her. “You’re almost done over there,” Maggie had said to be polite, pointing to the row of model homes.
He nodded. “Shelley Lane,” he said.
“You’re calling a street Shelley? Like Shelley Winters?”
“Like Shelley the poet,” Joey said, his hands in his pockets. “Every street is going to be named after some famous writer. There’s a Dickens Street, a Wordsworth Street. The models are called the Emily Dickinson, the Lord Byron, and the Edgar Allan Poe.”
“Which one’s the Edgar Allan Poe?”
“The ranch.”
Maggie shook her head. “I hope no one who comes to see it has ever read Edgar Allan Poe,” she said.
“The guy wanted to be an English professor,” Joey continued, “but instead he went into construction with his father. He says it shows the best-laid plans of mice and men do something or other. I can never follow half of what he says.”
“Weird,” Maggie had said.
Now she ran along the tamped-down dirt of the sidewalk until she came to the end of what would be Shelley Lane and knew she had to ask for help whether she liked Joey Martinelli or not. The construction trailer lay across a wide swatch of untouched land, a boundary of grass the developers had planned in the mistaken belief that it would placate the residents of Kenwood, when all it did was to make Tennyson Park seem like another country, like a raw-looking mirage floating over their backyards, distant and unsubstantial, somehow hostile. Maggie could hear music from inside the trailer, the Beatles in harmony, Paul’s strained soprano, John’s lower, thicker voice as the backdrop. “Things We Said Today.” There was a window in the door, and she pulled herself up until she could see through it.
Inside, her mother was standing at a gray table, and as Maggie watched she pushed back her hair with her fingers and looked up at Joey Martinelli, a look of such intensity on her face that Maggie drew back. When she looked again Connie had her head down and Maggie could see that the man was arguing, using his hands, finally putting them on Connie’s shoulders. Maggie thought of the feeling of Richard’s hand moving softly over her collarbone. On the table was a magazine, the same issue of Life Monica had been reading on Sunday, the one with Paul Newman on the cover in an undershirt. Next to it was a half-eaten Three Musketeers bar. As Maggie watched, Joey Martinelli let his hands drop, and Connie looked up again. She took his big fist in her small hand, opened it, and placed something in the palm. For a moment it lay there, under the fluorescent light, and Maggie saw that it was a key. She wondered whether it was the key she had seen on the kitchen table that day she had found out her mother was learning to drive, or the key her grandfather had tossed into her mother’s lap, the key to the new house in which they were all meant to live happily ever after.
Joey Martinelli’s fist closed around it.
Somehow Maggie was not surprised at what she was seeing, only a little sickened, as she had been the time she had found the dress that was to be her Christmas present on the top shelf of the closet and tried it on, smoothing the skirt until she looked into the mirror and saw her mother standing behind her, her face soft and dark with betrayal and disappointment.
Slowly she backed down the steps and went around to the end of the trailer. The car was parked there, a dark-blue Plymouth sedan, like the company cars that her grandfather’s salesmen used on their rounds, anonymous, undistinguished. Her grandfather always said you could pick out plainclothes cops in the city because they always drove cars like this; plainclothes city cops and the priests in the neighborhoods the cops patrolled. “Show me a priest in a Cadillac,” said John Scanlan, “and I’ll show you a priest who is doing things he shouldn’t.” Maggie could see in the light from the trailer that the car was empty. She peered in the window on the driver’s side. On the seat there was a pink cardigan sweater with little pearl buttons up the front, and another Three Musketeers bar.
She heard the door to the trailer open, and for a moment she was still; then she loped around behind the trailer and made for her own backyard. As she reached the edge of the development, she tripped over a stray cinder block and