White Oleander - Janet Fitch [89]
She asked about the other kids, but I didn’t have much to tell. At the best of times, I was never very sociable. School was a job, I did it and left. I had no intention of joining the Spanish club or Students Against Drunk Driving. I even passed by the stoner crowd without a glance. I had Claire now, waiting for me. She was all I needed.
“Did you have a nice day at school?” she’d ask, drawing up a chair at the little red-and-white kitchen table.
She had some mistaken notion that Fairfax was like high school where she grew up in Connecticut, despite the clear presence of metal detectors at every entrance. I didn’t tell her about the free-for-alls on the school yard, muggings on the bus. A girl burned a cigarette hole into the back of another girl’s shirt at nutrition, right in front of me, looking at me, as if daring me to stop her. I saw a boy being threatened with a knife in the hallway outside my Spanish class. Girls talked about their abortions in gym class. Claire didn’t need to know about that. I wanted the world to be beautiful for her. I wanted things to work out. I always had a great day, no matter what.
ON SATURDAY, Ron mowed the lawn, cutting the heads off the primroses, and then settled into reading some scripts. We had lox and bagels for breakfast, and Claire went to her ballet class. I sat with my paints next to Ron at the table. I was getting used to him. He didn’t try to be any friendlier than I wanted.
“How does Claire seem to you?” he asked all of a sudden. He looked at me over the tops of his glasses like an old man.
“Fine,” I said.
But I had some idea what he was talking about. Claire paced at night, I heard her bare feet on the floorboards. She talked as if silence would crush her if she didn’t prop it up with a steady stream of sound. She cried easily. She took me to the observatory and started crying in the star show. The April constellations.
“You have my pager number, you know. You can always reach me.”
I kept painting the way the poinsettia looked against the white wall of the house. Like a shotgun blast.
CLAIRE PUSHED back the muslin curtain, glanced out at the street. She was waiting for Ron. It was still light out, moving toward summer, a six o’clock honeyed twilight.
“I think Ron is having an affair,” she said.
I was surprised. Not at the thought — I knew the reason she would stop talking when he was on the phone, the way she would gently probe him to discover his whereabouts. But that she would say it aloud indicated a progression of her doubts.
I thought about Ron. His smoothness. Sure, he could get women anytime he wanted. But he worried too much about Claire. If he was messing around, why would he care? And he worked hard, long hours, always came home tired. He wasn’t that young. I didn’t think he had the energy.
“He’s just working,” I said.
Claire peered out into the street from behind the curtain. “So he says.”
“Have you seen my keys?” Ron asked. “I’ve looked everywhere for them.”
“Take mine,” Claire said. “I can have another set made.”
“Yeah, but it bugs me that I’m losing things. They’ve got to be around here somewhere.”
He took Claire’s keys, but it bothered him. He was a highly organized man.
One day, I saw Claire take a pen from Ron’s inside jacket pocket, slip it into her jeans.
“Have you seen my Cross pen?” he asked a few days later.
“No,” she said.
He frowned at me. “Did you take it, Astrid? Tell me the truth, I won’t be upset. It’s just things are disappearing and it’s driving me crazy. I’m not accusing you of