Monks and morning glories--
through many generations--
the law of the pine





























C H A P T E R

E I G H T




FOR TWO NIGHTS AILEEN FOSTER remembered her whole life. She could never get up the nerve to do anything until her nerves hurt unless she got up and did something. Maybe this is why she’d never done anything.
“You have done things,” a voice in her head protested, and began to tick off the list of her accomplishments, the same list she always brought out when she was certain she’d never accomplished anything.
This time Aileen cut the list off. It just didn’t matter. It didn’t matter if she’d built the Eiffel Tower and the Great Wall of China-- and she hadn’t. Now she had to act.
This was all she thought about all day. She thought about action while she cooked the litle bit of breakfast for Ryan and Ross, Lindsay and Ash. Ashley was coming home late. She’d have to talk to her, too. Everything that Ida had said was sticking in Aileen’s head. What about Ashley? What did she do with her time?
Tina came and went as she pleased. It was almost as if she didn’t live here anymore. Aileen wondered if she would see her daughter anymore.
There are so many damned people in this house, Aileen thought, and not a one talks to the other.
She wanted to stand up and demand that everyone tell her something right now. She wanted to say, “You’re going to start telling me your business now.” Aileen remembered Elaine, Kevin’s mother. How in her fifties she’d suddenly gotten assertive and demanded to know this and demanded to know that. Kevin was never able to stand up against his mother. In the end it had been Aileen who had taken her aside and said, “Listen old woman....”
So Aileen knew that once your forfeited the right to know, the right was gone. You couldn’t get it back. Once you stopped being dependable, you couldn’t demand that your children depend on you. She hated to admit it, but she knew she had stopped being dependable a long time ago.
Aileen was thinking about her family all day long. She was thinking about them as she drove out of Logan onto Michael, and then headed up through downtown to Windmill Cereals. She parked her car in the little parking lot. This building was old. It could not last much longer. Life would have to change for all of them. Very soon.
She thought of her children, flipping them over as she flipped boxes. Where had she failed? Didn’t all parents fail? No, Ida hadn’t. Ida had been a single parent, had to half raise two sisters and a nephew in the mix. She had managed not to fail. Who would judge her, Aileen wondered? God? No. It would be Mackenzie, Ryan, Tina in the end.
She had failed her oldest, no doubt about it, and Aileen was sure she’d failed Tina by not being interesting enough. Martina had been born in the wrong body in the wrong place. Aileen could not see beyond the Midwest. She could hardly see past the Parkway, and everything Tina had done had been odd to her. She had never really encouraged it. They’d never seen eye to eye, and now Aileen realized that this was because she had always assumed that it was she who was right. What if she had not married Kevin? For a very long time she hadn’t been married to him. Ida had only been about the same age Aileen was right now when Tina and Ash were born. What if she’d given Tina to Ida? Ida knew her.
But then what about Ashley? It just wasn’t enough for Aileen to assume that Ashley was like her. She admitted she didn’t know Ashley, either. Ashley was afraid. Ashley was drifting. Ashley had what Ida liked to call-- damn it, Mother-- cheap beauty. Ashley was blond with blue eyes and breasts and that was all she had or thought she had. Aileen didn’t know what to do for her. She’d failed that child too.
Lindsay would be fine. Lindsay was what parents raised their children to be. She wasn’t stupid, but she wasn’t too smart. She wasn’t bad enough to be hated, but Aileen also realized that she wasn’t good enough to be liked. Or pretty enough to be envied or ugly enough to be mocked. She just was.
And the same could be said for Ross. What the hell was wrong with her and Kevin? Ryan was a good kid. Aileen had always thought he wouldn’t make it, but Roy had helped him make it. Roy loved him. But Aileen and Kevin had taken pride in raising three children who were good because they were normal. Ross’s and Lindsay’s virtue lay in the fact-- yes, that they would never stick out, never overreach themselves, never cause trouble. They were normal. Actually, Ida had always said they were mediocre.
‘They’re not, Mother.” At lunch, Aileen caught herself talking to the mother who wasn’t there.
Ida had said, “Normal, mediocre. It’s the same thing. It just depends on how much value you put on being normal.”
“Well you like Mackenzie.”
“He’s not normal.”
And Aileen remembered almost shouting, “Yes, he is!”
He was her most handsome son. He was the one everyone said was the perfect blend of Kevin and Aileen. He had his father’s piercing eyes and in Mackenzie the Foster nose had been toned down. It was hawk like, not hooked. The whole top of his face was like a hawk, his smile was fierce, he had the full lips of his Italian great- grandfather on the Lawry side. He only got more handsome as the years went by. And he was kind and sweet and smart. He was a heart throb. All the boys wanted to be his friend. Her pride was watching him come down the stairs unconscious of his measured walk, his good clothes, the dash of cologne he wore, his gradually broadening shoulders. Watching her son in church, how he never realized how the girls were looking at him, was her pride.
So how could anyone that extraordinary have been ordinary?
He wasn’t normal. He was unusual.
Mackenzie was queer.
And this was a difficulty. Aileen turned that over in her head again and again. She had to deal with the fact that this might mean that she had never known Mackenzie. Ida had known. Ida had known about Ian. None of this was news to her. For God’s sake, Cedric Fitzgerald and Father Hanley knew! Aileen had to deal with the fact that the remarkably good looking son that she took so much pride in for never noticing the ladies checking him out, had been spending the bulk of his time checking boys out, and would never look at a lady. She had to deal with the fact that that nice Ian Cane who came over all the time was her son’s boyfriend. Aileen spent a while playing around with that concept. Then she went the next step. This didn’t mean a friend who was a boy, like Vaughan. This meant that Mackenzie had kissed Ian. That Mackenzie and Ian did things together. This might even mean that Mackenzie wasn’t a virgin anymore. How does a boy lose his virginity to another boy? Is it even possible? Aileen didn’t know if what was hard to deal with was the idea of Mackenzie sleeping with a boy, or Mackenzie sleeping with anyone.
In the end she decided it was best not to think about some things.

