“I thought everything between us was fine. When he stopped in the doorway, I put the magazine down and smiled. Then he said, ‘Kate—will you do something for me?’ ” Kate looked at Mrs. Camp, then dropped her eyes. “We were going to bed, you know,” she said. “I thought things would be better after a while.” Kate looked up. Mrs. Camp nodded and looked down. “Anyway,” Kate went on, “he looked so serious. He said, ‘Will you do something for me?’ and I said, ‘Sure. What?’ and he said, ‘I just don’t know. Can you think of something to cheer me up?’ ”
Will was sipping his drink, and he spilled a little when he started laughing. Kate frowned.
“You take everything so seriously,” Will said. “He was being funny.”
“No, he wasn’t,” Kate said softly.
“What did you do?” Mrs. Camp said.
“He came over to the bed and sat down, finally. I knew he felt awful about something. I thought he’d tell me what was the matter. When he didn’t say anything, I hugged him. Then I told him a story. I can’t imagine what possessed me. I told him about Daddy teaching me to drive. How he was afraid to be in the passenger seat with me at the wheel, so he pretended I needed practice getting into the garage. Remember how he stood in the driveway and made me pull in and pull out and pull in again? I never had any trouble getting into the garage in the first place.” She took another sip of Perrier. “I don’t know what made me tell him that,” she said.
“He was kidding. You said something funny, too, and that was that,” Will said.
Kate got up and put her glass in the sink. It was clear, when she spoke again, that she was talking only to Mrs. Camp. “Then I rubbed his shoulders,” she said. “Actually, I only rubbed them for a minute, and then I rubbed the top of his head. He likes to have his head rubbed, but he gets embarrassed if I start out there.”
Kate had gone upstairs to bed.
Mrs. Camp’s car was a 1977 Volvo station wagon. Mr. and Mrs. Wilde had given it to her in May, for her birthday. She loved it. It was the newest car she had ever driven. It was dark, shiny green—a color only velvet could be, the color she imagined Robin Hood’s jacket must have been. Mr. Wilde had told her that he was not leaving her anything when he died but that he wanted to be nice to her when he was above ground. A strange way to put it. Mrs. Wilde gave her a dozen pink Depression-glass wine goblets at the same time they gave her the car. There wasn’t one nick in any of the rims; the glasses were all as smooth as sea-washed stones.
As she drove, Mrs. Camp wondered if Will had been serious when he said to Kate that Frank was joking. She was sure that Will slept with girls. (Will was not there to rephrase her thoughts. He always referred to young girls as women.) He must have understood that general anxiety or dread Frank had been feeling, and he must also have known that having sex wouldn’t diminish it. It was also possible that Will was only trying to appear uninterested because Kate’s frank talk embarrassed him. “Frank talk” was a pun. Those children had taught her so much. She still felt a little sorry that they had always had to go to stuffy schools that gave them too much homework. She even felt sorry that they had missed the best days of television by being born too late: no
