The Almost Moon - Alice Sebold [66]
“They’ll want to know.”
He turned his face toward me. “We went out to breakfast?”
“Someone would have seen us. No, we drove somewhere and made love. It was unexpected,” I said.
“Are you nuts?”
“I think I’ve answered that resoundingly,” I said.
I cautioned Jake to wait for a car coming in the opposite direction over a one-lane bridge and then directed him to the turn for Westmore.
“We drove to my favorite spot overlooking the nuclear plant and made love,” I said.
“And how did my prints get on her window?”
“You came by yesterday. She asked you to fix a few things for her, and you did, for old times’ sake.”
“It’s pretty baggy. They’ll check it out, I’m sure.”
“Can you think of anything better?”
By the time we reached the college, it was 9:15. I had forty- five minutes to kill until Tanner Haku’s Life Drawing class. I was to do a series of three-minute standing poses, most of which I found ludicrous, from holding a towel to my side to pretending I had just stepped from the bath and was combing my hair.
“I’ll be back to pick you up, just as if you weren’t going to hear any news that would change our plans.”
“And if the cops come?”
“Act as if this is all new to you. You don’t know who killed your mother.”
“And hope that Mrs. Castle told them about Manny.”
Jake bowed his head. “Don’t tell me those things.”
“Right, I’m alone in this.”
“Yes,” Jake said. “I mean, I don’t know.”
We were double-parked outside the student union. Behind us, a car blasting hip-hop pulled up.
I put my hand on the latch.
“Good luck,” Jake said.
I did not go into the student union, where there was a chance I might run into Natalie having a liberal breakfast before modeling for the Lucian Freud wannabe. Instead, I walked around the low, flat building and down a well-traveled dirt path to the sole remaining patch of earth Westmore owned that had yet to be developed. The problem was that every time it rained, the field of weeds would flood. It sometimes remained swamped for half the year. There was one large oak tree in the middle of it. It must have been more than two hundred years old before its roots had rotted through.
Perched on the edge of the field, as I thought they might be, was the Senior Center’s watercolor class. In the fall and then again in late spring, you could see a group of older people in different scenic spots around the campus, with their huge painting boards out and all of them wearing sun hats and matching red Windbreakers. Their teacher was a woman my age. A volunteer who loved to work with the elderly.
I sat down in the grass far enough away from them that I would not be noticed. All of them except the teacher had their backs to me, and she was intent on her task of going from senior to senior and offering brief encouraging commentary.
I put my hands up underneath my sweater for warmth and felt the silk of the rose-petal-pink slip. I could have been watching a herd of zebra on the African plain—that’s how different these older people felt from my mother. I saw these people as wondrous, as the fantasy types that I wished had raised me. What had they been in their first lives? Lawyers, bricklayers, nurses, fathers, mothers? It seemed surreal to me that they would choose to come to the Senior Center, see classes offered in watercolors, and then sign up. I knew that I would never fall among their number. I was raised by a solitary woman to be a solitary child, and that was, I now saw, what I had hopelessly become.
I had to eat something, and Natalie or no Natalie, the student union was the only place within walking distance to get food at this hour. I stood, regretfully, and bid good-bye to the Sunday painters I had been taught to condemn.
ELEVEN
I walked through the gathering crowd of students outside the student union. Westmore was not known for its intellects or even its sportsmen. It was known for being an affordable commuter school, good for a four-year degree in subjects such as marketing or health-care consulting. The Art Department, like the English Department, was a