After work, Aileen drove right over to the house on Michael Street. She hadn’t been through the iron gate, up the brick walk, up the wide stair onto the porch in a long time. She’d forgotten what a happy old house this was. She felt a little safer now, knowing Mackenzie was here. She knocked on the large door. Vaughan answered it, smiling.
“We’re all in the kitchen.”
Going down the hall he walked a little ahead of Aileen. She wondered why he wasn’t surprised and why he wasn’t wondering how Mackenzie would take all of this. And then she knew that Vaughan was really too much like his mother and father, and that he was surprised and probably was wondering what to say, but that his face would never betray this.
She looked around the kitchen. Luke and Tina were present, Mackenzie stopped talking in surprise. Ian looked startled too. The two other boys, Aileen did not know.
“Mom,” Mackenzie said. Tina’s eyes just narrowed. But she smiled a little, looking interested, as if she couldn’t wait to see what would happen.
“I--” Aileen started. “I came to see you--” she included Tina. “The both of you.”
“I think you need to talk to Kenzie more,” Tina said.
Aileen looked at her daughter, and then said, “I think you might be right.”
She looked at her son.
Vaughan and Ian looked at Mackenzie, and he nodded.
“Well, you heard the lady,” said Vaughan. “Let’s get out. Amateur, Tolliver. This means you too. Shake a leg and we’ll reconvene in the BBC-arium in five minutes.”
They all picked up their things, and with a minimum of noise were gone. it was just Mackenzie and Aileen.
He sat at the large, round kitchen table. She put down her purse, and in her trench coat, hair still tied in a bun, sat down too.
Neither one of them spoke at first, so Aileen said, at last, “I came to bring you home.”
“I don’t know if that’s a good idea.”
“It’s your home.”
“Mom, it’s not my home if I can’t be me there,” Mackenzie said.
“Who says you can’t be you?”
“Can you accept me? Can you accept your gay son? Gay Mackenzie?”
“Is that what you’re calling yourself, now?” Aileen said.
“Mom, I am gay.”
Aileen put a hand up and said, “Yes. Yes, Mackenzie., I’m starting to realize that. But you’re also my son. And I would like you to come back to my house. Besides,” she added with a grin, “the other kids there are boring.”
Mackenzie raised his eyebrow and grinned.
“I’m sorry,” Aileen said, taking out her cigarettes. “But there’s just a time when you’ve got to face it. I’m sure it’s my fault, but they’re boring as all hell. Except for Ryan-- and he just gets stranger and stranger because of what’s happened. Roy hasn’t been around in a few days.”
“He’s probably nervous about everything.”
“Well, I suppose,” Aileen took a drag off her cigarette. “But hell, Ryan needs him. And I need some sanity,” Aileen told her son.
“Can I bring Ian?”
“To live?” said Aileen.
“To eat with us. To be a guest. Like he was before?”
“Only it won’t be like it was before. Will it?” said Aileen.
“It will,” Mackenzie said. “Except no one really knew what it was before.”
Aileen sighed, her cigarette dropped ashes from her fingers. Mackenzie pushed an ashtray across the table for her.
“Of course you can,” she said, wondering how she would negotiate this with Kevin.
“But Dad--” Mackenzie started, obviously thinking about the same thing.
“I--” Aileen put up a hand up to silence her son, “will take care of your father. Now, the whole Ian thing... Is he at home? I heard-- ”
“His dad hit him in the face. Hasn’t been around here, though. Ian doesn’t ever want to go back, and Cedric won’t make him.”
“No,” Aileen said, grinning faintly. “Of course he won’t. Well, I have a few other errands. Give your mama a hug before I go.”
“Don’t forget Tina,” Mackenzie said, standing up and letting his mother wrap her arms about him. She smelled of cigarettes and Primo perfume from the counter of Osco’s drugstore. It had never smelled so good. Suddenly Mackenzie said, “I thought you wouldn’t come. I thought you didn’t care, maybe, and that-- ”
Aileen took her son’s face gently.
“I will always care.”
And then she turned around and walked out of the kitchen.

Aileen stuck her head into the BBC-arium long enough to say:
“Tina, I want you at the dinner table two nights from now. Bring Luke with you. We’re having a get together.”
“Really?”
“Yes, I’m sorry, but your siblings are boring the hell out of me and so’s your dad. I need to be interested in my family again.”
“Maybe we should invite Aunt Meg and Aunt Ally over.”
“I said interested, not horrified.”

The sky was rapidly darkening as Aileen made her way to the white house on Allen Street.
Race Cane answered the door and was shocked to see Aileen Foster standing there.
“Do you have a few minutes?”
Race realized that she had never gotten over feeling a little inferior to Aileen. Over the course of nearly twenty years there was a great deal that the two of them ought to have talked about. It could be any number of things, really. Yet until this very moment, Race did not believe she’d ever spoken to Aileen.
“Come in,” the other woman said.
Aileen looked around the house.
“It’s nice,” she said.
“Thank you,” Race said, sheepishly.
“Actually,” Aileen said. “I was looking to see if your son might pop out.”
“He’s with Kirk Berghen of all people.”
“My cousin?”
“He is, isn’t he?” Race said, tilting her head. “This is a small town.
“Too small.”
“Sit down, Aileen. Come into the kitchen.”
The blond woman followed Race who said, “Can I get you something to drink?”
“Just water if you have it. I’m parched, and I’m dealing with my family. Which is sort of why I’m here.”
Race stopped in the act of pulling out the ice tray.
“Race, I know you’re a good woman,” Aileen went on. “After all, you sent Kevin back to me... When he strayed. Despite everything. That’s either courage or just knowing how much he is to deal with.”
Race was just standing there with the tray.
“I never knew you knew about that,” Race said.
Aileen nodded.
“I wasn’t the most accommodating wife at the time,” she said. “Not that that excuses it. But it’s true. I was a shrew. And then, later, I couldn’t really afford to think about it. But the point is, I think you’re good, so I’m coming to you.”
Race nodded her head, and blindly plopped ice cubes into a tumbler while she let the water run.
“Of all the boys in the world for Ryan to really take a shine to it’s Roy,” Aileen said. “And he hasn’t been around the house in a while.”
“The whole... Ian business.”
“Ian being my son’s boyfriend?” Aileen said so glibly.
This woman was definitely a surprise. Race nodded her head, and placed the glass in front of Aileen.
“Thank you,” Aileen said. “Well maybe Roy wouldn’t mind if Ryan came here? Unless you would.”
“No.”
Aileen nodded and said, “I’ll send him on over this weekend. They’ll both like it. I think.”
“Roy loves Ryan,” Race said simply. “He’s like....” Race let the phrase drop, “ an older brother.”
“Um,” said Aileen. And then, “Speaking of older brothers, what about yours?”
“Sam?”
“Yes. The one who by all reports punched his boy in the face.”
Race said nothing. She just sat down exhausted across from the other woman.
“Will it ever be safe for Ian to go back home?” Aileen said.
“It’s safe now,” said Race.
Aileen reconsidered and said, “Will he ever be happy going back home?”
“God, Aileen,” Race replied honestly, “I don’t think anyone would be happy going back to Sam Cane!”

