children were young, I heard Dennis’s key in the door, and I said, “Gloria, I’m sorry, I hate to interrupt, but Dennis is home and I just have to—”
“Go on, dear,” she said. “I just wanted to check on you.”
“Love you,” I said. I said it only every so often.
“You, too,” she said.
Dennis appeared in the kitchen doorway. His hair was wet, and I could see through the window that it had started to rain. He wiped his cheek with one hand and asked me about my day. I took his briefcase and set it down on the kitchen table, and although I really wanted to apologize for betraying him—never again, I would say, I don’t know what I was thinking—I couldn’t do that, not exactly. So instead, I said, “Do you want to fool around?” and he nodded and we went together down the hallway, past Margo’s room and the guest room that so long before I’d wanted to turn into a nursery. We went into the bedroom with its outdated furniture and the alarm clock that didn’t work very well but we’d never replaced and the clothes on the bed that I’d folded but not put away. And while we took off our clothes, I turned away from him, so he wouldn’t see that I was keeping myself from crying.
That week I joined a tennis team at the YWCA. I was matched with a doubles partner named Carolyn Baumgartner, who became a friend. Shortly afterward, I ran into Jane Brevard at the grocery store and told her about the team, and then she joined, too, and every couple of weeks she and I had lunch together after practice. She asked once if I knew that Jack wasn’t coaching at the Biltmore anymore—she might have been checking to see if we were in touch—but she didn’t say where he’d gone and though I wanted to, I didn’t ask. Carolyn and I won more than we lost, and though a few of the pounds I’d dropped crept back, tennis continued to be part of my life. Sometimes while I played I imagined Jack standing on the sidelines, watching me from behind sunglasses, calling out pointers: Don’t chase your toss! Show your shoulder on your forehand! In September, Dennis and Margo ran together in the Conch Classic 5K in Key West, and Dennis placed third in his age group. I’d had no idea, but that summer, while I’d been improving my tennis, Dennis had become a serious runner.
The Gainesville hysteria dissolved. No more bodies were found. The police arrested a disturbed teenager, but then let him go because he had an alibi. It would be a year before they charged the real killer, a Louisiana native named Danny Rolling; even then he would be arrested first for robbery, and only afterward would confess to the murders. Apartment 113 at Williamsburg Village would become a model apartment, the one management showed to prospective renters. Security alarms would be installed and extra locks added to the sliding glass doors throughout the complex. I know this because I called the management office to ask.
Margo changed dorm rooms again, this time with Janelle, who had by that time broken up with her boyfriend. She pledged Alpha Chi Omega but by the end of the semester went inactive. She brought three girlfriends home on break, and we took them all out to Stiltsville. She continued to live on campus. That year, Gloria and Grady decided to downsize, and they bought a condo and gave us their house—just gave it to us, no strings attached, nothing to pay but the property taxes. Then when we sold our home—our first home, where we’d raised Margo—we made enough to pay off Margo’s student loans and have a little left over for savings. When Gloria and Grady handed over the keys to their house, along with the paperwork transferring ownership, Gloria said to me, “You don’t get sentimental, now. You make it your own.” I stripped the wallpaper from every room. Bette, who at this point had sold her own house and was preparing to move away with Suzanne, helped me paint: butter yellow for the kitchen, chalky blue for the living room, deep red for the dining room. Still, in the months after we moved in, the house felt stolen—from Gloria, who’d left the linen closet smelling of cedar, and from Grady, whose tools still filled black silhouettes along the pegboard walls of the garage.
Eventually, their ghosts faded. Dennis