Dark Water - Laura McNeal [81]
I stared at her for a second, stunned, and then at the backs of the girls sitting in front of us. I no longer had any claim to muteness, so I said, “Hi.”
“I’m sorry about your uncle,” she said.
This I never answer anymore.
“You know that Robby told me not to come to the funeral, right?” she said, her hair cut short and brushing against her turtleneck but her face still innocently, childishly pretty.
“No. I didn’t. I looked for you, actually.”
“He acted like it would be really offensive for me to be there, which I didn’t get.”
I hoped that something would interrupt us, such as the cheerleaders asking our section to do the wave. “I guess he just thought it would be weird for you to be there,” I said.
“Why would it be weird?”
“Because of your relationship with his dad.”
Mary Beth stared at me. She didn’t look embarrassed or guilty, just confused. “What are you talking about?” she asked.
“You and my uncle—the affair. Robby knew.” On the field, among the bright red and blue shirts, play resumed.
Mary Beth turned a sort of plum color. “There wasn’t an affair.”
“But he saw you. At the house. Kissing his dad. I guess he was hiding in the bushes trying to figure out why his dad was acting so odd.”
She tugged at her sleeves as everyone around us jumped up and screamed about a play that we weren’t watching.
When they were quiet enough for her to continue, she told me she knew what day I was talking about, but he had it all wrong. She said she came out to the house to drop off a tennis racket she’d gotten re-stringed for Mrs. Wallace. Nobody was home but Hoyt, and he offered her a Coke. They started talking in the kitchen about Paris because Mary Beth was saving up to go there, and he wanted to recommend an apartment his wife’s cousin rented out near the Eiffel Tower.
“He thought he had the address and stuff in his room, in a box, and he told me to come on upstairs, and I remember thinking I shouldn’t go into his room, but if I acted like it was a big deal, then it would be a big deal. So I acted like it was nothing, and while he’s going through the box, showing me stuff, I hear the front door open and shut, and I’m thinking, ‘Oh my God! Agnès is home! What’s she going to think?’ Mr. Wallace thought the same thing, so we’re like in some sort of play with all these doors opening and shutting. It was kind of funny, but it was incredibly stressful, too, especially when Robby came to the door.
“Anyway, Robby left, or I thought he left, and Mr. Wallace walked me to my car. When we get there, he goes, ‘Well, that was a lot of trouble to prevent the appearance of something that couldn’t possibly happen.’ ”
Mary Beth paused for an unnaturally long time, and she looked into the distance where the other team sat and pressed her thumbnail against her lip.
“This is really hard to explain,” she said at last. “I don’t know if I should even try.”
I didn’t want to hear anything bad about my uncle, and that’s how the story was starting to sound. I just waited.
“Okay,” Mary Beth said. “You’re probably not going to believe me, but this really is the truth. I said to Mr. Wallace, ‘What couldn’t possibly happen?’ and he said, ‘Who would believe that a beautiful girl like you would be running around with an old muttonchop like me?’ He looked kind of sad, you know, and I said, ‘It’s not that impossible,’ and I went to hug him, which I guess was the wrong move. He thought I was going to kiss him, so our lips met, but it was not a passionate kiss at all, more like one of those greetings or farewells where you’re just planning to shake hands or hug but the other person is doing some French thing, first one cheek and then the other.”
I listened to all this while players were smacking and darting across the football field and the cheerleaders were shouting, “Let’s go, Warriors, let’s go!” Mary Beth watched the football players for a second after she finished the story.
“Do you believe me?” she asked.
“Yeah,” I said, relieved that what she’d brought to me was a better version