Lee Cane was miserable.
Her life came in three phases. There was work when she put home out of her mind. There was home when she sat by herself with no background music from Ian’s room playing or, for that matter, none of the presence of her son. People had presences. Even if they never left their rooms. Even if they never said a word to you. Even if the presence wasn’t necessarily a happy one, Lee felt its absence keenly.
The house was not huge, but it seemed too large for just her, and it was just her a lot of the time. She found herself longing intensely for Sam to come home.
And then when he was finally here, this was the third phase where she wanted him to go to sleep and go to sleep soon. Stop talking, and especially stop ignoring the fact that his son had-- two weeks hence-- flown the coop, hopped out of the window.
It was just now that Lee was able to realize she did not really want Sam home tonight.
But Lee did want Ian.
She’d called Race that evening, and listened to everything about Aileen. What a woman this Aileen must have been! Why couldn’t she do that? Then she decided she could.
Lee decided to get her son.

When Ashley came into the house that night, Aileen was sitting at the kitchen, smoking, one leg crossed over the other.
“Do you think you’ll be free the night after tomorrow?” Aileen asked her daughter.
“Oh, I don’t know, Mama.”
“Well, I do,” Aileen said, continuing to smoke her cigarette, “and the answer is-- you will be. I want you to bring over the boy you’re spending so much time with lately.”
Aileen might as well of shot ice water into her daughter’s spine. Ashley mastered herself and said:
“Such short notice-- ”
“Tell him it’s for me,” Aileen said. She smiled brightly. “Tell him it’s time to meet the mama.”


The clouds boomed, and then it seemed as if they’d been poked with a giant needle and rain just exploded against the window, falling heavy while the lightning flashed gently over the school in the distance.
“I always loved storms,” Ian murmured, reclining on his side in the bed Luke had slept in. He watched the shadows of the rain patterns that ran down the large window make patterns across Mackenzie’s face, and his arms, and his torso. “All the little kids were so afraid of them, but I’d wanna run off and play in the rain. I think I thought that maybe a tornado would come, and then I’d get to go to Oz or something.”
Mackenzie chuckled to himself, and Ian threw an arm over him.
“What? Didn’t you think strange things as a kid?”
Negligently, Mackenzie kissed Ian’s hand, turning on his side he pulled the other young man’s arm around him.
“My grandma told me that Australia was at the bottom of the world,” Mackenzie said, “And I remember going with Vaughan to the lake so that we could hunt for kangaroos.”
“What?”
“I thought that the bottom of Lake Erie was the bottom of the world. It was so huge, you know, and I thought... ‘Sure, there could be a country under there.’ We’d go swimming and I’d go down in the water and open my eyes and look for koalas or something.”
Ian started to laugh so loud he had to turn on his back.
“Now, you’re mocking me.”
“No,” Ian’s laughter died down a little. “No, that’s actually sort of cute. It is cute. You’re cute. Everything about you is cute.”
Mackenzie turned around and lay over Ian. He kissed him on the mouth, and then looked down at him again.
Ian, half smiling, traced his cheek with his index finger.
“Everything,” he said. “Including, I think, your mother. But I’m still not sure if I’m ready for her whole dinner idea.”
“Ian,” Mackenzie chided. “Do you think she is?”



“Well, I could show up,” Mick Rafferty said from the shower the next afternoon. “Then what a party that would be!”
Ashley climbed out of bed and began brushing out her hair.
“I don’t think so, Mick. We still have my grandfather’s guns, and I’m pretty sure Dad knows how to use them.”
The shower went off. Mick came out a few minutes later, red and dripping, the towel about his waist.
“Do you think she knows? Suspects a little?”
“That I’m fucking my teacher? No. That I’m fucking Bone Mc.Arthur or something like that. That’s probably what she thinks.”
Mick began drying himself, his face and hair first, his hair sticking up in spikes.
“Did you sleep with Bone Mc.Arthur?”
Ashley, in the midst of pulling on her skirt, suddenly looked at Mick sharply.
“What?” he said.
“Do I ask you for a history of your sex life?”
“No.”
“Well, then,” Ashley finished dressing. “I’m off. I need to find a suitable boyfriend by tomorrow night.”

The girls were at their lockers, between classes.
“Hakim is back at it again,” Claudia was telling Madeleine and Tina. “He’s trying to get back into my panties, and I said, ‘Really, this mess is gon have to stop and--’ ” Claudia stopped talking. They all turned to look at Ashley.
“Yes, Ash?” her sister said.
“I need you to do a huge favor for me, Tina?”
“Really?”
“You know tomorrow night? Mom’s whole dinner idea? She wants me to bring my boyfriend--”
“Who’s probably forty-five years old--”
“It’s hardly that bad. But she knows it’s someone, and she wants me to bring him around the house tomorrow, and I was wondering if you’d ask someone for me? Someone you have influence over.”
Tina raised an eyebrow.
“Derrick Todd.”
All three girls barked out a laugh, and Ashley said, “I’m serious!”
“Your mother will never believe you’re dating Derrick Todd,” Madeleine said.
“He’s the nicest guy in the school. He’s clean cut, and sweet, and--”
“And this is why Aileen will never believe it,” Madeleine insisted.
“You can’t do that,” Claudia told Tina. “Lindsay would hate you if-- ”
Tina put up a hand, and then she offered the other one to Ashley.
“Twin, just for the sheer pleasure of pissing Lindsay off, I’ll ask him.”
Ashley took her sister’s hand, “It’s always good to know we can hate Lindsay together.”
“Isn’t it, though,” Tina took out a cigarette. “I need to smoke now.”




“You want me to what?” Derrick said, closing his locker.
“Just be her boyfriend for one night,” Tina told him.
“She chose me?”
“She thinks you’re nice,” Tina said. “And she thought that I would be the one who could talk you into it.”
Derrick cocked his head at her, and grinned.
“Which would mean at this very moment I’m manipulating you,” Tina went on. “Only there actually is something in it for me.”
“Tina, this would piss Lindsay off so much,” Derrick said, shutting his locker.
“That,” Tina told Derrick, “is exactly what’s in it for me.”

