The Last Time They Met_ A Novel - Anita Shreve [110]
“You settling in OK?” Donny T. asks an inch from her waist.
“Just fine,” she says, reaching for a glass of Coke that is nearly full.
“Don’t you miss that place where you came from? What was it, a Home or something?” Donny T.’s voice has risen a notch, just enough to carry to the next table. The man with the errant briefcase looks up at her.
“I’m fine,” she repeats, letting the Coke tip so that it spills onto the Formica in front of Donny T.
“Watchit!” he cries. He tries to press himself into the back of the vinyl booth as the Coke drips over the edge of the table and onto his jeans. “That’s my leather coat there.”
“Oh,” says Linda. “Sorry.”
______
“What does Donny T. do in the backseat of Eddie Garrity’s Bonneville?”
This to Thomas later that night as they are driving home in the Skylark.
“You don’t know?”
“No, why?”
“He deals.”
She has an image of a deck of cards. And then she realizes. “Drugs, you mean?”
“Yes.”
“Marijuana?”
“That,” he says. “And then some.”
“Why do you hang around with him?” Linda asks.
“We’ve been friends since first grade.” He pauses. “Do you think it’s immoral to deal drugs?” A slight challenge in his voice.
“I don’t know,” she says. She hasn’t thought about this much.
“He doesn’t deal to kids,” Thomas says.
“Aren’t we kids?” she asks.
______
In increments, Thomas kisses her mouth and her face and her neck. He opens the top two buttons of her blouse. He gives her a back rub, lifting up her blouse from the waistband of her skirt. Once, his hand lightly brushes her breast. This takes two and a half months.
______
They are in the car in back of the cottage at the beach. It seems a good place to park: the beach is deserted, and the car is mostly hidden by the dunes. Though it is just before Christmas, the windows are steamed. The top four buttons of Linda’s blouse are opened. Thomas has his hand on the smooth skin of her collarbone, inching his way down. She feels nervous, breathless, the way she did on the roller coaster. A sense that once she reaches the top, she will have no choice but to go down the other side. That there will be nothing she can do about it.
He brings her hand to himself. She is surprised and not surprised — boys betrayed so visibly by their bodies. She wants to touch him and to please him, but something putrid hovers at the edges of her consciousness.
He feels her resistance and lets her go.
“I’m so sorry,” she says.
A light swings wildly through the car. It bounces off the rearview mirror and blinds Thomas, who looks up quickly.
“Oh, Jesus,” he says, as the other light, the flashing light, reveals itself.
Linda and Thomas are frantic in the front seat, a kind of comedy routine. Thomas gets his shirt buttoned and his trousers zipped, and Linda pulls her peacoat around herself. Impossible not to be reminded of the aunt shouting whore and then slut. Flailing her arms.
The cop bangs hard on the window. Thomas rolls it down.
A flashlight explodes in Linda’s face, and for a moment, she thinks: it isn’t the police; it’s someone who will kill us. So that when the cop swings the flashlight away and asks to see Thomas’s license, she is nearly relieved.
“You folks know this is private property?” the policeman asks.
“No, I didn’t, Officer,” Thomas says in a voice she’s never heard before — exaggeratedly polite, verging on parody. Of course Thomas knew it was private property.
The policeman studies the license, and it seems to take an age.
“You Peter Janes’s boy?” the cop asks finally.
Thomas has to nod.
The cop bends down and peers in at Linda, as though trying to place her. “You all right, Miss?” he asks.
“Yes,” she answers, mortified.
The policeman straightens. “Move along,” he says brusquely to Thomas. “You need to be getting on home.”
Parental now, which she knows will annoy Thomas no end. She wills him to hold his tongue. Thomas rolls the window as the cop walks to his car.
In the Skylark, Thomas and Linda are silent, waiting for the cruiser to drive away. When it has, Thomas leans his