right.
“She wanted you to see all of them,” Brett said. “That’s what I think.”
“I’m not particularly interested in what you think on the subject, Brett Camber.” Her face felt hot. Her hands itched to strike him. A few moments ago, in the cafeteria, she had been loving him . . . just as important, she had felt like his friend. Where had those good feelings gone?
“I just wondered how she got so much dough.”
“That’s sort of a crude word to use for it, don’t you think?”
He shrugged, openly antagonistic now, provoking her purposely, she suspected. It went back to his perception of what had happened at lunch, but it went further back than that. He was contrasting his own way of life and his father’s way of life with another one. Had she thought he would automatically embrace the way that her sister and her husband lived, just because Charity wanted him to embrace it—a life-style that she herself had been denied, either by bad luck, her own stupidity, or both? Had he no right to criticize . . . or analyze?
Yes, she acknowledged that he did, but she hadn’t expected that his observation would be so unsettling (if intuitively) sophisticated, so accurate, or so depressingly negative.
“I suppose it was Jim who made the money,” she said. “You know what he does—”
“Yeah, he’s a pencil-pusher.”
But this time she refused to be drawn.
“If you want to see it that way. Holly married him when he was in college at the University of Maine in Portland, studying pre-law. While he was in law school in Denver, she worked a lot of crummy jobs to see that he got through. It’s often done that way. Wives work so their husbands can go to school and learn some special skill. . . .”
She was searching for Holly with her eyes, and finally thought she saw the top of her younger sister’s head several aisles to the left.
“Anyway, when Jim finally got out of school, he and Holly came east and he went to work in Bridgeport with a big firm of lawyers. He didn’t make much money then. They lived in a third-floor apartment with no air conditioning in the summer and not much heat in the winter. But he’s worked his way up, and now he’s what’s called a junior partner. And I suppose he does make a lot of money, by our standards.”
“Maybe she shows her credit cards around because sometimes she still feels poor inside,” Brett said.
She was struck by the almost eerie perceptiveness of that, as well. She ruffled his hair gently, no longer angry at him. “You did say you liked her.”
“Yeah, I do. There she is, right over there.”
“I see her.”
They went over and joined Holly, who already had an armload of curtains and was now prospecting for tablecloths.
The sun had finally gone down behind the house.
Little by little, the oven that was inside the Trentons’ Pinto began to cool off. A more-or-less steady breeze sprang up, and Tad turned his face into it gratefully. He felt better, at least for the time being, than he had all day. In fact, all the rest of the day before now seemed like a terribly bad dream, one he could only partly remember. At times he had gone away; had simply left the car and gone away. He could remember that. He had gone on a horse. He and the horse had ridden down a long field, and there were rabbits playing there, just like in that cartoon his mommy and daddy had taken him to see at the Magic Lantern Theater in Bridgton. There was a pond at the end of the field, and ducks in the pond. The ducks were friendly. Tad played with them. It was better there than with Mommy, because the monster was where Mommy was, the monster that had gotten out of his closet. The monster was not in the place where the ducks were. Tad liked it there, although he knew in a vague way that if he stayed in that place too long, he might forget how to get back to the car.
Then the sun had gone behind the house. There were cool shadows, almost thick enough to have a texture, like velvet. The monster had stopped trying to get them. The mailman hadn’t come, but at least now he was able to rest comfortably. The worst thing was being so thirsty. Never in his life had he wanted a drink so