When the boys came back to the house that afternoon, and entered the kitchen, Mrs. Cane hopped up from the table. Cedric looked utterly exhausted, and Vaughan sent a glance to his father the same time Ian looked at Lee Cane and said, “Mom.”
“Yes,” she said. “I came to bring you home,”
Ian stared at her blankly, and then she said, “Don’t you want to go home?”
“Not really,” he told her, sounding dull and stupid to himself. “I need to sit,” Ian said, and made his way to one of the chairs.
“It’s no sense being someplace that isn’t your home when we want you to come back,” Mrs. Cane told her son.
“You want me to come back now?”
“Yes. Don’t you want to? You can pack up now?”
“I need to think about it,” Ian said.
“What’s to think about?” Mrs. Cane sounded a little shrill. “You have a home. You have a mother, and a father. We love you. We want you to come home.”
“Mom, did Dad say he wanted me to come home?”
“He didn’t have to.”
“I think he does,” Ian differed.
“Of course he wants you back.”
“He didn’t like me when he thought I was straight. How’s he gonna take me being gay?”
“You are not gay!” Lee Cane told him.
Lazily, Ian jerked his thumb toward Mackenzie, who was standing behind him.
“Meet my boyfriend, Ma,” he said.
Lee stared at Mackenzie. He only offered a hand.
Lee Cane did not except it. She returned to Ian.
“Look. You’ll get over this. This is not you, and I don’t see why you’d define yourself like this-- ”
“Because I’m in love with a boy-- ”
“It’ll pass.”
“No, it won’t,” Ian said, standing up. Cedric was about to open his mouth when Ian said, “Mom, please go away.”
“Ian--”
“Please. Just for now, awright?”
“But I want you to--”
“And I want to think about it. You can’t just expect me to come running back right now. I mean, for God’s sake, it took you two weeks to even come over here.”
“But his mother-- ”she pointed at Mackenzie.
“His name,” Ian said, wrapping an arm around Mackenzie’s waist, “is Mackenzie Allen Foster. And his mother actually acknowledges that I have a name too. And his mother actually makes an effort at... something. Mom, please go now.”
“But Ian!” she snapped.
“Really, Mrs. Cane,” Cedric stood up now. “I’m going to have to ask you to get the hell out of my house.”
She looked around at them all, incredulous, and then Cedric walked toward the hallway, and motioned for her to follow him.
When he came back-- alone-- all three boys felt a little bit shaken.
“I have to tell you,” Cedric said in his usual, deliberate voice. “She’s been here since two-thirty driving me about nuts. And it’s hard for me to be driven nuts. Really, Ian,” Cedric sat down and took out his cigarettes, “your mama is one tedious bitch.”
“Yes, sir,” Ian answered solemnly, “I would have to agree.”


It happened twice in one day, and after play rehearsal it was just too much.
“Ms. Foster,” said Mr. Stearne, “do you know what you’ll be doing with yourself after graduation?”
“I can honestly say that I don’t,” Tina said. She’d had to lie to Mr. Rafferty today, talking about plans. She told all of this to George Stearne who grinned at her, and tugged his goatee. God help us, the little man was cute to her today.
“And then he told me-- get a load of this,” Tina hefted her gymbag over her shoulder, “Maybe you and Ashley should look for colleges together. Maybe you should help her out a little more.”
George Stearne frowned, and said, “I think Ashley Foster’s gotten enough help as it is. Pardon me, Ms. Foster.”
“Why do you always call me Ms. Foster?” she asked suddenly.
“It keeps the lines of respect going. You know, if you’re calling me Mr. Stearne, shouldn’t I have the respect to call you Ms. Foster?”
Tina thought about it a second, and said, “I never thought of it that way. I always thought you were just making fun of me.”
“Well, there’s probably a little bit of that too,” he smirked at her. “You really don’t have any plans for next year.”
“No, St-- Mr. Stearne.”
“I just wanted to help.”
She looked at him again, strangely.
“You always seem to be surprised that I don’t have fangs.”
“Mr. Stearne-- I am surprised. You’ve spent the last two years polishing them... You’ve got to know it’s all we talk about.”
The schoolteacher jammed his hands in his pockets and said, “Do the students really think of me that way?”
“Distant, but in a good way,” Tina supplied. “Sort of like Thomas Jefferson’s view of God.”
“Nice to know you stayed awake through American history. Have you been to your guidance councilor?”
“That woman doesn’t have time for me.”
George Stearne frowned a little, and then pursed out his lips.
“I tell you what. Teachers find students who... have promise... every now and again. It doesn’t happen that often. Sometimes this is the most unrewarding job in the world. I’m just telling you now in case you ever plan to be a second generation teacher at this school.”
“No.”
George Stearne shrugged.
“But now and again,” he continued, “there are students you want to help because you know they’re going to go far. Madeleine-- ”
“She’s even worse than me. She really doesn’t know where she’s going!”
Stearne smiled, mysteriously, and said, “all the same, I have it on good authority that she is being seen to...- Expertly. I want to sort of see to you expertly. Steer you in the right direction.”
“Thanks, sir. I appreciate that,” Tina told him. “But it’s March. I mean, aren’t most schools no longer accepting applications.”
“Tina, Tina, Tina,” George Stearne placed a confidential arm around the girl, and surprised the hell out of her. “There are other things besides school after high school... And anyway... I’ve seen your grades. All those schools that just made their decisions... you wouldn’t have gotten into anyway.”

That evening, as Tina Foster was coming up the steps of 1959 Michael Street to the last of the daylight, she bumped into Rodder Gonzales.
“Mr. Gonzales,” she said, instantly realizing she’d been around Stearne too long.
“Hey, Tina!” he grinned brightly, which was a sign he was nervous, and clutched what he held to his chest a little tighter. “Madeleine’s not home,” he added.
“And yet you are?” she cocked her head. “What’s that you’ve got, Rodder?”
“Oh, nothing.”
The little woman swiftly grabbed the pakage from the tall young man’s hands.
“Tina!” Rodder protested.
“Ms. Madeleine Fitzgerald.... school of.... What the hell is this? Madeleine’s going to college?”
“She thinks- -we think.” Suddenly Rodder became very stern and said, “Please return the package, Martina.”
She laughed in his face.
“I’m serious!”
“I know. What’s this all about?”
“She doesn’t know anything,” Rodder told her. “Please keep it that way. Me and Cedric are sort of enrolling her in school behind her back. And then if she gets in we’ll tell her. She can make her decision.... If she doesn’t she’ll never know. If she doesn’t want to go...” Rodder shrugged.
“Oh, my God!” Tina said. “Now I know what Stearne was talking about. I wish you were my boyfriend!” Tina said.
“Please don’t tell, Tina.”
“Oh, no! I’d never.” She leapt up and kissed him full on the lips. “You really are the sweetest thing in the world, Roderigo Luis Gonzales. No wonder she kept you!”

Mackenzie told them that Aileen said dinner would be at around seven.
“Well great,” Vaughan told him. “I hope you have a good time.
“What?”
“I said I hope you have a good time.”
“You’re not coming?”
“Hell no. It’s not even about me. And I have my own shit to deal with. I’m staying the night at the monastery.”
“Oh,” Mackenzie said. “Well, if you change your mind.”
“I won’t. It’s a damn war zone over there. I’ve had enough of Logan Street for the time being.”

