The New Yorker Stories - Ann Beattie [174]
He struck a match and held it out to her. For a second, her fingers touched his. They were so thin that it didn’t seem she could hold anything heavier than a match. He watched her, intent on seeing that she didn’t burn her fingers—so intent that the whole ring was aflame and the match blown out before he realized the problem. The inner circle of candles was unlit, and now there was no way to light them. She knew it, too. “What should I do?” she said softly.
“Hurry up,” he said, putting his hand on her back, tilting her forward. “Blow them out. Start again.”
Laurel took a deep breath and blew out half the candles. She sucked in her breath and blew again. The others went out, and a little blue cloud rose above the cake. When the candles didn’t flare up again—when he saw that this time they weren’t those joke candles that somehow reignite themselves after a few seconds—he crouched and put his arm around Laurel. Outside, the light had almost disappeared. No one was coming toward the house yet, but things wouldn’t stay the way they were much longer.
Heaven on a Summer Night
Will stood in the kitchen doorway. He seemed to Mrs. Camp to be a little tipsy. It was a hot night, but that alone wouldn’t account for his shirt, which was not only rumpled but hanging outside his shorts. Pens, a pack of cigarettes, and what looked like the tip of a handkerchief protruded from the breast pocket. Will tapped his fingertips on the pens. Perhaps he was not tapping them nervously but touching them because they were there, the way Mrs. Camp’s mother used to run her fingers over the rosary beads she always kept in her apron pocket. Will asked Mrs. Camp if she would cut the lemon pound cake she had baked for the morning. She thought that the best thing to do when a person had had too much to drink was to humor him, so she did. Everyone had little weaknesses, to be sure, but Will and his sister had grown up to be good people. She had known them since they were toddlers, back when she had first come to work for the Wildes here in Charlottesville. Will was her favorite, then and now, although Kate probably loved her more. Will was nineteen now, and Kate twenty. On the wall, above the sink, was a framed poem that Kate had written and illustrated when she was in the fifth grade:
Like is a cookie
Love is a cake
Like is a puddle
Love is a lake
Years later, Will told her that Kate hadn’t made up the poem at all. It was something she had learned in school.
Mrs. Camp turned toward Will, who was sitting at the table. “When does school start?” she said.
“There’s a fly!” he said, dropping the slice of cake back onto his plate.
“What?” Mrs. Camp said. She had been at the sink, rinsing glasses before loading them into the dishwasher. She left the water running. The steam rose and thinned out as it floated toward the ceiling. “It’s a raisin,” she said. “You got me all worried about a raisin.”
He plucked some more raisins out of the pound cake and then took another bite.
“If you don’t want to talk about school, that’s one thing, but that doesn’t mean you should holler out that there’s a fly in the food,” Mrs. Camp said.
A year ago, Will had almost flunked out of college, in his sophomore year. His father had talked to the dean by long distance, and Will was allowed to continue. Now, in the summer, Mr. Wilde had hired Will a tutor in mathematics. Mornings and early afternoons, when Will was not being tutored or doing math problems, he painted houses with his friend Anthony Scoresso. Scoreboard and Will were going to drive to Martha’s Vineyard to paint a house there at the end of August. The house was unoccupied, and although she was a little hesitant about doing such a thing, Mrs. Camp was going to accept Will’s invitation to go with the boys and stay in the house for the week they were painting it. Scoreboard loved her cooking. She had never been to the Vineyard.
Now that they were older, Will and Kate included Mrs. Camp in many things. They had always told her