Another of those long, long pauses. In the world, Sadie could move carelessly; in her head, she never did. At last she said, “You know a lot about me, things I never thought I could tell anyone, but I know almost nothing about you. I guess I just realized that. Sadie can be stupid, George, can’t she?”
“You’re not stupid. And one thing you
“Yes…” She sounded doubtful. I remembered the bad dream I’d had that night at the Candlewood Bungalows, and the caution I’d seen in her face when I told her I didn’t remember it. Was that same look on her face now? Or perhaps an expression a little deeper than mere caution?
“Sadie? Are we all right?”
“Yes.” Sounding a little more sure now. “Sure we are. Except for Coach’s party. What do you want to do about it? Remember that the whole darn School Department will be there, and most of them will be drunk on their fannies by the time Mrs. Coach puts on the buffet.”
“Let’s go,” I said, too heartily. “Party down and kick out the jams.”
“Kick out the
“Have some fun. That’s all I meant. We’ll pop in for an hour, maybe an hour and a half, then pop back out. Dinner at The Saddle. That work for you?”
“Fine.” We were like a couple negotiating for a second date after the first one had been inconclusive. “We’ll enjoy ourselves.”
I thought about Ivy Templeton smelling the ghost of Sadie’s perfume and asking if my girl knew I was sneaking around south Fort Worth after dark, doing funny business. I thought about Deke Simmons saying there was one person who deserved to know the truth about where I’d been and what I’d done. But was I going to tell Sadie I’d killed Frank Dunning in cold blood so he wouldn’t murder his wife and three of his four children? That I had come to Texas to prevent an assassination and change the course of history? That I knew I could do that because I came from a future where we could have been IM’ing this conversation via computer?
“Sadie, this is going to work out. I promise you that.”
Again she said, “Fine.” Then she said, “I’ll see you tomorrow, George, in school.” And hung up, very gently and politely.
I held the telephone in my hand for several seconds, staring straight ahead at nothing. A rattling began on the windows facing my backyard. The rain had turned to sleet after all.
Coach Borman’s Christmas Eve bash was a bust, and the ghost of Vince Knowles wasn’t the only reason. On the twenty-first, Bobbi Jill Allnut got tired of looking at that red slash running all the way down the left side of her face to the jawline and took a bunch of her mother’s sleeping pills. She didn’t die, but she spent two nights in Parkland Memorial, the hospital where both the president and the president’s assassin would expire, unless I changed things. There are probably closer hospitals in 2011—almost certainly in Kileen, maybe even in Round Hill — but not during my one year of full-time teaching at DCHS.
Dinner at The Saddle wasn’t so hot, either. The place was packed and convivial with pre-Christmas cheer, but Sadie refused dessert and asked to go home early. She said she had a headache. I didn’t believe her.
The New Year’s Eve dance at Bountiful Grange No. 7 was a little better. There was a band from Austin called The Jokers, and they were really laying it down. Sadie and I danced beneath sagging nets filled with balloons until our feet were sore. At midnight The Jokers swung into a Ventures-style version of “Auld Lang Syne,” and the band’s lead man shouted “May all your dreams come
The balloons drifted down around us. I kissed Sadie and wished her a happy New Year as we waltzed, but although she had been gay and laughing all evening, I felt no smile on her lips. “And a happy New Year to you too, George. Could I have a glass of punch? I’m very thirsty.”
There was a long line at the spiked punch bowl, a shorter one at the unspiked version. I ladled the mixture of pink lemonade and ginger ale into a Dixie cup, but when I brought it back to where she had been standing, Sadie was gone.
“Think she went out for some air, champ,” Carl Jacoby said. He was one of the high school’s four shop teachers, and probably the best, but I wouldn’t have let him within two hundred yards of a power tool that night.
I checked the smokers clustered under the fire escape. Sadie wasn’t among them. I walked to the Sunliner. She was sitting in the passenger seat with her voluminous skirts billowing all the way up to the dashboard. God knows how many petticoats she was wearing. She was smoking and crying.
I got in and tried to take her in my arms. “Sadie, what is it? What is it, hon?” As if I didn’t know. As if I hadn’t known for some time.
“Nothing.” Crying harder. “I’ve got my period, that’s all. Take me home.”