George Stearne called up Mick Rafferty, and said, “Before you tell me you’re not free, and all your time is taken up by this sexy young thing you’re with, I should probably get off the phone.”
“George, my boy,” Mick said cheerfully. “I am blessedly unoccupied this evening. This sexy young thing has plans tonight. So I’m perfectly free. Go to the Tsalagi?”
“Yeah,” said George. “I want to hear about this gal of yours.”
“You’re a voyeur, you just wanna get some proxy.”
“Yeah, well...”
“As you once asked me: how long’s it been, George?”
“I’m getting off the phone now.” George Stearne said, “I’ll see you tonight, Mick.”

“But that’s great,” Madeleine said. “I wish I had someone helping me out with my future.”
Tina meditated only briefly on telling her about Rodder. Then she said, “Are you going out tonight?”
“Naw. You want me to help you battle the storm on Logan Street?”
Tina clasped her friend’s hand. “God, yes!”
“I’m there for you,” Madeleine told her. “Actually, I’d be there just to see the look on Lindsay’s face when Derrick Todd walks in.”
“I can’t wait to see the look on Mom’s face,” said Tina. “I mean, my God, does Ash think that she’s a complete moron?”

“This or this?” Ian displayed an electric blue dress shirt, and a plain one.
“Roy chose the electric blue.”
“I thought it might look to fruity for the parents.”
“Ian, you’re going as Mackenzie’s boyfriend. It can’t get any more fruity than that, can it?”

Tina was smoking a great deal this evening, sitting at the table playing cool, but taking in everything. She lifted the next cigarette to her mouth the same time Aileen did, and realized that her mother, in a white, spring dress, smelling of perfume, was doing the same. Luke wouldn’t be back from the gas station until around six. The more she thought about Stearne, and the more she thought about Luke, the more she wondered who was going to help him out.
Mackenzie looked a little haggard. No. He looked a little dangerous. Weren’t gay people supposed to be soft and sensitive. But Mackenzie was calling himself queer. There was no Ian as of yet. He was coming later with Roy. Ashley was sitting at the other side of the table from her and Madeleine. When there was a knock at the backdoor, Tina jumped, thinking it would be Derrick, but Ryan came in and said, “It’s Luke.”
“Tina’s got great news,” Madeleine said, as Luke sat down beside her. But Tina cleared her throat, and Madeleine looked at her strangely.
“What?” said Luke.
“Nothing,” said Tina. “Just not now. Later.”
Luke looked at Tina a little longer, and then said, taking out a cigarette. “Awright. Later, Ms. Foster.:”
Things could not have gone better except that Mackenzie seemed to be getting nervous as he entered the dance of children setting down plates and filling glasses with ice, passing the salad bowl. Kevin Foster sat down in the midst of it all looking, to Madeleine, a little out of it. Unlike most boyfriends, Luke did not seem to feel a need to ingratiate himself to the distant Mr. Foster. But then Luke wasn’t exactly most boyfriends... or even a boyfriend... Was he? Madeleine seriously did not know about that.
“Is your man coming, Ashley?” Aileen asked with a smile.
“Yeah, Mom,” she said, wondering if he really would show.
“Because if he doesn’t,” Tina heard Aileen threaten as she went into the living room to bring out candlesticks, “you know you’ll be restricted to school and the house until I finally see him.”
Tina heard her sister give a strangled noise, and then Tina said, “Don’t worry. I see his car now.”
Mackenzie was fidgeting, and even though he knew it was only Derrick Todd at the door, he almost leapt up to get it.
But it was Tina who ushered Derrick in, and Ashley rose up from her chair, graciously, throwing her arms around him at the same time that Lindsay stood up, amazed. Ashley kissed him on the mouth and said, “Honey!”
“I hate you!” Lindsay shrieked as Tina and Madeleine began to laugh. Even Mackenzie had to laugh. Kevin Foster just looked perplexed.
Aileen put a hand over her face, and Tina couldn’t tell what her mother really wanted to do, but Aileen just said, “Now let’s calm down.”
Derrick just stood there as Ashley waxed on, “We couldn’t contain it anymore. I mean, we’ve been real quiet about it until now. Lindsay I’m sorry-- ”
Tina and Madeleine were laughing so hard, Luke almost had to pick Tina up off of the floor, which would have been difficult, because he was in fits too.
Lindsay repeated, “I hate you.” She turned around and told her sisters and Madeleine, “I hate you all!” Then she stormed up the back stair.
This time when there was a knock at the door, Kevin got up to get it and then he came back and said, “School kids. Fundraiser. Let’s eat.”
Kevin said the grace. They were hungry. Mackenzie pecked at his food. When Roy showed up, Ryan told him how late he was and Roy said, “I’m sorry. Things got kind of crazy. I had to help Mom with some stuff at the restaurant, and before that I had to find Ian something to wear.”
“Where is he?” Mackenzie said.
“Beats me,” Roy shrugged, looking around the house as if Ian would suddenly pop up. “He left before me. He should have been here by now.”
“Well, maybe he stopped to pick up something,” Madeleine said. She was going to tease Mackenzie and say, ‘Pick up flowers’, but thought that at this table it might not be a good idea.
“No, he didn’t,” Tina said with certainty. And when she said it, Aileen put her glass down, realizing the same terrible thought that was coming to her was already in Tina’s head.
“Kevin?” Aileen said quietly.
“Um hum,” he kept eating. “Good corn.”
“Kevin?” At the strange change in her voice, everyone got quiet.
Kevin put down his corncob.
“Has Ian been here, already?” Aileen said.
Mackenzie turned toward his father for an answer. Kevin’s eyes began to space a little. But he didn’t answer.
“The fundraising kids?” Aileen said. When her husband still didn’t answer, Aileen said, “This is the time when you’d better answer me, Kevin Foster.”
“I couldn’t let him in.”
The whole kitchen was quiet. Aileen sat across from her husband, and waited for him to elaborate.
“I just looked at him, and I couldn’t let him. I just... I closed the door in his face,” Kevin said. “I could not have that in my house.”
Roy swallowed, and stood up.
“Roy, where are you going?” Kevin said.
Roy’s eyes, large and blue, filled up with tears that did not fall out. He looked, for once, like he wanted to kill someone. Tina could not decide if the transformation was wonderful or terrible.
“That,” he said, his voice thick, “is my flesh and blood.”
He turned to leave. Ryan stood up.
“I’m sorry, Ryan. I gotta get my cousin.”
“Hold on,” Mackenzie said, standing up. He left the room for a minute, and came out with his bomber jacket as Roy was slipping his pea coat on. “Now let’s go. Tina, can I take your car?” He spoke right over his father’s head, trying not to let his voice tremble.
“No,” Tina said, rising. “Cause I’m driving.”
And then Luke and Madeleine got up with her. And went to the kitchen door.
Lindsay, Derrick, and Ross, and Ryan were left between Aileen and Kevin.
Roy squatted down beside Ryan and said, “Don’t you try anything funny, alright? Just respect your dad.”
“Roy--”
“Listen to me. Respect me, alright?”
Ryan looked at his friend, and murmured, “I want to--”
“No,” Roy told him firmly.
When they had left, Ryan looked at Aileen and said, “May I be excused?”
Aileen, whose arms were folded across her chest and was staring down at her plate, nodded.
Then Roy and his friends went out into the night.
Derrick got up and said to Ashley, “Excuse me. But... those are my friends.” He nodded manfully at the Fosters, and left as well.
When it was just Ashley between her parents, Aileen said, “You might as well go too.”
“Yes, Mother.”
“And, Ashley?”
“Yes, Mother?”
“Don’t ever expect me to be so stupid as to believe that you and Derrick Todd would ever be a couple. But good points for pissing your sister off. Now take your food and go upstairs.”
“Yes, Ma’am.”
When it was just Aileen and Kevin, she finally looked up at her husband who was looking down at his plate.
“I want to thank you,” she told him. “For ruining everything.”
“Aily,” he started.
She put a hand up, and stood up.
“You know what?” Aileen said, “They didn’t have a bad idea.”
She went out of the kitchen, and few moments later Kevin Foster could hear his car leaving the driveway.


