“Laura seems to. Her mother.”
“Really?”
She waited to hear more, but the person who spoke next was one of the workers in the backyard. “Now, this here is my advice,” he said. His words were punctuated by the chuffing sound of a pickax. “Never, ever agree to stay overnight at a woman’s place. No matter how she begs and pleads, you have her stay at your place, or else a motel or a buddy’s place. Because you really got no way of knowing when her boyfriend might get out of jail. This one gal, she says her boyfriend couldn’t never in a million years get out, and like a fool I believe her. I say okay, I’ll sleep over, and what do you think happens? Next morning there’s a knock on the door. ‘Oh,’ she says. ‘Who can that be?’ Steps up naked as a jaybird to look through the little peephole and then comes squawking back to me, ‘Lord Almighty, it’s him!’ I says, ‘Woman?’ I says, ‘Woman, didn’t you swear and declare that he was locked up good?’”
Will said, “Of course, Laura’s considerably younger than I am. I suppose it’s only natural she would have a better understanding of adolescents.”
Rebecca refocused her thoughts. “How much younger?” she asked.
“She’s thirty-eight; I’m fifty-three.”
“So, let’s see… fifteen years. Well, with Joe and me it was almost that much: thirteen and a half.”
Outside the window, the nurseryman was saying, “I walk past him in the hall; say, ‘How you doing,’ and keep on going. ‘How you doing,’ he says back, and I walk on down the stairs just easy-like and careless-like, but all the time the back of my neck is tingling; know how it will do? Waiting for that knife between the shoulder blades.”
“Man, you was lucky,” another voice said. “How come you to put any stock in what a woman tells you?”
“This chicken is delicious,” Will said.
Rebecca said, “Thank you. Won’t you have some salad?”
“Thanks.”
“The thing about women is, they want what they want when they wants it,” the first man said. “They don’t mind what they might have to do to get it. They’ll do anything. They won’t be stopped. They call you on the phone, and they come by your place of work, and they look you up at the house and try to mess with you. You tell them, ‘Gal, hey, cut me some slack,’ but they just, man, they just steamroll on and can’t nothing turn them aside.”
“But you were so mature for your age,” Will was saying.
Rebecca said, “Excuse me?”
“You were so serious. So involved in your studies. Laura, on the other hand…” He shrugged. He was stirring his salad around rather than eating it, she saw. (This was a recipe of Biddy’s, involving charred yellow beets. It might have been too gourmet.) “Well, I should have known,” he said. “The way we met: she enrolled in my introductory physics class but decided it wasn’t relevant to her life. She came to get permission to drop the course and I persuaded her not to. That was our first conversation.”
“Aha! See there?” Rebecca crowed, pointing her fork at him. Then she glanced toward the window and lowered her voice. “You’re bearing out my theory about prophetic moments.”
“Pathetic?” Will asked.
“Prophetic. Moments that predict a couple’s future. See: at the very start of your courtship, she was threatening to leave you.”
“But I thought it was just a normal student interview. I had no idea that that was the start of our courtship.”
“No, of course not. That’s how prophetic moments work,” Rebecca told him. “You don’t suspect that’s what they are at the time they’re taking place.”
“It does seem I should have heard some kind of alarm going off,” Will said. “This was the course I was always so proud of, the one where I showed beginning students that physics could be an adventure.”
Rebecca said, “Oh, what a shame.”
“And she never did really take to the subject,” Will said sadly. “She stayed on after I convinced her but dropped the course second semester; switched to ecology instead to finish up her science requirement. Ecology! A pretend sort of science. But all I thought at the time was, now I could ask her out. I must have been blind as a bat.”
“She must have been blind, to think physics was irrelevant,” Rebecca said.
“Well, that’s where the two of you differ,” Will told her. “Laura’s a more superficial type of person. What matters most to her are material things. Clothing, makeup, hairstyles, jewelry… On every possible occasion, including Easter, she expected me to give her a gift of jewelry.”
“Really!” Rebecca said. This was getting interesting. “What kind of jewelry?”
“Oh… I don’t know.”
“I mean, important jewelry, like diamonds? Or just a new charm for her bracelet or something.”
He stopped stirring his salad and looked at her.
“Well,” she said hastily, “some women are like that, I guess.”
“She owned so many shoes that a closet company had to come build a special rack in her closet.”
“Gracious!”
Rebecca owned a lot of shoes herself. Not that she was a spendthrift. These were very cheap shoes, purchased on sale or at discount stores. But they seemed to have a way of not fitting quite right a short while after she bought them, and so she was always buying more. Mentally, now, she began discarding the extras. Those brown suede clogs, for instance: she could easily get rid of those. She had worn them exactly once and discovered that her heels hung half an inch over the backs, although she could have sworn they’d fit perfectly when she first tried them on.
“Plus another thing is, they’re so jealous,” the nursery man was saying. He grunted, and then she heard the thud of a rock or a root stob as he heaved it aside. “They phone you all the time and they ask you what you was doing if you take a minute to answer. They show up at your door and check out you’re not cheating on them. This one guy I know, he had to move to Arizona finally just to get shed of this woman who was always on his tail.”
“It’s more than a fellow can handle, sometimes,” the second man agreed.
Rebecca slid her chair back and rose to shut the window. She tried to make no noise, but she had a glimpse of two startled faces looking directly into her eyes before she turned away. When she had reseated herself, smoothing her skirt beneath her, she said, “You know, I’ve always regretted not completing my education.”
“You could do that now,” Will told her.
“Well, yes. Yes, I could! In fact, I’ve just started reading a biography of Robert E. Lee.”
“Lee,” Will said consideringly.
“Remember, how I had this new theory about Lee’s real reason for deciding to cast his lot with the South? And the other day I thought, I should go on with my research anyhow, just out of sheer curiosity.”
“Well, there you have it,” Will told her. “Laura’s got no curiosity whatsoever.”
Rebecca clucked. The telephone rang.
He said, “Don’t you want to answer that?”
“No, never mind.”
She waited till the ringing stopped, which seemed to take forever. Then she said, “So she isn’t a scholar.”
“Who isn’t?”
“Laura.”
“No, not in the least.”
She hoped he would elaborate, but just then the phone started ringing again.
“You certainly get a lot of calls,” Will told her.
“Yes,” she said. She sighed. “Won’t you have more chicken?”
“No, thanks, I couldn’t eat another bite.”
Her own plate was nearly untouched. Even so, she removed her napkin from her lap and prepared to slide her chair back. “I’ll go make us some coffee,” she said. “Would you prefer regular, or decaf?”