Kiki’s gaze became patient and long-suffering. “Penny, honey, no one ever said personal protests were easy. Ask Dr. King about that.”
Kiki’s mysteries featured amateur detective Hildy Breen, an occasionally clairvoyant exotic small animal vet (fire-bellied toads, sugar gliders, bearded dragons, and the like), living in an adorable, if corpse-riddled, southern town. People categorized her books as “cozy mysteries” but there was nothing cozy about Kiki, not Kiki’s exterior anyway. Her interior was quite a different matter. She had been one of Pen’s first clients and had teased out of Pen the whole story of Patrick and Tanya and of how, after a long talk with Tanya, and after talks with other parents who had talked with Tanya, the headmaster at Pen’s school had suggested that she take leave from teaching to deal with her “disheveled personal life.” Kiki’s rapid-fire, profanity-laced excoriation of Tanya, Patrick, the headmaster, and all of “Purifuckingtanical, hypofuckingcritical, soy-slurping, 100 percent testicle-free upper-middle-class America” had caused Pen to laugh out loud for the first time in months.
Pen ignored the Dr. King remark, along with Kiki’s calling her “Penny.” Calmly, she said, “All I’m saying is that more of your outrageously expensive steak is flying off the table than is going into your mouth, for which your circulatory system is probably thanking you. From the bottom of its heart.”
“My father said that if a steak didn’t weigh more than the family Bible, it wasn’t worth his time, and the man’s going gangbusters at eighty-six.”
“Good for him, but you’ve still got twenty bucks’ worth of red meat sitting in your lap.”
Kiki closed her eyes and issued an extravagant groan. “Have you read the Bill of Rights?”
“Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Lung Cancer? That part?”
Kiki turned to the pregnant woman at the next table, who had been shooting her murderous looks since she’d sat down. “How about you? Have you read the Bill of Rights?”
“You’re a lunatic,” said the pregnant woman.
“Only if being crazy about freedom counts,” whooped Kiki. “That baby of yours will have a better future because of lunatics like me, lady.”
Pen sighed. “I do not, do not, do not want to talk about this, but the data regarding the harmful effects of secondhand smoke are looking pretty solid.”
A thoughtful expression stole over Kiki’s face; her chewing slowed. “‘Data are,’” she echoed. “Sounds wrong. Is it?”
“I don’t think so. Possibly, you can use ‘is,’ too. Probably.”
“Interesting,” said Kiki, nodding, then she jabbed the air with her fork to signal the end of their grammar facts sidebar. “Anyhoo. Data potata. Folks who don’t want to expose their candy-ass asses to hazards should stay the hell home. The world is dangerous. Deal with it, people.”
“I said I didn’t want to talk about it. Remember?”
The pregnant woman and her friend began ostentatiously slapping their napkins from their laps to their table and signaling their waiter.
“Oh, fine. Fine, fine, fine,” growled Kiki, and jammed the cigarette into the pocket of her immaculate pink Oxford shirt. Kiki swore like a dockworker, but she dressed like a Junior League president. Amelie called her a “Lilly Pulitzer fever dream.”
Kiki sawed off a chunk of meat and wedged it into her mouth, squinting at Pen as though sizing her up.
“What?” asked Pen.
Through meat, Kiki said, “Tell me about this Cat character, the one who dropped you like a hot potato and is whining for your help. Whine, whine, whine.”
Pen had told Kiki about the reunion by way of explaining why Amelie, not Pen, would be escorting Kiki to her speaking engagement at a big hospital benefit the following day (“the Lyme disease lunch,” as Pen and Kiki liked to call it).
“You’re gearing up to give me the ‘You’re Too Nice for Your Own Good’ speech, aren’t you?” Pen asked.
“No, I am not. Honest Injun.”
“I don’t think people say that anymore.”
“Good Lord, whatever. Cross my heart, then,” said Kiki, crossing her heart with her steak knife and alarming vigor. “Look, I strongly suspect that you are being too nice for you own good, but I get friendship, undying loyalty, all that crap. It’s one of the few varieties of crap that I do get.”
Because she knew this to be true, Pen thought for a moment, and then said, “Cat is the single most charming person I have ever met. She is beguiling. Bewitching. She pulls you in.”
