had never been one to linger before the mirror, fussing with herself (that was her mother's term, as in "Maddy 5 stop fussing with yourself and come out of there!"), she took time to put her hair up that day because her father had once complimented her on that particular style.
When she had put the last pin into place, she reached for the bathroom light-switch, then paused. The girl looking back at her from the mirror didn't seem like a girl at all, but a teenager. It wasn't the way the sundress accentuated the tiny swellings that wouldn't really be breasts for another year or two, and it wasn't the lipstick, and it wasn't her hair, held up in a clumsy but oddly fetching chignon; it was all of these things together, a sum greater than its parts because of... what? She didn't know. Something in the way the upsweep of her hair accented the shape of her cheekbones, perhaps. Or the bare curve of her neck, so much sexier than either the mosquito-bumps on her chest or her hipless tomboy's body. Or maybe it was just the look in her eyes-some sparkle that either had been hidden before today or had never been there at all.
Whatever it was, it made her linger a moment longer, looking at her reflection, and suddenly she heard her mother saying: Iswear to God, sometimes you behave as if she were your girlfriend insteadof your daughter!
She bit her pink lower lip, brow Burrowing a little, remembering the night before-the shiver that had gone through her at his touch, the feel of his hands on her breasts. She could feel that shiver trying to happen again, and she refused to let it. There was no sense shivering over stupid stuff you couldn't understand. Or even thinking about it.
Good advice, she thought, and turned off the bathroom light.
She found herself growing more and more excited as noon passed and the afternoon drew along toward the actual time of the eclipse. She turned the portable radio to VNCH, the rock-and-roll station in North Conway. Her mother abhorred "NCH, and after thirty minutes of Del Shannon and Dee Dee Sharp and Gary "US" Bonds, would make whoever had tuned it in (usually Jessie or Maddy, but sometimes Will) change to the classical music station which broadcast from the top of Mount Washington, but her father actually seemed to enjoy the music today, snapping his fingers and humming along. Once, during The Duprees" version of "You Belong to Me," he swept Jessie briefly into his arms and danced her along the deck. Jessie got the barbecue going around three-thirty, with the onset of the eclipse still an hour away, and went to ask her father if he wanted two burgers or just one.
She found him on the south side of the house, below the deck on which she stood. He was wearing only a pair of cotton shorts (yale phys ed Was printed on one leg) and a quilted oven-mitt. He had tied a bandanna around his forehead to keep the sweat out of his eyes. He was crouched over a small, smoky sod fire. The combination of the shorts and the bandanna gave him an odd but pleasant look of youth; Jessie could for the first time in her life see the man with whom her mother had fallen in love during her senior summer.
Several squares of glass-panes cut carefully out of the crumbling putty in an old shed window-were piled up beside him. He was holding one in the smoke rising from the fire, using the barbecue tongs to turn the glass square this way and that like some sort of weird camp delicacy. Jessie burst out laughing-it was mostly the oven-mitt that struck her funny-and he turned around, also grinning. The thought that the angle made it possible for him to look up her dress crossed her mind, but only fleetingly. He was her father, after all, not some cute boy like Duane Corson from down at the marina.
What are you doing? she giggled. I thought we were having hamburgers for lunch, not glass sandwiches!
Eclipse-viewers, not sandwiches, Punkin, he said. If you put two orthree of these together, you can look at the eclipse for the whole period oftotality without damaging your eyes. You have to be really careful. I've read; you can burn your retinas and not even know you've done it untillater.
Ag! Jessie said, shivering a little. The idea of burning yourself without knowing