“There are no lightning rods up there,” Roger Chatsworth said thoughtfully. “No lightning rods at all.”
4
The three of them sat in the living room of the big house, Chuck by the telephone. He looked doubtfully at his father. “Most of them won’t want to change their plans this late,” he said.
“They’ve got plans to go out, that’s all,” Roger said. “They can just as easily come here.”
Chuck shrugged and began dialing.
They ended up with about half the couples who had been planning to go to Cathy’s that graduation evening, and Johnny was never really sure why they came. Some probably came simply because it sounded like a more interesting party and because the drinks were on the house. But word traveled fast, and the parents of a good many of the kids here had been at the lawn party that afternoon—as a result, Johnny spent much of the evening feeling like an exhibit in a glass case. Roger sat in the corner on a stool, drinking a vodka martini. His face was a studied mask.
Around quarter of eight he walked across the big bar play-room combination that took up three-quarters of the basement level, bent close to Johnny and bellowed over the roar of Elton John, “You want to go upstairs and play some cribbage?”
Johnny nodded gratefully.
Shelley was in the kitchen, writing letters. She looked up when they came in, and smiled. “I thought you two masochists were going to stay down there all night. It’s not really necessary, you know.”
“I’m sorry about all of this,” Johnny said. “I know how crazy it must seem.”
“It does seem crazy,” Shelley said. “No reason not to be candid about that. But having them here is really rather nice. I don’t mind.”
Thunder rumbled outside. Johnny looked around. Shelley saw it and smiled a little. Roger had left to hunt for the cribbage board in the dining room welsh dresser.
“It’s just passing over, you know,” she said. “A little thunder and a sprinkle of rain.”
“Yes,” Johnny said.
She sighed her letter in a comfortable scrawl, folded it, sealed it, addressed it, stamped it. “You really experienced something, didn’t you, Johnny?”
“Yes.”
“A momentary faintness,” she said. “Possibly caused by a dietary deficiency. You’re much too thin, Johnny. It might have been a hallucination, mightn’t it?”
“No, I don’t think so.”
Outside, thunder growled again, but distantly.
“I’m just as glad to have him home. I don’t believe in astrology and palmistry and clairvoyance and all of that, but ... I’m just as glad to have him home. He’s our only chick ... a pretty damned big chick now, I suspect you’re thinking, but it’s easy to remember him riding the little kids’ merry-go-round in the town park in his short pants. Too easy, perhaps. And it’s nice to be able to share the ... the last rite of his boyhood with him.”
“It’s nice that you feel that way,” Johnny said. Suddenly he was frightened to find himself close to tears. In the last six or eight months it seemed to him that his emotional control had slipped several notches.
“You’ve been good for Chuck. I don’t mean just teaching him to read. In a lot of ways.”
“I like Chuck.”
“Yes,” she said quietly. “I know you do.”
Roger came back with the cribbage board and a transistor radio tuned to WMTQ, a classical station that broadcast from the top of Mount Washington.
“A little antidote for Elton John, Aerosmith, Foghat, et al,” he said. “How does a dollar a game sound, Johnny?”
“It sounds fine.”
Roger sat down, rubbing his hands. “Oh you’re goin home poor,” he said.
5
They played cribbage and the evening passed. Between each game one of them would go downstairs and make sure no one had decided to dance on the pool table or go out back for a little party of their own. “No one is going to impregnate anyone else at this party if I can help it,” Roger said.
Shelley had gone into the living room to read. Once an hour the music on the radio would stop and the news would come on and Johnny’s attention would falter a little. But there was nothing about Cathy’s in Somersworth—not at eight, nine, or ten.
After the ten o’clock news, Roger said: “Getting ready to hedge your prediction a little, Johnny?”
“No.”
The weather forecast was for scattered thundershowers, clearing after midnight.
The steady bass signature of K.C. and the Sunshine Band came up through the floor.
“Party’s getting loud,” Johnny remarked.
“The hell with that,” Roger said, grinning. “The party’s getting drunk. Spider Parmeleau is passed