them, they had a blast. They started to leave around five o’clock, but Emma Deane, Abra’s closest friend, stayed for supper. Abra, resplendent in a red skirt and off-the-shoulder peasant blouse, bubbled with good cheer. She exclaimed over the charm bracelet Dan gave her, hugged him, kissed him on the cheek. He smelled perfume. That was new.
When Abra left to accompany Emma back to her house, the two of them chattering their way happily down the walk, Lucy leaned toward Dan. Her mouth was pursed, there were new lines around her eyes, and her hair was showing the first touches of gray. Abra seemed to have put the True Knot behind her; Dan thought Lucy never would. “Will you talk to her? About the plates?”
“I’m going outside to watch the sun go down over the river. Maybe you’ll send her to visit with me a little when she gets back from the Deanes’.”
Lucy looked relieved, and Dan thought David did, as well. To them she would always be a mystery. Would it help to tell them she would always be one to him? Probably not.
“Good luck, chief,” Billy said.
On the back stoop where Abra had once lain in a state that wasn’t unconsciousness, John Dalton joined him. “I’d offer to give you moral support, but I think you have to do this alone.”
“Have you tried talking to her?”
“Yes. At Lucy’s request.”
“No good?”
John shrugged. “She’s pretty closed up on the subject.”
“I was, too,” Dan said. “At her age.”
“But you never broke every plate in your mother’s antique breakfront, did you?”
“My mother didn’t have a breakfront,” Dan said.
He walked down to the bottom of the Stones’ sloping backyard and regarded the Saco, which had, courtesy of the declining sun, become a glowing scarlet snake. Soon the mountains would eat the last of the sunlight and the river would turn gray. Where there had once been a chainlink fence to block the potentially disastrous explorations of young children, there was now a line of decorative bushes. David had taken the fence down the previous October, saying Abra and her friends no longer needed its protection; they could all swim like fish.
But of course there were other dangers.
2
The color on the water had faded to the faintest pink tinge—ashes of roses—when Abra joined him. He didn’t have to look around to know she was there, or to know she had put on a sweater to cover her bare shoulders. The air cooled quickly on spring evenings in central New Hampshire even after the last threat of snow was gone.
(I love my bracelet Dan)
She had pretty much dropped the uncle part.
(I’m glad)
“They want you to talk to me about the plates,” she said. The spoken words had none of the warmth that had come through in her thoughts, and the thoughts were gone. After the very pretty and sincere thank-you, she had closed her inner self off to him. She was good at that now, and getting better every day. “Don’t they?”
“Do you want to talk about them?”
“I told her I was sorry. I told her I didn’t mean to. I don’t think she believed me.”
(I do)
“Because you know. They don’t.”
Dan said nothing, and passed on only a single thought:
(?)
“They don’t believe me about anything!” she burst out. “It’s so unfair! I didn’t know there was going to be booze at Jennifer’s stupid party, and I didn’t have any! Still, she grounds me for two fucking weeks!”
(? ? ?)
Nothing. The river was almost entirely gray now. He risked a look at her and saw she was studying her sneakers—red to match her skirt. Her cheeks now also matched her skirt.
“All right,” she said at last, and although she still didn’t look at him, the corners of her lips turned up in a grudging little smile. “Can’t fool you, can I? I had one swallow, just to see what it tasted like. What the big deal is. I guess she smelled it on my breath when I came home. And guess what? There is no big deal. It tasted horrible.”
Dan did not reply to this. If he told her he had found his own first taste horrible, that he had also believed there was no big deal, no precious secret, she would have dismissed it as windy adult bullshit. You could not moralize children out of growing up. Or teach them how to do it.
“I really didn’t mean to break the plates,” she said in a small voice. “It was an accident, like I told her.