She couldn’t go in, of course. It was one thing to see Ronnie, another thing to let Ronnie see her. And the restaurant’s placement made it hard to get too close to it. So she sat back on the curb near the mall. She should give up, go about her day. Her horoscope for this morning had said “Finding the right answers depends on knowing the right questions,” which had sounding promising, but also demanding.
Even as she told herself to leave, Alice sat for five more minutes, then ten, then twenty. The day was hot, and she was tired from all her walking. Shortly before 2 P.M., she saw two girls come out of the Bagel Barn and light up cigarettes. One was a short girl in an apron, one of those people who could be anything-black, Spanish, Italian. The other was a thin girl with dark hair. Ronnie.
She was taller, but not by much, and although she had a bust, she still had a way of carrying herself as if she just didn’t care about her body. Her posture was bad, a little stooped, and she folded her arms across her breasts as if they annoyed her. Her dark hair was worn in the same way-a bang across the front, the rest hanging to her shoulders. If she had tried to style it in any way, it didn’t show. Alice reached for her own hair, which had remained pale blond and stick straight. It was quite the prettiest thing about her. Helen had said so, years ago, in just those words, and it remained true. “Your hair is beautiful, baby. Quite the prettiest thing about you.” Alice thought her blue eyes were a nice color, but Helen said blue eyes were even more striking on a brunette. Like Ronnie.
Ronnie stared across the parking lot, straight at where Alice was sitting. But Alice didn’t panic or try to run away. People couldn’t see what they weren’t looking for. She had the advantage of knowing that Ronnie worked here. But Ronnie had no expectation of seeing Alice on the edge of the Westview Mall parking lot. It was almost as good as being invisible.
The aproned girl said something and Ronnie appeared to laugh. She hunched up her shoulders and bobbed her head, looking as if she was enjoying herself. She dragged hard on her cigarette, throwing back her head on the exhales. When had she learned to smoke? You couldn’t smoke at any of the places Alice had been. Not even adult prisoners were allowed to smoke these days. Had Ronnie smoked when they were little? Alice had no memory of it. But she had always suspected that Ronnie knew all sorts of things she didn’t tell. That was what Alice had been trying to get the grown-ups to understand back then: Ronnie had secrets. Ronnie knew things she wasn’t supposed to know, which was what made her so dangerous.
Ronnie took the cigarette from her mouth and dropped it into a low ceramic pot, what Helen called a “butt beach,” one of those little containers of sand outside restaurants and movie theaters. Helen hated these fixtures, not because she objected to smoking, but because they were always ugly and cheap looking. The butts sticking up in sand, some with lipstick-smeared ends, made Helen shudder.
Now Alice shuddered, too. But it wasn’t the cement basin that bothered Alice, it was seeing Ronnie use it. The very neatness, the orderliness of this act was disorienting. It was natural for Ronnie to smoke. But once her break was over, she should have flicked her butt into the air in a careless arc and let it fall where it may. Ronnie was the kind of girl who littered, dropping candy wrappers and soda cans in the gutter. At least she had been. Ronnie was the bad one. There shouldn’t be any confusion about this, even now. Especially now.
Her latest attempt at chocolate-covered peanuts, forgotten while she was watching Ronnie, had melted to mush in the brown paper sack in her hand. It was just as well. They weren’t going to taste like the old ones. Nothing did. Strange, when she tried to stand, her breath caught in her throat and her lungs seemed to slam shut, as if she were the one who was drowning.
14.
Daniel Kutchner eased himself out of Sharon Kerpelman with the sweet-but-sheepish air of a man who had just had sex with someone he might never see again. Sharon didn’t mind. She had made a similar decision about Daniel before they ended up in bed, but the evening had a little momentum going for it. At least she would be able to tell her mother with a clear conscience that she’d really tried. She would not be explicit, of course, telling her mother that she and Evelyn Kutchner’s son had-what was the hideous phrase she had heard a twenty-something toss off the other day-landed the deal. But her mother would figure it out, and appreciate the codes that Sharon used to convey such information. Nice enough. No real chemistry.
“Bathroom?” he asked.
“The first door on your right, when you go out in the hallway,” she said. Was he a washer, she wondered. Or did he just need to pee? Both, as it turned out. She listened as one stream of water followed another. She rather liked his fastidiousness.
So what was wrong with Daniel Kutchner? Some women, aware that they had dated their way into an instantaneous dead end, might have turned the question on themselves, but Sharon never would. She got up, comfortable enough in her skin so that she didn’t feel the need to put on a robe or T-shirt, and headed out into the hall, knocking on the bathroom door as she passed by.
“Do you want anything? I’m going to fix myself a drink.”
This interrupted the third stream of water-probably from the faucet. Daniel Kutchner must be washing his hands now.
“You mean, like a glass of water, or a soda?”
“I have those, too,” Sharon said. “But I was thinking of a drink-drink, truthfully. I like to have a glass of white wine, or Bailey’s on the rocks before I go to sleep. I’ve got a full bar.”
“How not-Jewish,” Kutchner said through the door and they both laughed, for it was the theme of the evening, the pleasant bond they had established over dinner, making a list of what was Jewish and what was not. “Okay. Sure. Whatever you’re having.”
Sharon wandered through her apartment, which would have surprised her coworkers if they had ever been invited to see it. Her apartment was the only clue to Sharon ’s secret: She could afford to work at the public defender’s office because there was family money. Not a lot, but enough to close the gap between the barely middle-class lifestyle afforded by a government wage and the upper-middle-class life to which she was accustomed. That’s why it was nice, bringing home someone like Daniel, who knew about the Kerpel-mans and the small foundations company that had made everyone permanently comfortable when it began catering to postop breast cancer patients.
She returned to the bedroom with two old-fashioned glasses, aluminum Russell Wright knockoffs, on a matching tray, and set them on the bedside table.