Buddy finished closing the store, flicked off the lights, locked up and went out, passing the old red truck as he walked around back toward his own car. As he strolled under the landing, he looked up and saw that, yep, he was right: no lights on in Frankie LaCoy’s apartment and several lights burning in Hettie’s. That goddamned Wade Whitehouse, he better be careful, coming around to visit Jack Hewitt’s girlfriend. If Jack catches him, Wade will have some serious explaining to do.
None of my business, he thought, just so long as they don’t trash the apartment. I’ve got to stop renting these places to kids, he decided, walking on. It was nothing but trouble. Of course, there was no one else in town to rent to, except single kids who could not afford a trailer or a house of their own and did not want to live with their parents anymore because they needed to screw each other and drink and smoke marijuana and God knows what else, and newlyweds, who never stayed long.
Hettie was surprised to see Wade. She invited him in and waited for him to tell her why he had come knocking on her door. He peered slowly around the small crowded room and tiny kitchen by the door and said nothing.
She fluffed her new short haircut at the nape of her neck and said, “What do you think, Wade? You like it short?” She spun around to show him all sides. She was wearing an aqua V-neck tee shirt and tight jeans with zippers at the ankles and rubber thongs on her feet. Just home from work, she explained, and out of that uniform they made her wear at Ken’s Kutters in Littleton. “It’s like a damned nurse’s uniform or something they make you wear,” she said. “Ridiculous. They want, like, to call you a beautician, right? So I guess they figure you have to look like you work in a hospital. It’s nice, though.” She sighed. “The job, I mean.” She chattered on nervously, feigning good cheer, while Wade prowled in silence through the apartment, looking out the window in the living room to the road below, where Pop’s truck was parked beside the gas pump.
“You all right, Wade?” Hettie asked, suddenly serious. “What happened to your face there? It’s all swollen.”
He sat down heavily on the tattered old couch, still wearing his hat and coat, and drummed his fingers on the armrest. “You know, I lived in this apartment. Twice.”
“No kidding. Twice. You want a beer, Wade?” Hettie moved toward the refrigerator. “I was just going to get myself a beer. It’s what I like to do when I first get home, change out of that nurse’s uniform they make me wear and have a beer before I start supper.” She smiled eagerly at the refrigerator door, her face a question mark. “Beer?”
“When I first got married I lived here. And then I lived here alone a few years ago. When I got divorced.” He pulled his hat off and flipped it to the end of the couch and smoothly unzipped his coat and wriggled out of it, tossing it on top of the hat.
“I know,” she said. “About after the divorce, I mean. But not about when you were married. Before my time,” she said, opening the refrigerator.
Wade agreed, it was before her time, and said maybe he would take that beer. He stood up again, moving from the living room toward the single bedroom in back, where he halted at the door for a moment and peered in. She had left the light on, and her white uniform lay rumpled on the unmade double bed. There was a three-legged dresser with a pair of bricks for the fourth leg, and several blue plastic boxes under the window were filled with record albums, and female clothing was everywhere, spilling from the dresser drawers, in piles on the floor, drooping off the ironing board in the corner. On the wall she had tacked up a poster of David Bowie in concert.
“Don’t mind the mess,” she said, handing him a bottle of Michelob. “It’s Friday, like TGIF, and I do housecleaning on Saturday. Cheers,” she said, and clinked his bottle with her own.
Wade walked back toward the kitchen at the far side of the living room, looked into it and took a long pull from the bottle. “Looks like the same furniture that was here when I lived here,” he said in a metallic voice. He looked strange, Hettie told me, when I asked her about that night, and he was acting and talking oddly, she said, right from the start, when he first came in, and she was a little afraid of him, even though they were old friends and Wade had always behaved decently toward her.
“I used to like baby-sit Jill, you know,” she explained, “so I was used to Wade and his moods, and I had seen him get pretty ugly when he was drinking. But this was different. He wasn’t ugly or anything, just strange. Like, he was all caught up remembering when he once lived in the same apartment, back when he and Lillian were first married and then later, when they got divorced. Like, it must have been hard on him, having to come back to the same apartment years later, where the marriage had first started out. I guess I told him that, about how hard it must have been for him, being his age and all, to live in a furnished little dump like this, and he must have been glad to get out of it and get his own trailer out there by the lake.”
“I’m living in my father’s house now,” he said. “Up on Parker Mountain.”
“Yeah, right. I guess I knew that. I heard Margie — your Margie, Margie Fogg — I heard she moved in with you. Nice?” Hettie dropped into a director’s chair opposite the couch, crossed her legs and swung one ankle back and forth in a circular motion, stirring the air. She was nervous, a little frightened of Wade, not trying to be provocative — although, thinking back on it, she told me, she could see how Wade might have thought differently. The truth is, she wanted him to leave and wished that she had not let him in and offered him a beer. He was looking at her as if he did not know who she was, as if he thought she was Lillian, maybe, and they were newly-weds living in this apartment together. Or he may not have known who he himself was: it was as if he thought he was Jack — he was acting the way Jack did sometimes when he was drunk, especially lately: morose, inward, cryptic. These were not exactly Hettie Rodgers’s words, of course, but they are her perceptions, essentially, as she remembered them six months later.
He moved closer to her, and she stopped twirling her leg in the air and looked up at him. Reaching out with one hand, he brushed her chin with his fingertips, then lowered himself down next to her and laid his head on her lap, facing away from her toward the shabby couch and across the cluttered room to the darkened window beyond. The room looked to him exactly as it had when he had lived here with Lillian twenty years before, and he had knelt beside her and had placed his head in her lap, and looking away from her, so that she could not see the tears in his eyes, he had begged her to forgive him. Hettie stroked his head, as if he were a troubled child, and he set the bottle of beer on the floor and reached around her legs with his arms and held her tightly.
“Wade,” she said. “No.”
“When we lived here,” he said in a low voice, “it was mostly good. There were some bad times, but it was mostly good. Wasn’t it?”
“Wade, that was a long time ago. Like, things change, Wade.”
“No. Some things stay the same your whole life. The best things that happened to you, and the worst, they stay with you your whole life. When we lived here, when we were kids just starting out, that was the best thing. I know that. I can still feel that, in spite of everything else that has happened to us.”