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By Root 474 0

that had upset you, only her and nothing more, and when I tried to tell you what you'd said in the kitchen — about how you and your father had been alone at your place on Dark Score Lake when the sun went out in 1963, and how he'd done something to you — you told me to shut up. When I wouldn't, you tried to slap me. When I still wouldn't, you grabbed your coat, ran out, and spent the night somewhere else — probably in Susie Timmel's little fleabag cabin down by the river, the one we used to call Susie's Lez Hotel. By the end of the week, you'd found some girls who bad an apartment downtown and needed another roomie. Boom, as fast as that . . . but then, you always moved fast when you'd made up your mind, Jess, I'll give you that. And like I said, you always gave good shut up.

Shu —

There! What'd I tell you?

Leave me alone!

I'm pretty familiar with that one, too. You know what hurt me the most, Jessie? It wasn't the trust thing — I knew even then that it was nothing personal, that you felt you couldn't trust anyone with the story of what happened that day, including yourself. What hurt was knowing how close you came to spilling it all, there in the kitchen of the Neuworth Parsonage. We were sitting with our backs against the door and our arms around each other and you started to talk. You said, 'I could never tell, would have killed my Mom, and even if it didn't, she would have left him and I loved him. We all loved him, we all needed him, they would have blamed me, and he didn't do anything, not really.' I asked you who didn't do anything and it came out of you so fast it was like you'd spent the last nine years waiting for someone to pop the question. 'My father,' you said. 'We were at Dark Score Lake on the day the sun went out.' You would have told me the rest — I know you would — hut that was when that dumb bitch came in and asked, 'Is she all right?' As if you looked all right, you know what I mean? Jesus, sometimes I can't believe how dumb people can be. They ought to make it a law that you have to get a license, or at least a learner's permit, before you're allowed to talk. Until you pass your Talker's Test, you should have to be a mute. It would solve a lot of problems. But that's not the way things are, and as soon as Hart Hall's answer to Florence Nightingale came in, you closed up like a clam. There was nothing I could do to make you open up again'. although God knows I tried.

You should have just left me alone! Jessie returned. The glass of water was starting to shake in her hand, and the makeshift purple straw was trembling between her lips. You should have stopped meddling! It didn't concern you!

Sometimes friends can't help their concern, Jessie, the voice inside said, and it was so full of kindness that Jessie was silenced. I looked it up, you know, I figured out what you must have been talking about and I looked it up. I didn't remember anything at all about an eclipse back in the early sixties, hut of course I was in Florida at the time, and a lot more interested in snorkeling and the Delray lifeguard — I had the most incredible crush on him — than I was in astronomical phenomena. I guess I wanted to make sure the whole thing wasn't some kind of crazy fantasy or something — maybe brought on by that girl with the horrible burns on her bazooms. It was no fantasy. There was a total solar eclipse in Maine, and your summer house on Dark Score Lake would have been right in the path of totality. July of 1963. Just a girl and her Dad, watching the eclipse. You wouldn't tell me what good old Dad did to you, hut I knew two things, Jessie: that he was your father, which was bad, and that you were ten-going-on-eleven, on the childhood rim of puberty . . . and that was worse.

Ruth, please stop. You couldn't have picked a worse time to start raking up all that old —

But Ruth would not be stopped. The Ruth who had once been Jessie's roommate had always been determined to have her say every single word of it — and the Ruth who was now Jessie's headmate apparently hadn't changed a bit.

The next thing I knew, you