and answering to the third degree that passed for small talk when it came to some chump from the high school wanting to get into the panties of Art Vaughn’s only daughter. Art knew you could never trust a boy. His only hope, as he saw it, was to instill enough fear in the young man’s heart so that even if Lorna was ready to put out (as he feared she would), the boy might develop a case of temporary impotence. Art didn’t know if he had that kind of power to frighten, but for the sake of his little girl’s virginity, he gave it all he had.
“You’re Merle’s boy,” Art said. It was not a question.
“Yes sir.” Lance nodded once.
“Your mother’s doing well.” The pause that followed Art’s statements were his only indication of inquisition.
“Hasn’t done herself in yet,” Lance said.
“Say what?”
Lance shook his head in self-effacement.
“No word from your sister,” Art said. But if there’d been news from Kiki, everyone on Osprey would have heard it within hours. Art knew that. He’d heard talk about the Squires. Rumors about Merle finding the girl in Lance’s bed. Others said it was Lance in hers. And maybe all those were exaggerations. Maybe nothing like that had ever happened at all. But rumors started somewhere, suggested something of the truth that spawned them.
“No one’s heard from Kiki since summer,” Lance said, his eyes narrow as paper cuts.
Art lifted his wrist and looked at his watch as if it could tell him just how long she’d been gone and when she might be expected to turn up. “She’ll come ’round,” Art told Lance.
“She might,” Lance said.
“What kind of prayer is that, son?”
“Not a prayer, Mr. Vaughn.” Lance paused. His tone shifted darkly. “And I’m nobody’s son except my mother’s, sir.”
Art Vaughn blanched.
“Unless,” Lance went on, his voice slow and controlled, “unless you are my father. Which would make you a real sonofabitch.”
Art drew in his breath. “I beg your pardon,” he hissed.
Lance laughed, low and mean. He still held his hands behind his back. His feet were spread in a stance so vulnerable it was menacing, a stance that said, You threaten me so little I’d roll over on my back and bare my belly, you prick. “You don’t beg a thing from me, Mr. Vaughn. And I know you don’t give two shits for pardon, mine or anyone else’s.”
Art sucked in his gut. He reached for the front doorknob. “You better pray you’ve got the Lord’s pardon, boy. For that you better pray.” He opened the door, and Lance never set foot in the Vaughns’ house again.
Lorna, as a matter of course, was forbidden to see Lance Squire under penalty of every penalty that her parents (who were not creative people) could dream up. Perhaps equally predictable was how little these threats affected Lorna. She disobeyed every order laid upon her, and in the end it was more than clear who held the trump card in that family. What Lorna had on her parents was that they loved her a lot more—or at least in a qualitatively different way—than she loved them, and they forgave her every time, pulled her back into the fold, because they wanted her with them more than they wanted her justly punished. Lorna learned this lesson early: the less you cared, the more power you possessed. And it was maybe just that which kept her with Lance for so long. For everything you could say about Lance and Lorna—and there was certainly plenty to say—one true thing was that their love existed in a balance few people ever know. For everything they did wrong—and that was almost everything—there was something fundamentally right about the fact of them together.
In 1968 most of Lance’s high school buddies were breathlessly awaiting their eighteenth birthdays and the chance to go fight in Vietnam, but Lance, who’d had a childhood bout of measles that stole a good fraction of his hearing, didn’t go anywhere after graduation. He kept his job at Lovetsky’s car shop, rotating tires and patching flats, and Lorna stayed in school. She was no honors student, but she stuck it out, even after she got pregnant in the spring of her junior year and married that June in a big Island to-do held at the Lodge. The party was an uncharacteristically generous wedding present from Bud Chizek, although anyone would tell you he’d been acting strange—if understandably so—ever since Chas (his only son) had gotten killed in Vietnam