, disaffected; with no preamble at all he asked if she wanted to go to the playground next Friday night. The elementary school playground after dark was always full of teenagers, smoking or surreptitiously drinking: it was a place Molly might well have gone on Friday anyway, alone or with Annika; there was nowhere else to go in town that you could make belong to you that way, unless you had a car. But Molly was not confused, because Ty, like any sixteen-year-old boy, was so easy to read: he wanted to make sure that if he was wrong about Molly or if the whole thing was some sort of mistake — the two of them had never really spoken for more than a few minutes — he would learn this in a place where he could easily pretend, in front of others, never to have thought otherwise at all. They would be in a group, and whatever might set it apart from any other Friday evening when they ran into each other there would be a matter only of an understanding between the two of them. She said she would do it.

“That’s excellent,” Ty said, with a little more animation.

The next afternoon Molly went to the Vincents’, and when she knocked it was Dennis who opened the door. He was not dressed in a way that suggested he was going back to the office. Her first sensation was annoyance. If she wasn’t needed, she couldn’t imagine being paid, and there were other things she could have been doing with her time.

“Have I made a mistake?” she said, though in fact Dennis was smiling at her as if he’d been expecting her.

“No, no,” he said softly, absently, “I’m sorry, I ought to have called you, to give you the choice, I didn’t know I’d be home so early. But I’d like you to stay. The kids are in the yard playing. I need you here. They’re so attached to you.”

Something was wrong with him. He seemed upset, though he was trying to hide it — the way a parent will try to act as if everything is normal in order to avoid transferring fear to the children. He was staring at her. It was strange that he was still standing in the doorway.

“So how are you?” he said, too loudly.

This was interesting, in the way that misfortune is interesting, to the point where it was hard to take her eyes off him; she wanted to stay in the room, to see what would happen next, but at the same time not to be in the room, not to be a part of whatever was taking shape. She remembered the two children, and that decided it for her, for the moment.

“I’ll just get a soda,” she said, stepping forward, “if that’s okay, and I’ll go make sure Kevin and Beth are all right.”

“Oh,” he said, finally backing out of her way. “Okay.”

A few hours later Mrs Vincent came home. Molly had dinner with the kids and then Dennis drove her back to Bull’s Head. His face was red. He didn’t say a single word to her on the way, not even when she opened the door and said goodbye to him. At home there was something of a celebration: Richard had been accepted to Berkeley, and though Kay and Roger made several plaintive jokes about his getting as far away from home as possible, mostly they seemed relieved to know that now the worst-case scenario still had him going to college somewhere. Roger even let Molly have a glass of wine. While they were all still downstairs, Molly went up to her parents’ bedroom and looked at herself for a minute in the big semicircular mirror above her mother’s dressing table.

Friday night she told her mother she was going to Annika’s house; she met Ty outside the Bull’s Head sign. He acted just like any other boy on a date, bluff and nervous, and she felt a little disappointed in the first few minutes. There were eight or ten other kids at the playground, mostly boys. The girls sat on the swings, pushing off gently with their feet; the boys hung on the jungle gym or walked up the slide. When the sun went down they all became shadows, and one or two pairs moved off into the darkness. Ty produced a joint, which he and Molly shared. The leaves shivered in the wind, and whenever a car slowed down on the road in front of the school, they all stopped what they were doing for a moment and turned their heads to listen like deer.

Ty walked Molly back to the sign, and they kissed, taking a moment first to throw out the gum Ty had brought to mask their breath for their parents — not that his parents would ever notice, he said, but he didn’t know what hers might be like. It struck her then how much thought he had given to tonight. All of his tentativeness, which she had been waiting for all night, was in his kiss. She held her hands still on his back, wondering where under his shirt the unseen, damaged skin was, wanting to avoid touching it not out of squeamishness but simply out of a fear of offending him. She let him put his hands on her breasts over her sweater, but when he tried to pull out the tails of her shirt his hands were cold and she gently pushed them away. He didn’t pursue it. He counted on being stopped, maybe not right at that point, but at some point.

“See you,” he said curtly, trying to behave a certain way, but he had to turn his back in order to hide the fact that he was smiling.

Monday at school he asked if she wanted to go to the movies in Schenectady with him — he had his license and had pledged an unspecified future favor to his older brother in return for one evening with his car. Molly’s parents had a rule against unchaperoned dates involving cars, but the important thing to them was the rule itself, not its vigilant enforcement; so she told Ty to meet her in front of Annika’s house on Route 3, where she would spend the night. It was a deception that meant nothing to her, but she could see Ty’s confidence swell as she related the plan.

That Wednesday at the Vincents’, Dennis wasn’t there when she arrived, and in fact when Mrs Vincent came home at quarter to eight he still hadn’t been heard from. She insisted that Molly must be starving and that she stay for dinner. When Dennis came home at nine, his tie loosened, he seemed surprised to see Molly at the table, doing her homework.

“There you are,” his wife said, coming out of the kitchen. “Listen, I know you must have had a horrible day, I hate to ask you, but it’s Bethany’s bedtime now. Can you give Molly a lift home?”

He nodded somewhat glumly, turned and went back to the car without a word. Molly got in beside him. They were approaching the center of town when Dennis suddenly said — a little hoarsely, as if he had not spoken in quite some time — “Nine minutes, it takes, to drive from our house to yours.”

Molly looked at him. She wondered if she ought to be afraid of him, but he seemed so weary, so beaten, it was hard to feel any sort of tangible danger at all.

“You don’t say much,” he went on. “It’s hard to get a word out of you. It’s hard to figure out what you’re thinking about.”

He seemed to be in some kind of distress, and Molly felt genuinely chastened by it; she wanted to say something reassuring to him now but she had no idea what to say.