not the smar—” she caught herself in mid-word and cocked her head. “Ed?” she asked, narrowing her eyes as if squinting would bring him into clearer focus.
“I’m sorry,” he began but then realized he did recognize her. “Connie?”
“Oh, crap,” she said, covering her face with her hand. When she removed it, newsprint smudged her cheeks and forehead. “I look like, well, not at the height of my pulchritude. I thought you were off …” She held the newspaper as if it were a bat and swung it, clucking her tongue against the roof of her mouth in imitation of a ball hitting the bat, darkened drops of rainwater spattering Edward Everett and his uncle.
“I was,” he said. “I got hurt and—this is my uncle, Stan. I’m working with him.”
“We were just calling on your Mr. Osgood,” his uncle said.
She laughed. “He’s hardly my Mr. Osgood.”
“He’s a tough nut to crack,” Edward Everett’s uncle said.
“With ‘nut’ being the operative word,” Connie said. “I’d better—I left a stack of term papers on my desk that if I don’t grade this weekend, my American Lit students are going to revolt on Monday.”
“You’re teaching here?” Edward Everett asked.
“My second year,” she said.
“I’m sorry, but Margaret and I …” his uncle said. “George Jones is at the Jamboree tonight and I need to get on home. I don’t mean to break up the reunion.”
“I need to skedaddle myself,” Connie said. “Paper grading! Friday night fun!” She turned to go but stopped. “I’d love to catch up, Ed.”
“Sure,” he said.
“Do you have a piece of paper? I’ll give you my number.”
Edward Everett fished out the small spiral notebook he carried in his shirt pocket and took out a pen, handing both to her. She took them, scribbled her name and number into the notebook and started to give them back to him but then snatched the pen away. “This I’ll keep as a hostage until you do call me. That way, it takes all the pressure off. We’re not making a date. You’ll just be retrieving your pen.”
Within a week and a half, they were seeing each other. On a Sunday morning, he was waking in her house for the first time and he realized that, without ever planning it, he had been with her nearly every day since he first ran into her. He was alone in her house; she had gone for a jog at sunrise, giving him a quiet kiss on the forehead that he dimly remembered as he lay in her bed, contemplating getting up. From down the hall, he could smell a pot of coffee simmering. She’d been divorced for seven years by then—a Polaroid marriage, she called it, wed at eighteen, divorced a few days after she turned twenty, not even old enough to celebrate the end of her marriage with a legal glass of champagne—and her bedroom was decorated as if she had tried fiercely to eliminate any trace of masculinity: the bed was canopied with a scalloped lily-print fabric, posters of Degas dancers hung on the walls and a crystal bowl on the bureau held potpourri so pungent he wondered if she had bought it anticipating he would, indeed, spend the night. They’d actually slept together the first time they’d gone out, the previous Sunday. He’d picked her up to have lunch. She hadn’t wanted him to come to the door because she had a son, a nine-year-old who had bad eyesight, asthma and a horrible father. She’d enumerated the conditions as if they were of the same magnitude of affliction. “It’s too soon for him to meet you,” she’d said, and then rushed to add, blushing, “Not that he ever needs to meet you. It’s just lunch, nothing more.” He sat in his Maverick at the curb, the engine idling, listening to WPOP out of Wheeling, an upbeat tune about a boy and girl who share an umbrella at a bus stop and end up marrying.
At Connie’s house, a small hand drew back the curtain over a window but then snatched itself away as if he’d been burned, no doubt because someone had scolded him for spying on Edward Everett. A moment later, Connie came down the walk to his car. As a girl, she had taken dance lessons since she was three and, for as long as he could remember, her movements all possessed a certain fluid quality, no matter how ordinary: taking a pen out of her purse, opening a math text, scratching her calf