“It’s you tonight,” she said, holding a beaded necklace against the nape of my neck. “They’re not real pearls, but no one will know.” I felt a shiver along my spine as she fastened the clasp.
“Perfect,” she said, stepping back again to take a final look at me. “Go on; you’ll be late.” She shooed me toward the door. “You look beautiful.”
I turned to face her. “Thank you, Caroline. I know this is your favorite dress. I’ll treat it well.”
“Spill wine on it if you want,” she said. “I’ll never wear it again, anyway.” She patted her belly. It swelled a little, revealing the early months of her pregnancy. “I had plenty of fun in it.”
In an impulsive move, Caroline had married a fisherman named Joe the week after the event at the Olympic. They’d been together, on and off, for a year, but when he’d shown up with his grandmother’s engagement ring, she’d said yes. And then, shortly after, he died in an automobile accident and she found out she was expecting his child. Caroline showed up at the apartment with all of her worldly possessions stuffed into a single suitcase. The one-bedroom flat was already cramped with three other women, but we took her in anyway. Her own parents had thrown her out.
“Oh, Caroline,” I said, tucking an arm around her waist. “You’ll wear it again. You’ll see.”
“Well,” she said with a sigh, “it’s your night. Live it up, honey.”
I nodded. “I’ll try.”
Charles waited for me on the sidewalk. He leaned against the car and watched as I walked outside.
“Hey there, doll,” an obviously drunk man called from the street. “Looking for someone to love?”
“Mind your manners!” Charles shouted to the man. “Where do you get off speaking to a lady that way?”
The man slunk back into an alley as I gave Charles a grateful smile. “Welcome to the neighborhood,” I said.
“Do you have to put up with this all the time?”
I nodded. “You get used to it after a while. Most of them are harmless.”
He shook his head, surveying the street. A homeless man kicked a tin can down the sidewalk, grumbling to himself. An old woman stood up from a bench and approached Charles. A vehicle that shiny in our part of town was a rare sight, and it attracted a crowd of onlookers like a juicy plum draws buzzing fruit flies.
“Excuse me, sir,” the woman said in almost a whisper. She held out her hand, displaying dirt-caked fingernails. “Could you spare a few cents for a hungry old woman?”
“Is that a real Buick?” a teenage boy asked, running his hand along the hood. Charles looked at me with a helpless expression.
I cleared my throat. “Pardon us,” I said with a firm voice. “We were just leaving.”
The woman nodded, taking a step back. The boy shrugged. The others continued on.
“Sorry about that,” I said once we were inside the car. “Rich people are a novelty around these parts.”
He looked conflicted. “Oh,” he said, pulling away slowly.
We drove in silence for a few moments, before Charles turned to me. “I wish I had given her something.”
“Who?”
“That woman back there,” he said. “I could have given her some money. I don’t know why I didn’t.”
I shook my head. “Well, it would take more than a few dollars to solve her problems.”
Charles nodded. “Do they hate people like me?”
“Of course they don’t,” I said, noticing the way the streetlights made his gold cuff link glisten. “You’re just from another world, that’s all. A world they don’t understand.”
Charles shook his head, as if trying to make sense of the differences between us. “I’m embarrassed,” he finally said, “that I’m so out of touch with what these people are facing.”
I touched his arm. “You’re different,” I said, looking at him in awe. Charles possessed a goodness that others in his position didn’t. His heart seemed to feel the pain of the poor—rare, when the trend among the upper class was to simply ignore them.
He stopped the car in front of a restaurant where a woman in a pale crepe dress stood outside smoking a cigarette. She puffed it elegantly through her crimson red lips, then dropped it to the sidewalk and stomped out its last embers with a thick, shiny black heel. “I thought we’d grab a little dinner at the Blue Palms,” he said. “That is, if you’re hungry.” His kind eyes smiled expectantly.