“How? Why? Tell me what the fuck’s wrong with it. Jesus Christ. That thing cost me a hundred and fifty bucks.”
“It don’t matter,” Wade said to Nick, and he clapped him on the shoulder. “It looks real … serious,” he said. “It looks like you’re in the goddamn restaurant business to stay. We’re proud of you, Nick, we the citizens of Lawford, New Hampshire, we goddamn salute you, sir!” he said, and he reached to open the door. “Now I think I’ll go in and have me some of that home made cooking you’re advertising, if you don’t mind.”
Since that morning, every time Wade pulled into Wickham’s parking lot — every time, in fact, that he passed the restaurant, whether he stopped in or not — he examined the neon sign and tried once again to figure out what was wrong with it. The sign made him nervous, embarrassed him slightly, as if it were a mirror in which he had caught a glimpse of himself with a silly grin on his face.
Nobody else seemed to find the sign peculiar or “wrong”; in fact, no one even spoke of it unless to compliment it. One evening Wade had leaned over the counter and asked Margie what she thought of Nick’s new sign, asked her offhandedly, as if he himself held no opinion on the subject, and she had said, “Oh, well, the sign’s terrific, I guess. But who needs it? Everybody who comes in here has been coming in here for years. They don’t need a neon sign to tell them where it is or what’s sold here. It’s nice, though,” she had said. “Better than what was there before.”
“What was there before? I never saw anything there before.”
She punched his arm and laughed. “That’s the point.” She patted his hand. “Nothing was there before,” she said, and she reached across the counter and with both hands squeezed his cheeks. Hands: Margie Fogg had hands that went everywhere, all over you, faster than you could think about and before you could decide whether you wanted her to touch you or not. From back in the kitchen, Nick hollered for her to pick up her orders, for Christ’s sake, before they froze, and she let go of Wade’s cheeks and, rolling her eyes, slouched toward the kitchen in a parody of obedience.
Now Wade stood among the cars and pickup trucks in the snow-covered lot for a few seconds before going into the restaurant, and once again he studied the pink neon sign, pinker than usual in the falling snow, almost obscenely pink. Underwear pink, he thought, although he had never known a woman who wore pink underwear. Margie wore white cotton underpants and cream-colored bras. Lillian’s underwear was beige or sometimes bronze-colored or dark gray. Taupe, she once told him. Who knew what color she wore now? Surely not Wade. Ho, ho, not he. But the sign was bubble-gum pink. Wade figured that hookers, probably, were the only women who wore bright-pink underpants — prostitutes, B-girls — and then he remembered one who had, a girl in Seoul, he even remembered her full name, Kim Chul Hee, and he quickly looked down from the Home Made Cooking sign and entered the restaurant.
Inside, clouds of cigarette smoke and intense chatter swirled from the booths along the wall, where men wearing luminous orange hunting vests and caps and plaid wool shirts were seated in groups of three and four. Coats, parkas and quilted jackets were strewn on chair backs and hooks around the room. A dozen or more men, their boots dripping puddles onto the floor, perched on stools with their elbows on the counter, smoking and talking intently, as if just before Wade entered something exciting had occurred here. Normally, the place was quiet as a tavern at this hour, no matter how many people were there.
Wade looked around the crowded room, his eyebrows raised for a greeting, but no one seemed to notice him. Even Margie, standing at the booth at the far end with her empty tray propped against her outslung hip, did not notice him. She was listening to the conversation between the four young men seated before her: Chick Ward, whose purple Trans Am Wade had observed parked outside among the pickups and Wagoneers and Broncos like a fancy switchblade among sledgehammers; and two other guys, whom Wade did not recognize but who he assumed were from Littleton, where Chick often went to drive his car at night; and there was the kid Frankie LaCoy, who, like Chick, spent a lot of time up in Littleton, but for a different reason, because Littleton was where Frankie bought the grass he sold here in Lawford. All four were dressed for hunting and from the looks of their boots had been tramping through the woods since daybreak. There had not been any dead deer tied to the fenders of Chick’s Trans Am out front — Wade had registered that on the way in — but why should there be? Chick was no hunter, except for women. You’d expect to see a couple of naked women trussed up and lashed to the fenders of the Trans Am, not white-tailed deer, right? That Chick Ward, he was obsessed.
Wade ambled over to the booth and laid one hand across Margie’s broad shoulder and placed the other on Chick’s. He liked sometimes to try doing with his hands what Margie seemed compelled to do with hers: it looked good when she did it; it made her seem connected to other people in a way that Wade envied.
Margie turned to him, and the four men ceased talking and looked up at him expectantly with sober expressions, even Frankie, who usually grinned and winked when he saw Wade, as if the two shared a delightful secret, which in a sense they did. Wade knew that Frankie was the only person who sold marijuana in Lawford, and Frankie knew that as long as he acted as if Wade did not know, Wade would let him alone.
This morning, however, Frankie looked up at Wade as if he wanted the older man to explain something to him, to unravel an irritating mystery. Chick Ward too. Chick usually ignored Wade, except to grunt hello and, suddenly flush-faced, scowling, to stare at his feet, like a guilty child, which Wade understood to be the result of an encounter they had had years ago, when Chick was still in high school and liked peeping through windows at middle-aged women getting ready for bed. The other two men, both bearded, with long dark hair spilling over their collars, did not know who Wade was, but even so, they peered up at him eagerly, as if he had brought them important news.
“Getcha deer yet?” Wade asked the group. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder. There was something off, a beat or a note missing. People were not acting normal this morning, Wade thought, or else he was not seeing things right, as if he had a fever or were hung over or his toothache were distracting him. It was like watching a movie with the sound track out of sync. “Whaddaya say, boys?” he tried. “Some kinda snow.”
He let go of Chick’s shoulder, avoided his gaze and tapped a cigarette halfway loose of the pack and plucked it out with his lips. He squeezed Margie’s shoulder a second time. There were mornings like this — infrequent, six or seven times a year, but frequent enough to trouble him — when, after having lost all memory of the final hour of the previous night at Toby’s Inn, he strolled into Wickham’s for coffee, and it was instantly clear to him that whatever he had said or done during that last hour of total darkness the night before, whatever it was that he could not remember, was known this morning to everyone in the place.
Margie said, “You okay?”
“Yeah, sure, why not?” Wade said. His heart was pounding, as if he were frightened, but he was not frightened, not yet. He was only a little confused. There was a slight, almost imperceptible break in the pattern of greeting, that was all. No big deal. Yet he was sweating, and he was smiling oddly, he knew, making remarks that did not quite add up, driving the pattern of greeting further and further off with every passing second. He could not stop himself. He felt the way he believed Frankie LaCoy felt all the time, which put him on a kind of defensive alert.