Kiki frowned. “One person’s charming is another person’s full-of-shit, if you know what I mean.”
“I do know what you mean, and Cat likes attention, for sure. She likes to be fussed over and cuddled and adored and taken care of. She’s a kitten. But she’s a real kitten. She’s genuinely sweet, but in good way.”
Kiki chuckled. “Sounds like something I’d say. Okay, so what about Will? What was he like?”
Pen laughed, remembering. “Once, Cat asked Will if he was the WASPiest man on the planet.”
This had been in the spring of their freshman year. Without missing a beat, Will had said, “I used to be, until my brother, Philip, showed up.”
“Isn’t your brother, Philip, a high school sophomore?” Pen had demanded. “Are you saying that you were the WASPiest man on the planet until you were just three years old?”
Will had nodded and said, “It was a good run, though. A really good run.”
Kiki laughed when Pen told her this, then said, “I’ve known WASPy men. Stone face, good manners, cold hands. Getting all distant and Episcopalian on you the second the going gets tough. Bad genes, too. Those Mayflower types are as inbred as the stinkin’ Amish.”
Before Kiki finished her list, Pen was shaking her head. “No. Good manners, yes. He was maybe a little old school, but not in a phony way. And maybe a little quiet. Not with us, mostly in big groups. But funny, dry-funny, and creative—he’s an amazing writer now—and the main thing about Will is that he always had—what do I mean?” Pen rooted around for the right words for what Will had always had.
“An extremely large penis?” suggested Kiki.
“Quiet.” Pen held up her hand. The right phrase came to her and she blushed at the thought of what Kiki would say about it.
“Spit it out,” said Kiki.
“You’ll make fun of it.”
“Very possible.”
“A generous heart.”
Kiki absorbed this and then said, “You’re saying he was nice, but in a good way?”
“And I don’t know about inbreeding, but he did not get his niceness from his father, that’s for sure.”
“Mean?”
“Hideous.”
“Hitting-mean?”
“No. But I’m pretty sure the guy was a sociopath. Or a narcissist. Not sure what the difference is, but he thought he owned other people. Or more like he didn’t have any idea that other people were other people, especially his family. He thought they should all behave according to his will, and when they didn’t, he got mean. I think Will hated him.”
“Bummer. So tell me this.” Kiki leaned in, her necklace of fat, unmistakably real pearls falling forward to rest on her steak. “Were you doing it?”
“Kiki.”
“The three of you. You were doing it, right? Not all the time, not nightly, but it happened.”
Pen rolled her eyes. “You aren’t the only person who’s wondered that.”
“I’ll bet.”
“We weren’t doing it. We were friends.”
Kiki deflated a little and she said wistfully, “Yeah, I didn’t really think you were doing it. I mean, I hoped. But I was almost 100 percent sure that you weren’t.”
“Hold on. Almost 100 percent? And why would that be?”
“Oh, come on. Why else? It’s you. You’re wholesome. A good girl. No getting around it. More’s the pity.”
“Thanks.”
It was something Cat used to say, one of a few things she??
?d said to Pen that truly stung. “Our resident girl next door,” she would sing. “Our pink-cheeked, long-lashed, straight-A, stand-up gal!” “The original brown-eyed girl!” “America’s Sweetheart!” “Little Miss Perfect!” “The kind you bring home to mother!” Once as a joke, she had copied out the Girl Scout Law in semi-calligraphy on a piece of poster board and taped it to Pen’s wall.
“Euphemisms for boring,” Pen had observed, once, unhappy but tentative, not wanting to hurt Cat’s feelings.
Cat had thrown her arms around Pen, pecked kisses onto her cheeks, and shrieked, “Never!” But she hadn’t explained or taken it back. Pen hadn’t stayed mad, though. She was never very good at staying mad at Cat, and she had to admit that Cat wasn’t the only one calling Pen a good girl, squeaky clean; it was the sort of thing people had said, in varying tones of voice, for Pen’s entire life.
“I don’t feel like that inside,” Pen had told Will, once.
“Of course, you don’t. Why would you?” he’d said.
