over her head. She appeared frozen between her desire to make a pre-emptive strike and her mind’s struggling realization that this wasn’t the person she’d expected. It was, Bill thought later, one of the most exotic moments of his life.
The two of them stood looking at each other across the doorjamb of Rosie’s second-floor room on Trenton Street, he with his bouquet of spring flowers from the shop two doors down on Hitchens Avenue, she with her two-pound can of fruit cocktail raised over her head, and although the pause could not have lasted more than two or three seconds, it seemed very long to him. It was certainly long enough for him to realize something that was distressing, dismaying, annoying, amazing, and rather wonderful. Seeing her did not change things, as he had rather expected it would; it made them worse, instead. She wasn’t beautiful, not the media version of beauty. anyhow, but she was beautiful to him. The look of her lips and the line of her jaw for some reason just about stopped his heart, and the catlike tilt of her bluish-gray eyes made him feel weak. His blood felt too high and his cheeks too hot. He knew perfectly well what these feelings signalled, and he resented them even as they made him captive.
He held out the flowers to her, smiling hopefully but keeping tabs on the upraised can.
“Truce?” he said.
6
His invitation to go out to dinner with him followed so quickly on her realization that he wasn’t Norman that she was surprised into accepting. She supposed simple relief played a part, too. It wasn’t until she was in the passenger seat of his car that Practical-Sensible, who had been pretty much left in the dust, caught up and asked her what she was doing, going out with a man (a much younger man) she didn’t know, was she insane? There was real terror in these questions, but Rosie recognized the questions themselves for what they were—mere camouflage. The important question was so horrifying Practical-Sensible didn’t dare ask it, even from her place inside Rosie’s head.
What if Norman catches you? That was the important question. What if Norman caught her eating dinner with another man? A younger, good-looking man? The fact that Norman was eight hundred miles east of here didn’t matter to Practical-Sensible, who really wasn’t Practical and Sensible at all, but only Frightened and Confused.
Norman wasn’t the only issue, however. She hadn’t been alone with any man but her husband in her entire life as a woman, and right now her emotions were a gorgeous stew. Eat dinner with him? Oh, sure. Right. Her throat had narrowed down to a pinhole and her stomach was sudsing like a washing machine.
If he had been wearing anything dressier than clean, faded jeans and an oxford shirt, or if he’d given the faintest look of doubt to her own unpretentious skirt-and-sweater combination, she would have said no, and if the place he took her to had looked too difficult (it was the only word she could think of), she didn’t believe she would have been able even to get out of his Buick. But the restaurant looked welcoming rather than threatening, a brightly lighted storefront called Pop’s Kitchen, with paddle-fans overhead and red-and-white-checked tablecloths spread across butcherblock tables. According to the neon sign in the window, Pop’s Kitchen served Strictly Kansas City Beef. The waiters were all older gentlemen who wore black shoes and long aprons tied up under their armpits. To Rosie they looked like white dresses with Empire waists. The people eating at the tables looked like her and Bill—well, like Bill, anyway: middle-class, middle-income folks wearing informal clothes. To Rosie the restaurant felt cheerful and open, the kind of place where you could breathe.
Maybe, but they don’t look like you, her mind whispered, and don’t you go thinking that they do, Rosie. They look confident, they look happy, and most of all they look like they belong here. You don’t and you never will. There were too many years with Norman, too many times when you sat in the corner vomiting into your apron. You’ve forgotten how people are, and what they talk about ... if you ever knew to begin with. If you try to be like these people, if you even dream you can be like these people, you are going to earn yourself a broken heart.
Was that true? It was terrifying to think it might be, because part of her was