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 true in nineteen hundred and sixty- two!”
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.”
It was only three miles, but that seemed like a very long drive. We didn’t talk. I turned into her driveway and cut the motor. She had stopped crying, but she still didn’t say anything. Neither did I. Some silences can be comfortable. This one felt deadly.
She took her Winstons out of her handbag, looked at them, and put them back. The snick of the catch was very loud. She looked at me. Her hair was a dark cloud surrounding the white oval of her face. “Is there anything you want to tell me, George?”
What I wanted to tell her more than anything was that my name wasn’t George. I had come to dislike that name. Almost to hate it.
“Two things. The first is that I love you. The second is that I’m not doing anything I’m ashamed of. Oh, and two-A: nothing you’d be ashamed of.”
“Good. That’s good. And I love you, George. But I’m going to tell you something, if you’ll listen.”
“I’ll always listen.” But she was scaring me.
“Everything can stay the same… for now. While I’m still married to John Clayton, even if it’s just on paper and was never properly consummated in the first place, there are things I don’t feel I have the right to ask you… or of you.”
“Sadie-”
She put her fingers to my lips. “For now. But I won’t ever allow another man to put a broom in the bed. Do you understand me?”
She put a quick kiss where her fingers had been, then dashed up the walk to her door, fumbling for her key.
That was how 1962 started for the man who called himself George Amberson.
New Year’s Day dawned cold and clear, with the forecaster on the Morning Farm Report threatening freezing mist in the lowlands. I had stowed the two bugged lamps in my garage. I put one of them in my car and drove to Fort Worth. I thought if there was ever a day when the raggedy-ass carnival on Mercedes Street would be shut down, it was this one. I was right. It was as silent as… well, as silent as the Tracker mausoleum, when I’d dragged Frank Dunning’s body into it. Overturned trikes and a few toys lay in balding front yards. Some party-boy had left a larger toy-a monstrous old Mercury-parked beside his porch. The car doors were still open. There were a few sad, leftover crepe streamers on the unpaved hardpan of the street, and a lot of beer cans-mostly Lone Star-in the gutters.
I glanced across at 2706 and saw no one looking out the large front window, but Ivy had been right: anyone standing there would have a perfect line of sight into the living room of 2703.