This first place they all went was the Fitzgerald house.
“Well then, where is he if he’s not here?” Mackenzie wondered. His grandmother, Cedric, and Ralph shook their heads, not knowing either.
“You think he went back home. His house?” Tina asked Roy.
“Not a chance,” Roy said.
“I can’t believe he’d do that.” Mackenzie just kept on repeating, “I don’t know that I believe in anything anymore.”
Apropos to nothing, Derrick Todd put his hand out, and introduced himself to Cedric.
“Weren’t you with Lindsay?’ Ida said.
“At one time, Ma’am.”
“Now he’s with Ashley,” Tina stated.
Ida cocked a disbelieving eye at her granddaughter.
“Things didn’t work out with Lindsay, Ma’am,” said Derrick.
“Oh, you learned she was a bitch. Eh?”
“Uh,” Derrick started, trying to be politic. “Something like that.”
“You might want to try your house,” Cedric told Roy. “Wouldn’t that make sense?”
“Yeah,” Roy’s voice lightened with relief. “Thanks, sir.”
Cedric saluted the boy, then shrugged.

“That son of a bitch!” Race swore, blowing out cigarette smoke. “I’m getting the car keys. I’m going to kick his ass!”
“Mom, no! Not right now!” Roy said. “Please, sit!”
Race took in a deep breath. The ashes of her Winstons were falling on the carpet.
“He hasn’t been here?” Mackenzie said, hopefully.
Race knew the boy’s mother now. She knew what this boy meant to Ian, and what Ian meant to him. She had to love him.
“No, Mackenzie. I’m sorry.”
Mackenzie looked devastated.
“He’ll turn up, I’m sure. He’s probably just driving.”
“Can I stay here awhile?” Mackenzie said. “In case he turns up?”
“Of course,” she said.
Then Tina said, “Can we all stay awhile? If you don’t mind, ma’am?”
“I don’t mind,” Race said. “I don’t mind at all.”
Tonight Race looked at Tina and Mackenzie, and realized she’d have to start to think of the Fosters differently. They sat down on the couch with Roy between them, and Race looked at all three of them together, and didn’t know what to think.


SO THIS IS WHAT LOVE was, Vaughan learned. Some people would never learn. And this is what God was. It could not be taught at school or at a pulpit. It had to be experienced, and he was sure that it was only being experienced at a monastery by coincidence. It could happen anywhere. He sat in the casement of a window in a quiet room in an abbey outside-inside of Jamnia, looking across Lake Clare. And Lake Clare was like faith wasn’t it? He could not see it in the dark but he knew the Lake was there because he’d seen it before. In the distance were the lights of Jamnia.
How could anyone not believe in God? What was God? God was what was there. God was what was. God was all around. To believe in being, to be, was to be with God. So much that could not really be communicated. So much happiness at this moment.
There was a tap at the door, and Vaughan suddenly realized that the happiness was now over. He went to answer it, and Brother Paul stood there with Ian.
“I figured he must need you really bad and all,” said Brother Paul.
Vaughan looked at Ian, and then nodded, and said, “Thanks.”
He closed the door, and stood waiting for Ian to speak.
Instead, the other boy did the most astounding of things and burst into tears. Vaughan put his arms around Ian, and Ian began to cry into his friend’s shirt. What in the hell could have possibly happened? Vaughan wanted to ask. But Ian continued sobbing louder and louder, catching his breath, and Vaughan knew that this was just not the time for questions.
Never mind, he would learn soon enough.


The phone rang in Vaughan’s room, and he told Ian, “Hold on.
“Who could this be?” he picked up the phone. “Yeah, hello. Kenzie! Oh, God, Kenzie, slow down. Just stop. He’s right here!”
Vaughan put down the phone and said: “Do you think you could manage a phone call from your significant other?”
Ian swallowed and tried to smile as he reached for the phone.


It was late when the lights of Tina’s LTD lit up the driveway of the house on Windham Street. A few minutes later she came on in though the door that was never locked.
Tina found her mother and grandmother sitting around the table.
“Ian’s at the monastery with Vaughan,” Tina reported. “Kenzie’s going to join them.”
Aileen nodded.
“Mom, are you drunk?”
Aileen gave a little wave to acknowledge that she just might be, and Ida nodded emphatically.
“Oh, Mama, I’ve failed,” Aileen said.
“Whaddo you mean?” said Ida.
“I didn’t do anything tonight. I just sat there. I didn’t know what to do.”
“What could you have done?” Ida said. “You let your son be a man. You let love take it’s course.”
“I don’t understand this,” Aileen said. “I don’t get a thing going on. I am screwing up in every which direction.”
“How can you understand people?” Ida said. “Or understand love? Look at me, Mary Aileen. Did you do your best?”
Tina watched her mother nod to her mother.
“Well, then. There’s nothing else to be done.”
All at once the three women took out their cigarettes, and lit up.