Now, she told Kiki, “I had an affair with a married man. Twice. Same man both times, but still. I was fired from my job for my rule-breaking ways. I have a child out of wedlock. I am an unwed mother, for crying out loud.”
“Well done, too, all of that. Even so, doesn’t change who you are. I guarantee that you’ll go to that reunion, and Cat and everyone else’ll tell you you haven’t changed a bit.” Kiki dabbed primly with her napkin at one corner of her mouth and shrugged. “Sorry, sister.”
Pen lifted a forkful of salade Nicoise to her mouth, then put it back down on her plate. What if she and Cat and Will had changed too much? How was it that in all the years the three of them had been apart, Pen had never once, not for a moment, considered this possibility? Abruptly, she put her elbow on the tabletop and dropped her forehead into her open hand.
“Kiki.”
“What?” asked Kiki, alarmed. “Oh, God. Bad tuna?”
“What if we don’t know each other anymore?”
“Oh, sugar. You’ll catch up. Gab, gab, gab. It’s a reunion! Don’t you worry.”
Stricken, Pen lifted her head and looked wide-eyed at Kiki.
“No, what I mean is, what if we aren’t knowable to each other anymore?”
“People don’t change that much. Usually.”
“What if we have? I don’t know what I’ll do.” She had no idea.
Kiki reached across the table, pressed her tobacco-scented hand briefly against Pen’s cheek, and looked at Pen in way that reminded her, with a pang, of her mother.
“Here’s what you’ll do,” said Kiki sternly. “You’ll have a quick, no fuss, no muss, three-way roll in the hay and come on back home. Understand?”
This was in no way like something her mother would have said and was at the same time exactly like something her mother would have said. Pen felt a smile start in the middle of her chest and spread to her face.
“I do,” she said, and she gave Kiki a double thumbs-up to show that she did.
CHAPTER SEVEN
DRIVING DOWN TO THE REUNION, PEN REMEMBERED THIS: Halloween, junior year. Cold; the smell of wood smoke, rotting leaves, and beer; a fat and jaundiced moon.
The fraternity party was bad, but not as bad as most. The music was moody and decent and playing at a less-than-bone-jarring level; someone had actually made an effort, however feeble, with the decorations (jack-o’-lanterns, dry ice in a plastic cauldron, wobbly rubber bats hanging from the ceiling, fake cobwebs making their woolly way across walls and windows and the cracked bathroom mirror); and there was even—and this was the crowning glory—promotional beer from a new local microbrewery.
“Just wait,” Will warned. “What begins as Beck, Luna, and amber ale will be grain punch, vomit on the dance floor, and ‘Louie, Louie’ by the end of the night. It’s the way of all things.”
They were there because of Cat, who adored fraternity parties as she adored any activity involving dim lights, music, noise, and boys. “Don’t you feel it?” she would ask Pen, with a shiver. “The singing in your veins? The electric zing of possibility in the air?” And, often, Pen did feel it, not so much at the party or the club or the bonfire or the concert, but beforehand, getting ready with Cat, trying on clothes, splashing the rejected scarves, tops, and dresses onto Cat’s bed, shimmying around the living room with a glass of wine. They’d walk out their apartment door, with their lipstick fresh and their hair and eyes lit by the streetlights, and anything, anything would seem possible to Pen.
Thirty minutes into the party, Cat left with a mummy. He had a blanket tucked under one arm and the other arm around Cat, who blew Pen a kiss and smiled a devilish smile. Cat had a rule to never, ever go upstairs with a boy at a fraternity house. This made sense to Pen (technically, she had this rule, too, although the opportunity to enforce it had yet to arise), but going outside in a flapper dress to lie on the cold ground with a guy wrapped in toilet paper struck her as a fairly bad idea, as well.
An hour or so later, after two brief, desultory, and shouted conversations, the first with a vampire Pen recognized as the guy from her British lit class who’d made a compelling argument linking the metaphysical poets with early Motown songwriters, but who turned out to be both a personal-space invader and a person who spit when he talked, and the second with a Jolly Green Giant who was losing leaves at an alarming rate and really just wanted to score some Ecstasy—(“Do I look like a drug dealer?” Pen had asked, slightly flattered. “No,” the Giant had said. “You look like the kind of person who’d be too polite to refuse drugs from others and would put them in her pocket to dispose of at a future time.”)—Pen was ready to leave.
