“Everything okay?” Her voice sounded a little unsteady, borne, he knew, from concern.
Denny looked at the spot on the floor of the garage again.
“Paranoia getting the best of me, I think,” he said. “Had a little fender-bender today on Storrow. My brakes went out. And I’m starting to wonder if maybe someone did something to my car. I know it sounds nuts,” Denny said. He considered Sticks’s warning at the Agawam and the encounter at the Block Party. Right now what he needed was the comfort of a friend.
“That sounds very scary,” Di said.
“Yeah,” Denny said. “I guess it was.”
“I don’t mean for this to come out the wrong way,” she said. “But do you think maybe there’s another explanation?”
“Under ordinary circumstances? It sure does sound insane,” Denny admitted. “But I’ve gotten used to insane. Also, the car was just inspected.”
“I guess I just feel . . .” She coughed lightly, interrupting herself. “I just feel that maybe it’s best not to jump to conclusions.”
“You mean that maybe assuming that someone breaking into my house and draining the brake fluid from my car is a wild and unlikely thing to happen, and that there is probably a much more logical explanation for what happened today,” Denny said.
“Bingo,” Di said.
“Thanks,” Denny said. “I really did need to be brought back down to earth.”
Louisa called from upstairs, even though she was supposed to be asleep. He took one last look at the stain. If you looked at it for long enough, he told himself, you could be convinced that it wasjust old oil, or water, or something that had been there a long time, the kind of stain that had been on that floor long before a Volks-wagen Atlas had ever parked in its spot.
“I’ll be right there,” he called in response. “I’ll be up in a minute.” Then, to Di: “I gotta go. Louisa’s calling for me. Thanks for talking me off the cliff.”
Turning the lights off, he closed the door.
There was no use in trying to solve a mystery like that, he told himself.
Chapter 19
“I CAN HOSTit at my house,” Mary was saying over the phone. In the few short weeks of their friendship, Anna had become atelephoneperson again, making actual phone calls, chatting, actually listening to another person’s voice on the other end, the way she once had in the ’80s and ’90s. This was a surprising quality of her new friend, the desire to talk on the phone. Most people her age didn’t even like the phone anymore, and she almost never met people younger than she was who called rather than texted, but Mary wasn’t like most people. She was—and Mary would say this about herself—an old soul trapped in a young body.
“That’s why we’re so evenly matched,” Mary said, right from the start.
Which was true. They did feel evenly matched. Anna felt bad that she preferred Mary sometimes even to Di, but Di was busy anyway, with Life Time and the Hamilton gossip, and so she and Mary made plans to meet at Veterans or to take their kids for an early al fresco dinner of wood-fired pizza at Appleton Farms or to take them to Crane’s early in the day before it got too hot andthen to Russell Orchards after for cider pops. The party had been Mary’s idea.
“You are never going to become president of the PTO without some ridiculous meet-and-greet. You know this, right?” They had driven over to Richardson’s, in Middleton, and the kids were stalking the parking lot for yellow jackets, slapping them with flip-flops the way Denny had once taught her to do.
“This is exactly what I do not want to do,” Anna said. “An afternoon communing with the women of Hamilton is my precise and sweat-soaked nightmare.”
“Well, how else do you intend to get them to vote for you? The people you need to win over—I hate to say this—are the ones on theinside. It’s all well and good that I like you, and I can tell all of my friends to have your back, but the voting majority are the peopleon the PTO.”
Of course Anna knew this, but she had been putting off the abject reality of it, because she knew that the hardest part of becoming part of the PTO would be getting the existing PTO to like her enough to make her one of them. It was also the existentially challenging part, the part that required stepping into a different pair of shoes. Anna Plummer was, after all, the kind of person who wasn’t good at pretending, and she was particularly bad at disguising her own sense of distaste, and she had a sour spot—that kind of turned-up-mouth feeling—for the women who disregarded the parts of Hamilton that needed work. The parts of her that needed work, if she really thought about it.
“This part is the impossible part,” she confessed to her new friend.
“We literally had entire human beings come out of our bodies. I wish people would stop saying that anything was impossible,” Mary said. She lifted a chocolate ice cream cone to her face and sank into it, covering her entire nose. It looked ridiculous. And fun.
“I hate that what you say makes so much sense to me,” Anna said. She drew the line at sticking her face in ice cream.
Mary had plenty of other ideas, of course. It should be, she felt, an afternoon party. Garden-themed. Upscale, but not too upscale. Anna had to distinguish herself as a woman of the people who still had impeccable taste. She needed to come with ideas, but those ideas should be tempered.Sheshould be tempered.
“Let them get to know you first,thenhit them with your platitudes about how the world is unjust,” Mary said. “Or at least let them get a little drunk before you start talking about that god-awful Ziti Dance.”
It made sense. Anna needed this kind of consultation, a second set of eyes to help her see the nuance that she couldn’t. Much as she loved Denny, he was too kind for any of this, too forgiving. He would have told her to show up, act the part of Hamilton doyenne, and never mention a word about any of the underpinnings of the PTO. But it went against everything she believed in, to just let the core rot under her eye. There was a way to get at it, and she hadn’t seen it before, and now she did, and to reclaim the town was to find a way in and to change the atmosphere and the culture, to force out its terribleness by forcing in goodness. And although she remained unconvinced by her friend’s ebullience—that anything could be solved as sunnily and easily as just sticking one’s face into a scoop of round, smooth ice cream—she had come to believe, in just a few short weeks, that maybe her hard-and-fast outlook on the world was a little too rigid.
Mary’s house, they both agreed, was more neutral. Mary, after all, had grown up in South Hamilton, knew more people, and could draw a bigger crowd, even though her house was smaller and much farther away from, say, Nancy’s Corner.