“If it makes you feel better, Mom,” Tina said, sitting down at the table. “I have a future. I don’t know where, but Mr. Stearne said he’s gonna help me out. And that a bright girl like me-- he calls me bright--”
“Of course. You are,” Ida said.
“You’re just lazy as hell... Scholastically,” Aileen added.
“And he’s... I’ve got an advocate now. It’s just... I wondered who would be Luke’s advocate?”
“Um?” said Aileen.
“Mama, he’s working hard at the first job anyone ever helped him get. Where’s he going go, though. What’s he going do? Who’s going to fight for him?”
“Why don’t you?” Ida said simply. “Maybe a woman’s not a woman until she has to learn to fight for someone. Until she learns she has been fought for.”
“What if she wasn’t?” Tina said.
Ida told her granddaughter, “I wasn’t. So I made up for it by fighting a little harder for others. And what’s that to your story when you’ve got so many people on your side, Martina Foster?”
Tina nodded. She sighed and said, “Well then I’m on Luke’s side now. And I like that. I feel like I’m going to go places. And you know what, Ma? Mackenzie will, too. He’ll be fine. He’s stronger everyday.”
Aileen nodded. Then she said, “He’s my son. Of course he’s stronger everyday.”
Tina looked from her mother to her grandmother, and began to get the feeling that they were all a lot more alike than she’d ever thought.

On either side of Vaughan, Mackenzie and Ian were talking rapidly, and Mackenzie was going on about Roy, who stood at the edge of the bed.
“He was something else,” Mackenzie was telling Ian. “I’d never seen anyone like that. Except for Tina.”
“I wish I’d been there,” Ian said, blowing his nose.
“If you’d been there,” his cousin pointed out, “it wouldn’t have happened.”
“You all are really good friends, you know that?” Ian said.
None of them responded.
“No, I mean that,” Ian said.
“Oh, stop it, Ian.” Vaughan demanded.
“Let’s not lose this,” Ian commanded.
Vaughan muttered, “Alright Ian.”
“No, I’m serious, “ Ian clasped Vaughan’s shoulder tightly, and with his other hand he caught his cousin’s hand, “You two didn’t have to be in all of this--”
“Yes, we did,” Roy argued.
“No,” Ian said, quietly, looking up at his cousin. “You didn’t. But you are now, and I guess nothing’s gonna get easier. No matter how much we want it too. Right, Kenzie?”
Mackenzie, beside Vaughan, nodded sternly.
“So, let’s stick together,” said Ian said. “Like we are right now.”

i i

The next morning Ralph Hanley is up early. He showers, smokes, and drinks a cup of coffee before Mass. He does not make it to Cedric’s house though he sees both Cedric and Ida at Mass. Over thirty years ago, Cedric introduced the would be priest to the one time baby-sitter. They got on as well as two friends of a friend could. Ralph did not expect to know her this many years later.
He checks on Father Brumbaugh again. Before Mass, Ralph went up to his room and tapped on the door a few times. Hearing no answer, he went in and found the old priest, hair disheveled, sitting on the edge of the bed looking as if he were-- unsuccessfully-- trying to recall something. Now, after Mass, he is still there.
“Father,” Ralph says. Outside of the window of Father Brumbaugh’s bedroom the Number Seven rattles by.
“Come, let me help you,” Ralph reaches out an arm, and hooks the other around the old priest. He leads him out of the room ,and down the stairs. He wishes Cedric was here to help the old man with coffee or a bit of food.
Sometimes it is this way.
The old priest has been sitting nearly catatonic in the rectory, being virtually spoon fed. Ralph knows that this will be the day that he must return Brumbaugh to Holy Spirit, and perhaps see about getting a new priest. Not that new priests are in vast supply.
He drives with the window wide open. This day yellow lilies like weeds are popping up in profusion on the side of the road, and the sky above is like a huge blue tent. The clouds are thick and white as if Michelangelo painted them there with dramatic flourish. Ralph cannot remember the sun being so bright or so close. Spring is here again. How many springs has he seen? This June it will be fifty-two.
Ralph turns toward the old priest, a collection of white wrinkles over blue veins. The old man’s mouth looks heavy, pulled down to his chest by gravity. His eyes are spaced out, looking at nothing. This may be his last spring. And does this even count as a last spring? If you are not present, is it present for you?

Julian and Ralph are talking in the common room. Julian is telling Ralph everything he knows about the kids.
“I’d like to see Vaughan before I leave,” Ralph says, taking out a cigarette, and stretching his legs.
Julian nods. “He came here for prayer and quiet, I think. But it doesn’t seem forthcoming.”
“Are they all here?” Ralph gestures with his smoldering cigarette. “Mackenzie and Ian.”
Again, Julian nods, “And this Ian’s little cousin too. It’s nice having boys in the place. They’re not vocations, but... Ick!” Suddenly Julian makes a face.
“What?”
“I’m tired of that word,” Julian says, then mimicks, “Vocation. Vocation. Vocation. Discernment. Discernment. Discernment!” And laughs. “But yes,” Julian says, growing serious again. “It’s good you brought old Brumbaugh back here for his last days... And there’s no debating it, these are the last days. I’d love to send Paul to you.”
“But he’s not a priest.”
“Exactly,” Julian said. “It would be nice to see him in plain clothes, though. Almost as nice as it would be to remember what you look like in habit.”
Ralph smirked at the other priest.

Vaughan finally got up from his knees, and bowed before the tabernacle, then headed past the grille into the pews of the chapel and said to the darkness: “How long have you been here?”
“How’d you see me?” Ralph laughed out of the darkness.
“Aren’t we in a mess, now?” Vaughan said, not answering the question as he sat down beside Ralph.
“What all happened?”
Vaughan told him everything, uncensored, about last night.
“I got rid of them,” he said. “I told Ian and Kenzie to go walking by the Lake. Roy’s out amusing himself by himself. Which is something he’s good at. And I went here because I needed to be here. With God. Alone. And because I don’t think I’ll be able to be alone with God a lot for a while.”
“Um?” said Ralph.
“It’s alright,” said Vaughan. “There’s work to be done. I think God wants me to do it. Nothing big. Just to be there for people. Just to be there right now when they need me. Maybe someday I’ll put on a big black robe, and live in the woods like a hermit... Sing Latin all day.”
“I would not put it past you,” Ralph said.
“But not today,” said Vaughan.
“Fitzgeralds always come to the rescue,” Ralph said.
Now it was Vaughan’s turn to say, “huh?”
“It used to be your father’s favorite phrase. Whenever he’d pop up and I would be in trouble. Or what he thought was trouble. He would say,” Ralph raised his finger, and shook it, “ ‘Fitzgeralds to the rescue.’ Which, at first, shocked me. Because for the first eighteen years I knew him, his last name was DuFresne.”
Ralph shrugged it off.

