the Tigers games. Bethie wondered if anyone besides her mom, herself, her sister had been inside the house since that fateful Thanksgiving when she and Jo had insisted on having guests. Her mother had never been a great one for making friends. My family is all I need, she would say, along with We keep ourselves to ourselves. Her companions had been her own sisters, Ellen and Iris. In the summer, all three sisters would come to the cabin on Lake Erie; Ellen with her husband, Max, whom nobody liked, and their sons, Jerry and Alan, and Iris, the glamorous unmarried sister, who wore red lipstick and smoked mentholated cigarettes. Iris would bring Bethie and Jo candy wax lips, and Ellen would take a rowboat all the way out to the middle of the lake, telling everyone that she was going fishing, when they all knew that she was trying to get away from baby Jerry’s crying and her husband’s requests for sandwiches and bottles of beer.
Eventually, Ellen and Max had moved to St. Louis when Max got some job there, and Iris died of breast cancer, two years after Ken. Bethie had heard her mother talk about “the girls” at work, but she’d only ever heard them described as a single, nameless mass, not as individuals. Sometimes Sarah met the girls for drinks, and once or twice a year, they’d go out to dinner, but Bethie was almost positive that Sarah had never invited any of the girls to her house.
“I’ll come home whenever I can,” Bethie promised, feeling sad and sorry, because that, too, was a lie. The next morning, Sarah dropped her at the bus station on her way in to work. By ten o’clock, Bethie was back in Ann Arbor. By noon, she was naked, in Devon Brady’s bed, with her head resting on his chest. “How’d it go with your mother, little Alice?” Devon asked, reaching across her for the pipe he’d packed before she’d arrived. He lit it, inhaled deeply, and pressed his lips against hers, blowing smoke into her mouth.
“Summer school,” said Bethie, when she could breathe again. She didn’t want to tell Dev how small and worn her mother had looked in the kitchen, and how even the air had felt old and stale. “I told her I was going to do summer school.”
Dev slipped his warm hands underneath her bare bottom, pulling her up closer. “Adult education.”
Dev was only six years older than she was, but he seemed more worldly than other boys Bethie had known. He called himself a student, but he was really a businessman, with a lucrative industry selling a product that was popular, albeit illegal. She thought of Dev as the Candyman, with an endless supply of treats. There was pot, of course, which he acquired by the garbage-bagful and sold by the joint or by the lid or by the ounce. There were mushrooms, dried-up and wrinkled, some of them looking disturbingly like body parts, amputated ears or lips gone gray and shriveled. There was Dev’s famous and much-sought-after acid, guaranteed to provide the smoothest high, the most vivid trips, and the gentlest come-down, and there were assorted pills of varying sizes and colors, in glass bottles, lined up in Devon’s dresser drawers. Once, Bethie had asked Dev if he was worried about having all that stuff in his place. He’d given her his slow, sly smile, the one that made her feel like she was made of melting ice cream, and said, “I’ve got prescriptions. Or at least, someone does.”
Most of the boys’ dorm rooms and apartments Bethie had visited ranged from disorganized to sloppy to so filthy they felt hazardous to her health. Dev’s garden apartment, on the lower floor of a Victorian on Church Street, was scrupulously clean. His hardwood floors were immaculate, swept in the morning and at night. In the living room, one wall was covered with bookshelves made of raw lengths of lumber and cinder blocks, and the shelves were full of books of philosophy and poetry and political history, biographies of generals and presidents, martyrs and saints. Above the bricked-over fireplace he’d hung a poster of a red-and-white woodcut image of a woman with a serene expression and flowers in her hair and the words MAKE ART NOT WAR. A couch was draped in Indian-print fabric. In the bedroom was a brass bed covered in a patchwork quilt, with squares of corduroy and velvet, striped and patterned cotton. Dev’s