she’d smoked it just once, missing him after the first time he’d left for New York, when she’d found a forgotten stash. But the fact was pipes and bongs were her livelihood. They bought cough syrup, field trips, socks. They had histories; they had temperaments; they were as knotted and regal and individual as trees. It still pained her, like some irrecoverable loss, to recall the grisly sight she’d encountered here those months ago, the glass bodies broken beyond recognition. She propped her cigarette in the ashtray and began to blow out the bulb, filling it tenderly with her breath. Nobody loved a vase the way they loved a bong.
Her lips were pressed to the tube like so, the bulb swelling like a soap bubble on the end of a child’s wand, when she heard the door slam shut. Harriet turned her head, and her hands followed, and her left pinky, alert, trailed through the flame. The pipe bounced once on the edge of the table, not breaking, and then broke on the floor.
A man and a woman stood by the door. Harriet could see, through her UV lenses, as she jogged to the sink and held her hand in the cold stream, that they were as startled as she was. But she felt her heart slow: for an instant, as she heard the crash of the glass, she had expected boys with baseball bats.
“I’m terribly sorry,” said the woman, not coming closer. Her British accent had a cooling effect, like a salve. “We heard the music. We knocked.” She turned to the man, who was wearing the sleek uniform of a chauffeur. “Could you wait in the car, Dwayne? We’ll be a while.”
Do you take milk, or . . . ?”
“Lemon, if you have it.”
In the crisper, Harriet found a quarter of something that resembled a lemon, its tissue eaten gray by mold. She served tea because she’d imagined serving tea, but a lemon had not figured into the picture. Harriet was a coffee drinker; she was one of those Vermonters with the liter-size mug, drowned with sugar and cream. Of course Diane Urbanski took lemon with her tea.
“I’m sorry,” Harriet said, the tea spilling a little on the coffee table as she set the mugs down, “I don’t.” Would this be, in Di’s mind, Harriet’s first act of hostility? Or would she just read her as a bumpkin, the lemonless bumpkin ex?
Di waved her ringed fingers. Not to worry. Despite the fact that the couch was sculpted from a bathtub six inches off the ground, she appeared to have found a comfortable position. She was dressed for an interview: black pants and black heels and a white blouse winged open to reveal a sturdy rope of pearls. She was pretty, but not as pretty as Harriet had feared. Hers was the kind of makeup you could see from across a coffee table, dusting each of her perfect pores as pale as chalk.
“It was the ponytailed man, wasn’t it,” said Harriet, feeling foolish. “Gray hair? Glasses?” He’d been awfully friendly.
“Bob,” Di confirmed, her eyes hard. “I would have been here earlier,” she said, “if Bob hadn’t taken so long to locate his backbone.” He’d succeeded in convincing Di that there was no sign of any of the kids in Lintonburg, as Les had paid him handsomely to do, but after taking care of his mother’s medical bills, he’d had second thoughts, sleepless nights. He couldn’t, after all, keep a child from its mother.
“I know you wouldn’t want to do that, either,” Di went on, reaching for her mug.
Would Harriet want to keep a child from its mother? She studied her tea. An old friend of hers had once told fortunes by reading tea leaves. She’d had a little tea booth on Ash Street, a gypsy kerchief, gold hoops in her ears. Where was she now? Was Harriet the only grown-up stuck in the sixties, hawking her juvenile wares? Who was she fooling, playing this game of hide-and-seek with a woman she didn’t know, pleading to be on the kids’ team?
“She was here, yes,” Harriet said into her mug. “But now she’s gone. They just ran off, and that’s the truth. They’re on tour. They’re on tour with the boys’ band. I don’t know how that happens, exactly.” She was turning chatty again; she couldn’t stop herself. “How can a bunch of boys just decide to start a band and go on tour? But that’s the way they do it,