“I heard these two people talking,” I told her. “It turned out to be them, Forrest and ... Brenda.” For a moment, I resisted speaking her name.
“Oh, really?” Regina’s voice sounded steady. “I wouldn’t have guessed Brenda Barnett as the bookish type.”
“I don’t want to make you mad,” I said. “But they were saying these things to each other. About how much they wanted to be together. They were making a plan to meet up.”
My words seemed to have had less effect than I’d expected. Regina reached for the ball of mohair wool she used in her knitting project and stroked it contemplatively.
“Oh well,” she said. “I guess we knew about this already, didn’t we? It’s just Forrest engaging in his usual summertime hijinks. Forrest being Forrest. This too shall pass.” She let out a long sigh. She looked back at her typewriter keyboard, ready to resume work on her list, apparently.
I could have let it go there. It would have been easy to let her think that nothing more had taken place at the library that afternoon. But I knew this wasn’t the whole story.
And maybe there was something else going on in me that made me push harder. As much anxiety as I’d felt about delivering the news of what I’d learned at the library and as much personal grief as I’d suffered over it, I’d felt excitement about my role as the one person other than Forrest and Brenda themselves who understood what was going on andwas in a position to help Regina. This conferred a kind of power on me that was all new.
“They were talking like they were going to be together. The word they used wasforever.”
“Oh, Frances,” she said. A look of something between sympathy and pity came over her. “If I’m not mistaken, before you got on this Stephen King kick, you were reading all those Judy Blume books. Wasn’t there one with that word for the title, about a couple of kids who think they’re each other’s destiny or something? I read that one too, long ago. As you may remember, it didn’t work out that way.”
Maybe she was right. I wanted to believe she was.
“What you overheard at the library between Forrest and this little girlfriend of his was just a couple of not-particularly-bright people getting sex confused with love. It’s happened before with my husband—every damn summer, if you must know—and I have every reason to believe it’s going to happen again. Maybe the two of them think cheating on your partner is more honorable when you call it love. Whatever their story is, it doesn’t matter all that much to me.”
“I just thought you should know,” I said.
In truth, I couldn’t even remember what Forrest and Brenda had said to each other that day anymore. I just remembered the feeling I had hearing them. That I’d shrunk into nothing again. That in the world of Forrest Emerson, in which Brenda Barnett presided as queen bee—a world in which I had seemed, very briefly, to occupy a place of significance—I now meant no more than a bug.
In the world of Regina Emerson, on the other hand, I was important. Never more so than right now.
She had returned her hands to the keyboard of her typewriter, but she wasn’t typing. I could see her turning it all over in her mind, considering my words. Maybe they were sinking in. Maybe she was beginning to get it.
Regina said nothing for a surprisingly long time then. She just sat there, stroking the sides of her beautiful red Olivetti.
“They just sounded so serious,” I said again.
“Well then,” Regina said, her tone still revealing little in the way of concern. “It may be prudent to keep some sort of record. I suppose we need to protect ourselves.”
She saidwe. I didn’t get the part about protecting ourselves, but the other part I did.
We.
“That husband of this Brenda person—the car salesman, Kyle—is too weak to do anything,” Regina went on. The way she named his line of work, she might as well have been telling me he was one of those men who walked along the side of the highway picking up trash. “They’re just renters here, you know.”
Renters.I knew what that meant. Another breed altogether from Regina and her family. The Barnetts weren’t even members of the country club.
“What happens now?” I asked Regina.
“This is where you come in, Frances,” she told me. Her voice, which had sounded so hard, softened now. “I’m lucky you’re at my side here. My only friend.”
Not that there was much competition in that department. I felt flattered that she described me as she did. But it was unnerving too. I had the sense she had forgotten I was just a kid, and as much as I wished I were older, or looked older to the rest of the world, at this particular moment I felt I was way too young for this. I had no idea what any of this had to do with me. Only it did, evidently.
As was often the case with Regina, she seemed to know what I was thinking, even at times when I said nothing.
“I know you haven’t even begun to menstruate yet,” she said. This was an odd thing to mention—an odd way of putting it, and embarrassing, of course. But she had nailed it: the source of all my problems, my inadequacies, the reason for my inability to be heard or seen or taken seriously. “But even when you were very small, I recognized you wereold beyond your years. You understood so much more than they did. More than most people.”
As was often the case with Regina, I had no idea what to say. I waited for her to explain.
“I’m going to need your help,” she said. “You’re actually a key player here.Thekey player.”
All this time I’d been standing at the side of Regina’s bed. Now she patted a spot beside her, indicating I should sit there. She took my hand. She stroked it as if she were petting a dog.
