Five Oaks might boast of the new WaldChem building, but it was still a city where you kept running into the same people. You would have to move at least as far away as the Caspian Sea to avoid them.
Patsy had wanted to be Anne’s friend ever since she and Saul had shown up, muddy and in shock, at the McPhees’ door after their car turned over following the party at Mad Dog’s, but the friendship couldn’t last.
The day had arrived some months back when the McPhees announced themselves at Patsy’s office at the bank, presenting their case for a home loan. Patsy couldn’t tell if they had concocted a plan to trade on what they assumed to be her friendship. Maybe so. Emory had been holding Matt’s hand, and the young father wore his baseball cap with the visor in back. He had just shaved, and he gave off a first-date odor of drugstore cologne. Very proudly, speaking in married-couple relays, first the husband, then the wife, they announced that they wanted to buy a house in a new development, Maple Meadows. They were tired of paying rent for their current house, they said. They wanted this as a real investment; it was time to build a future. They recited these sentences as if they had rehearsed them, fanfare, emphases, and all. But Patsy, as one of the bank’s loan officers, had to refuse the loan almost on the spot. They had virtually nothing in savings or collateral, and Emory’s employment as a housepainter was sporadic. He was a high school dropout. Their credit rating was dismal. When Patsy had told Anne and Emory the bad news, Anne cried. She began her sobbing slowly, then really worked up a storm of tears. It went on and on.
You tried to create a community, but money always got in the way, and finally lines were drawn. Friendship ended at the bank’s front door, at least for working people.
Like some lovers who get romantically entangled young, in high school, both the McPhees, Emory and Anne, had an intense, greedy physicality. They always reminded Patsy of two healthy animals who had mated, almost without thinking. Their stories were always stories about the body; they never got past it.
Patsy took Emmy’s hand and walked over to where Anne McPhee was sitting in the park. North of the women, on the block bordering the park in which they sat, the yellow construction crane turned slowly, lifting a steel beam. A man, small in the distance, standing on another beam and wearing a hardhat appeared to be watching them. He appeared to wave.
“Some of those construction workers get rich, if they live long enough,” Anne said. She checked Patsy out, then smiled halfheartedly. “I see we both got ourselves knocked up again.” There was a brief pause. “Congratulations.”
“I didn’t think I was showing that much yet,” Patsy said.
“You aren’t. Not in front,” Anne pointed. “Only if a person is looking. A mom would know. It’s the way you’re walking.”
“Do you mind if I sit down?” Patsy asked. She would be the soul of politeness.
“Go ahead.” Anne patted the bench. “Please.”
“Thanks, Anne.” She sat down.
“Want a cookie?” Anne pulled an Oreo out of her purse. Matt grabbed it out of her hand before curling up at her feet. She smiled indulgently at her son. “Public space. It’s free to everybody. Hey, I see Emmy’s getting real big.” Anne smiled at Mary Esther, who was folding herself for protection against strangers into her mother’s lap.
“Matt, too. Good-looking boy.” He was, of course. He looked like a three-year-old James Dean, a little pint-sized greaser heartthrob. His mouth was smeared with cookie crumbs, but he was beautiful anyway. “Where’s Saska?”
“Saska? She’s home with Emory. Yeah, well.” Over to their right, the skateboarders made their racket, and when one of them fell, the others yelled encouragement. “I got another one coming. My third. Another hell on wheels, I guess.”
“Boy?” Patsy asked.
“Yeah. I think so.”
“When’d you find out?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, the ultrasound. . the amnio?”
“Oh, I haven’t had any of that. I’m just guessing. You?”
“This one’s a boy. For sure. I suppose I always knew it, but I did have my doctor do an ultrasound, and she asked me if I wanted the big news, and I said I did, and she said, ‘It’s a boy,’ so that’s how I know.”
“Our medical insurance ran out,” Anne McPhee said. “No ultrasound for me.”
In front of them, a squirrel scurried up the pedestal of the governor’s statue, stopped, then scurried down again. A whistle blew near the construction site’s trailer. Quitting time. The construction worker seemed to wave at them again, two pregnant women sitting in the park.
“I’m sorry,” Patsy said. The man on the steel beam continued to watch her.
“Oh, you don’t have to be sorry for us. It’s not your fault. And in case you’re wondering, I’ve forgotten all about that business with the home loan.”
“Really, Anne, it wasn’t personal. My apologies.”
“No need to be so sorry so much,” Anne McPhee said, mirthlessly laughing. “Besides, it’s not your fault, not giving us that loan. You work for a bank. We went to the other banks. Same thing. Besides, it’s Emory. It’s who Emory is, as a provider. Years ago we had the red-hots for each other and we got married and I got knocked up, and now here I am, sitting on this park bench with you.” She shot Patsy a huge disarming smile. She had a quality of dishonest sincerity. “We kissed ourselves right out of school into having a family before we had prospects. Same old story. Story of the ages. Story of the sower and the seedbed. We couldn’t help ourselves.”
“You get married, you struggle for a while,” Patsy sighed, scratching at her own arm in sympathy.
“It’s different for you,” Anne said. “You and Saul have two incomes. You at the bank, him at the school. No offense, Patsy. Emory and me, we had so much love so fast it just kept us ignorant about other things. The whole rest of the world.”
Patsy nodded. This conversation was like an old cat that wouldn’t get up from the carpet, that wouldn’t move anywhere at all. Anne McPhee scratched and scratched and scratched at her rash. Finally Patsy said, struggling against the silence, “How is Emory?”
“Oh, he’s okay. He’s thinking of getting his equivalency, then going to the Community College, get a degree in commercial art. We’re sort of fine. We’re still happy, you could say. No problem with each other. We worry about money, though.” She touched Patsy on the knee. “ All the time. Which is more your department. You still ever ride that motorcycle you bought — what, two years ago?”
“No,” Patsy said. “Not for months and months. Not since I became a mom. It’s getting dusty in the garage.”
There was a long pondering silence. The silence was about being able to buy a motorcycle that you then didn’t use. It was about that luxury. “Sometimes I wonder,” Anne said.
“Wonder about what?”
“How long it’ll last.”
“What?”
Anne said nothing. She wasn’t talking about the motorcycle anymore.
Her voice now came out very quietly and slowly. “How long it can last without enough money.”
“Depends, doesn’t it, how strong it is?” Patsy asked.