Her wig itched. Her false eyelashes itched. She had succumbed to Cat’s demand that she be Holly Golightly, mainly because she owned a black dress and had no imagination for things like Halloween costumes. “Halloween costumes should be scary,” she’d protested to Cat. “I hate it when women use Halloween as an excuse to glam up. All those Catwomen and go-go dancers, and flappers in tiny dresses with fringe.”
“Ooh, flapper!” Cat had squealed. “I’m being that!”
Pen spied Will at the other end of the room flipping through CDs with his friend Gray, a guy he knew from boarding school. Gray was the guitarist for Elephants Gerald, a band that specialized in punk covers of Gershwin and Cole Porter songs and that was perpetually purportedly on the verge of being signed by a major label. Pen liked the band’s name and found that there was something appealing about watching a kid with facial tattoos scream out the lyrics to “It’s De-lovely,” but she worried about the band members’ complete lack of musical training. “When we first got together, we put our names in a hat to decide who would play what. It was totally random,” Gray had once told her. He had seemed to consider this fact an asset, but Pen had her doubts.
Pen caught Will’s eye and made an inquiring doorward motion with her head. She watched Will nod, give Gray a good-bye clap on the shoulder, and begin to make his way toward her. She smiled. Will’s costume consisted entirely of a black eye patch and a fake yellow bird pinned to the shoulder of his shirt.
“I don’t get it,” Cat had said, when they’d picked him up.
“I’m a pirate,” said Will.
“You’re wearing a rugby shirt,” said Cat.
Pen had touched the bird on his shoulder. “I think this is a canary.”
When Will got to Pen, he flipped the eye patch up and rubbed his eye. “This patch is making me unexpectedly nauseated. Is that weird?”
Pen considered, then said, “It would’ve been weirder if you had expected nausea and worn the costume anyway. Because, really, it’s not that great a costume.”
“I expected limited vision. Disorientation, maybe. Nausea, no. I don’t know how the pirates did it.”
“Maybe they got used to it. Maybe being on ships all the time made them immune to nausea. Maybe not having the two-eye option made a difference. I’m just guessing here.”
“What else can
we do but guess?” Will’s gaze shifted to something behind Pen. “Uh-oh,” he said.
“What?” She turned around to see the mummy swaying in the open doorway, his toilet paper raveled and torn, his expression similarly frazzled, even stunned. But in the few seconds she looked at him, she witnessed the party soaking into his consciousness: a dopey grin wormed across his face, and he began to bob his head and pop his chest in and out to the music, first absentmindedly, then with increasing vigor.
“Yo, Jason!” shouted one of his compatriots from across the room.
“Squid Man!” bellowed Jason the mummy. “I have been overtaken by a great and powerful thirst!”
Pen glanced at Squid Man, who was sitting atop a beleaguered upright piano in one corner of the room. He was dressed as a skeleton, not a squid. Pen was struck by the fleeting thought that, as far as she knew, squids did not even have skeletons.
“Shut the damn door!” roared Squid Man.
And Jason turned around and flung the door shut, without Cat’s having walked through it.
“Oh, no,” groaned Pen. “Where is she?”
She and Will didn’t need to consult each other; they made a beeline together through the grinding, gyrating, drink-spilling crowd. At some point the music had become earsplitting and horrible; Pen could feel the bass thumping inside her sternum. They caught Jason mid-bellow, “I repeat: I find I have been overtaken by a great and powerful—” Will thumped him on the shoulder and said, “Where’s Cat?”
Jason blinked. “Who?”
“Cat,” said Pen. “The girl you left with?”
Jason screwed up his face in a look of concentration that struck Pen as remarkably authentic, as though he had actually forgotten Cat. Suddenly, Pen began to feel scared. Let him just be drunk, she thought. Let him not be some psychopath out of a Flannery O’Connor story.
“Oh,” said Jason finally, snapping his eyelids open, “the Hispanic chick.”