living crèche outside, with people in robes and shepherd outfits in a life-sized manger; we thought Boyd hired them but Betsy says they were volunteers from Carole’s church.
The Tills can take off whenever they want because they have more than Shoresafe Security. They have friends! We watch out for their house, and for more reasons than Carole thinks. Sad to say, Boyd has some pretty weird friends dropping by when his wife goes away. Stitch picked up on it when he was out speed-walking last year, bikers and worse people spilling out at dawn.
Richer than God, and Boyd has a personality disorder. You wouldn’t know it to look at him and we’ve never seen it in Fort Jude but, poor Carole, Boyd is a cross-dresser, which is probably why they travel so much. Maybe that kind of thing goes over better in Paris than here. If he’d let Carole have that baby she wanted so bad, maybe he wouldn’t be flouncing around in Carole’s pretty things. Once she came back from her Godchild’s christening in Atlanta and found grease spots all down the front of her black velvet, and he ruined her Fortuny pleated dress! Carole started FJHS after we left for college and Boyd is way older, which probably explains a lot.
But why did Boyd’s house get on fire?
Fortunately, it stands all by itself the far side of the circle, so nothing else caught. With the circle jammed with city trucks, we ended up in Lillian Lipton’s front yard. Buck and Stitch had to bang on her door because Miss Lillian isn’t deaf exactly, but age has made her just a little dumb, and they didn’t want her to see the fire and get confused. She came out blinking, but she has the sweetest smile, and she was thrilled to see them. Of course they promised to keep the flames off her roof. She thanked them and invited us up on the porch, so we’d get a better view. Then she went in the kitchen to make coffee, which is what you do.
It was interesting, being together with nothing but our nightclothes between us and all the others’ bodies; it made us softer, unguarded and rumpled from our beds. Man, woman. Woman, man, with only the smoke and the products we put on to keep us sweet to mask our body smells. Here in the night we had a choice between flirting and the usual sibling etiquette, which protects us all.
Generally we treat each other’s men like sandbox friends – big smile, no agenda, it’s for the best, but seeing Buck in briefs and a dress shirt and baggy old Stitch in his striped pajamas and Chape with those ripped-looking abs and thighs, with nothing between us but the underwear he slept in, brought it home:
How many things polite society protects and defends, in and of itself.
Watching Chape, we had to wonder whether Sallie has a harder row to hoe than she lets on, as in, whether Chape is gone for a reason all those times he says it’s work. Then there was Al Watson, twenty years younger than Bette so we only see them at big parties, but who could keep from looking at Al?
Miss Lillian came out with a nice coffee tray and she put on the porch light so she could see to pour; the Nabisco wafers were a nice distraction, which was just as well. Then the light went off and we focused on the fire.
Tills’ kitchen wing roof caved in and flames shot up. You wouldn’t expect a tile-roofed stucco to burn so bright, but the parquet floors and poor Carole’s antiques and draperies fed it for quite a while. When the firemen bashed out the Rolos we half-expected to see kids in drag screeching and flailing inside, you know, Boyd’s special friends, or Boyd himself in one of Carole’s shifts or at the very least some vagrant running out with his hair on fire, but whoever broke in was either dead already, or long gone.
Thank God our kids are OK. As soon as we heard the sirens, we phoned.
At first there was so much racket that we couldn’t hear ourselves think but finally even the TV people and the ambulances left. The fire had died and officials were going into the wreckage to inspect. Sane people would have gone home, but we weren’t finished here.
We had to talk. Not that we hadn’t already begun to speculate.
Somebody said, ‘Good thing they weren’t home.’
‘Just so