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As Fran looked around the room, she did not see Tim Mason’s compassionate glance, nor did she realize that the expression in her eyes brought back to him vividly the image of the teenage girl mourning her father.
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The location and the hour had been A
At six o’clock-much too early, she knew-Molly was ready to leave. She had changed clothes twice, feeling too dressed up in the black suit she first put on, then too casual in denims. She finally settled on dark blue wool slacks and a white turtleneck sweater. She twisted her hair into a chignon and pi
“You always look so perfect, Molly,” he would tell her. “Perfect and elegant and well bred. You manage to make a pair of jeans and a sweatshirt look like formal dress.”
At the time she thought he’d been teasing her. Now she wasn’t sure. It was what she needed to find out. Husbands talk to their girlfriends about their wives, she thought. I need to know what Gary told A
At seven o’clock, Molly decided it finally was reasonable to leave for Rowayton. She took her Burberry from the downstairs closet and was headed toward the door when, as a last-minute thought, she went back up to her bedroom, took a plain blue scarf from the drawer, and searched until she found a pair of oversized Cartier sunglasses, a style that had been fashionable six years ago but probably was dated now. Well, at least they will give me a sense of being disguised, she decided.
At one time the three-car garage had held her BMW convertible, Gary ’s Mercedes sedan, and the black van he had bought two years before he died. Molly remembered how surprised she’d been when Gary showed up with it one day. “You don’t fish, you don’t hunt, you wouldn’t be caught dead on a campground. You’ve got a big trunk in the Mercedes, easily big enough for your golf clubs. So what’s with the van?”
It had not occurred to her at the time that, for his own purposes, Gary might have wanted a vehicle that looked exactly like dozens of other vans in the area.
After Gary ’s death, his cousin had arranged for his cars to be picked up. When Molly went to prison, she had asked her parents to sell hers. As soon as her parole was granted they had celebrated by buying her a new car, a dark blue sedan she’d selected from the sales brochures they sent.
She had looked at the car the day she came home, but now she got in it for the first time, enjoying the smell of the new leather. It had been nearly six years since she had driven, and suddenly she found the feel of the ignition key in her hand to be very liberating.
The last time she had been behind the steering wheel of a car was that Sunday she had returned from Cape Cod. With her hands on the wheel now, Molly could visualize that drive. I was gripping the wheel so tightly that my hands hurt, she remembered as she backed out of the garage, then used the remote to close the door. She drove slowly down the long driveway and onto the street. Normally I’d have put the car in the garage, but I remember that night I stopped right in front of the house and just left it there. Why did I do that? she wondered, straining to remember. Was it because I had the suitcase and, that way, wouldn’t have to carry it as far?
No, it was because I was frantic to talk to Gary face to face. I was going to ask him then the same questions I’m going to ask A
Molly felt her lips tighten, felt the old anger and resentment surge through her body. Stop it! she told herself. Stop it right now, or turn around and go home!
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Her sister Lucy had argued strenuously against keeping the date. “A
The sisters had argued all evening, but A
Once inside the diner, A
The gloom of the diner only added to the feeling of foreboding and despondency that had come over A
She knew much of the problem stemmed from the argument that had raged between her and her sister. While she did love her sister dearly, Lucy was not shy about hitting her where it hurt most, and her litany of “if onlys” finally had gotten to her.
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