THE OTHER NIGHT RALPH WOKE up with the most dreadful charley horse. This is life. You don’t know you’re in pain until you’re awake. Cedric was never able to be asleep for long, this was the difference between Ralph and his friend, and he Ralph knew after nearly thirty-eight years of friendship, the other man’s main complaint about him. It had been the ability to sleep through experiences which had gotten him past high school and a great deal of seminary through seminary. It had been this ability which had gotten him through or sent him to his first year at Notre Dame.
The sleep had ended with a drunken caterwauling in January of 1969. Ralph heard it coming from downstairs in the common room of Old College.
“Ralph, you motherfucker! Get down here you motherfucker! Com’ on motherfucker!”
He lay in bed wondering who in God’s name this could be, and daring to hope that maybe this was a dream.
There was a tap on his door, and Ralph said, “It’s open.”
A splinter of light went across the floor as Jeremy Tosca entered.
“Ralph,” he said. “It seems you have a friend here?”
Ralph came downstairs in his housecoat and pajamas and found Cedric DuFresne dressed to the nines, his good shoes impeccably bright as his feet dangled over the couch. He was swilling a bottle of something, and two Samsonite suitcases were on the couch before him.
“Ralph!” he cried.
“Cedric DuFresne?”
“No,” Cedric tried to stand up, failed, and grumbled, “Goddamnit, I need a cigarette.” He fumbled for his Pall Malls. “Fitzgeralds to the rescue.”
“What?” said Ralph.
“I said Fitz-GERALD. How you like that shit?” Cedric laughed. He turned to the innocent Jeremy Tosca, and demanded, “”How you like that shit? Motherfucker?”
“Please, Ced?” begged Ralph.
“Please my ass,” Cedric said, and then, lighting a cigarette which he began ashing on the floor, continued, “I have gone from being a Frenchman to an Irishman that quick. Fitzgerald is Irish, ain’t it? Oh, shit, and the fighting Irish too! You Irish, baby?” he asked the alarmed Jeremy Tosca.
“I’m Italian,” the other boy stammered.
“Are you in the Family... You know that mafia shit?”
“Oh, God, Cedric.”
Jeremy Tosca smiled ruefully at the other nineteen year old, and said, “No.”
“I bet you are,” Cedric disagreed. “I bet that’s how your mama and daddy sent you here. Ain’t nothing wrong with that,” he waved it aside. “We all need to get our education somehow.
“Now, Ralph, I need to tell you all about New Orleans,” Cedric went on, not stopping for breath. “And about the name change. And about Haiti. And-- yes-- Minnesota. I went to Minnesota. You know why?” When no one answered, Cedric went right on and answered himself, “Cause I’d never been.” he laughed out loud. “I’d never been to the motherfucker! So, why don’t you get some clothes on, and we’ll go for a walk.”
“It’s the middle of the night, and its cold,” Ralph protested, upset at everything.
“You bastard!” Cedric declared, full of venom. “I travel all this way and you give me some crap like this. Put some goddamn clothes on. Now! Jeremy!”
“Yes,”
“Get me some coffee. I’m drunk as hell!”
Jeremy stared at him.
“I meant now,” Cedric said.
“A--” Jeremy Tosca stammered, “Alright.”

It was early in the morning when Cedric sat on the edge of Ralph’s bed, and lit another cigarette clenched at the corner of his mouth.
He offered Ralph one.
“Naw, I don’t do that now,” Ralph said.
“Really, since you gon be a priest?”
“Exactly,” Ralph said.
“Seems like you’d want to do it for that very reason. Seems like you’d need some diversion around a dull ass place like this.”
“It’s not dull.”
“It’s dull as fuck,” Cedric protested. “And cold as fuck too. Speaking of fuck, when’s the last time you got... fucked?”
“You know I don’t do that kind of thing... anymore.”
“Well,” Cedric said, negligently, “neither do I. But I still like to think about doing it. Actually, I’d like to think about going to sleep. I’m tired as hell.”
“How long you staying?” Ralph asked as Cedric made his way to an easy chair, and wrapped himself in your blanket.
“Oh,” Cedric said, as the sun began to peak up over the frozen lake. “I thought I’d told you. I’m going here now.”
And then he immediately went to sleep.



*****

His ass was like a peach, gently cleft and covered in a light fuzz in the early morning as she caressed it again and again after a night of unrelenting passion....

Ida Lawry put down the pen and bit into the peach, reflecting on it. She liked what she’d made. She had quit her job at the college. It was just too much having to see David everyday. And then she didn’t really like the college. She was collecting alimony, writing porn and taking in borders to make ends meet. All in all she liked her life.
Ida came out onto the porch. The border, Mr. Stanley, was sitting out there, smoking cigarettes and looking at the high sunflowers. Aileen was asleep upstairs.
“Mrs. Lawry,” he said in his smooth Southern voice. Ida resolved to use him in her next porn novel-- which she would dedicate to Cedric for helping her get her life somewhat on track. “You look so lovely this evening.”
Ida made herself blush, and said, “Oh, just stop that.”
She sat down and began to smoke with him. Mr. Stanley came a little closer. When Ida did not protest, Mr. Stanley came closer still.
“Mrs. Lawry, you smell you wonderful.”
Why... thank you.”
He took another drag from his cigarette.
“I read your wonderful little novel,” he told her.
“Really?”
“Oh, yes,” said Mr. Stanley. “It got me thinking about how long it had been sense... I’ve enjoyed the company of a real lady.”
Ida looked at him, playing with her yellow headband.
“Mrs. Lawry, when’s the last time you enjoyed the company of a real man?”
“Oh, God!” Ida laughed like crazy. “I don’t think I’ve ever enjoyed the company of any man.”
“A woman who writes so passionately!”
“It’s all for the books. Has very little to do with the reality.”
Mr. Stanley fixed his smoldering gaze on her.
“Would you like for it to have something to do with the reality?” he said. “You’re a beautiful woman. I could enhance your reality.”
He kissed her hand. His lips lingered on her fingers, on her wedding ring. His eyes went up to her.
“But only if you want me to.”
Ida’s heart was racing. Aileen was asleep. Her ex-husband was off in Belmont. She realized suddenly that in all of her twenty-six years she had never had an orgasm, and it was about high time she did.
So she stood up, took Mr. Stanley’s hand, and led him into the kitchen.
A second later, the kitchen light went out, and the house on Windham street was immersed in darkness.