Saturday was the day after payday. Stu would be unconscious by ten in the morning. “Yes,” Peggy said.
“Good,” Nancy said. “Chris is going to call her this morning to firm things up. After that, we should know something about times. I think Chris is going to have it catered. All you've got to do is show up and behave yourself. No commenting on how she still has really awful taste in clothes.”
“Well,” Peggy said, “they're no longer cheap.”
Nancy pulled into a parking space and shut off the engine. “No, they're not, and nothing else about her is either. I just hope you take the point. Chris is right. It's been bad enough with those stupid newspaper stories, but it's going to get a lot worse if we don't do something about it. Show up. Make polite conversation. Pretend that you're really impressed with what she's done with her life. That's all I ask.”
But I am really impressed with what she's done with her life,
Peggy thought, struggling with the door handle and her pocketbook and the brown paper bag all at once. Then she stepped out of the car and looked around, bewildered. There were times when she woke up in the middle of the night and thought she was still fourteen years old. She still lived in the same place and knew the same people. She still went to the same school she'd gone to then, even if it was in a different building.
She turned to say something to Nancy, but Nancy was gone, striding out across the parking lot with her briefcase swinging on the tips of the fingers of her right hand.
If I were Betsy, I wouldn't come
, Peggy thought, and then she changed her mind, quickly, because she had to. She was going to come herself. That was just as bad. If she'd had any self-respect left, she would have refused outright.
For Belinda Hart Grantling, it was better this morning than it had been for a long time, in spite of all that nonsense about the dog in Betsy Toliver's garage. Part of that was that she had someplace to go, and therefore some reason to stay away from Maris. Always before, when Maris had come home, she'd gone to stay with her own parents in their house out in Stony Hill. Now Maris's parents were both dead, and there was nowhere for her to stay except in one of those motels out on the highway, which weren't feasible, since Maris wouldn't drive. It made Belinda insane. She'd rented that bright yellow Volkswagen at the airport, and driven it out here, and now it was sitting abandoned in the English Drugs parking lot while Maris cadged rides from whoever would give them to her. Belinda wondered, vaguely, if Maris had inherited whatever money her parents had. She had a brother with a wife and a child somewhere in Ohio, but surely that wouldn't mean she'd been cut out of the will entirely. Maybe there was nothing to inherit. Maris never seemed to have any money, and although Belinda knew that was Betsy's faultâdidn't it figure that Betsy was not only stuck-up, but a miser?âit was still odd that Maris could have the things she had and live the way she lived and not have enough pocket money to buy magazines when she went to English Drugs. Maris had been in residence less than forty-eight hours, and Belinda was ready to kill her. If it wasn't for that meeting the night before, Belinda would have kicked her out, first thing, as soon as she woke up.
She stopped in the living room right before she left the apartment, and stared at the television screen Maris had left glowing the night before. Maris never turned anything off. Lights, television, faucetsâBelinda found herself wandering from one room to the next, shutting things. Belinda found the remote half under the couch and punched the
channel changer. She passed Cartoon Network and Lifetime and the Sci Fi Channel and hunkered down with the news shows: CNN, MSNBC, C-Span. Betsy didn't seem to be on any of them at the moment. Maybe it was the wrong time of day. Maybe they were done live, and Betsy wouldn't be on television at all the whole month she was in Hollman. The idea gave Belinda a little rush of satisfaction. It wasn't, Belinda thought, as if Betsy were somebody
really
famous. She wasn't a movie star or a rock singer or a model or anybody else important. She was just an intellectual, the way she'd always been. The only difference now was that there were a lot of intellectuals on television for other intellectuals to watch. Belinda couldn't imagine who else would watch them. She hated those screaming matches over fiscal policy she sometimes stumbled into looking for a movie or a rerun of
Designing Women
. The shows where they didn't scream were even worse. Four people in four modern chairs on a gray platform on a black set, talking so reasonably you could barely hear themâand about what? The Bush tax cut. The Clinton legacy. The Laffer curve. Belinda truly hated Hillary Clinton, more than she hated anybody on the planet except for Betsy Toliver herself. You could see what Hillary was all about just by looking at her, another stuck-up smart girl who thought people should elect her God just because she listened to classical music. It was disgusting. It was
unfeminine
, too. Belinda didn't understand why all these women didn't come right out and say they were lesbians. What was the point of the pretense, the husband they didn't like sleeping with, the children they kept as pets to drag out in front of the cameras when the holidays rolled around and they needed to take a family portrait? Belinda snapped the television off and put the remote where it belonged, on the coffee table. Then she went to the back of the apartment and looked in on Maris, asleep across the daybed in the back room with her clothes from last night still on, including shoes. Belinda went out again and picked up her purse from the counter next to the sink. She took out her wallet
and counted the money in itâ$17 in bills, $1.26 in changeâand put the wallet back and zipped up the bag. There was just something wrong about the whole thing, something so fundamentally unfair. It was as if all those womenâBetsy, and Hillary Clinton, and all the rest of them on the news talk showsâit was as if they were all cheating, breaking the rules, going behind the backs of everybody else and stealing things that rightfully belonged to others. The worst thing was, men never seemed to catch on. Men
married
them for it.
She was out on the street before she knew it. The day was very bright. She blinked a few times in the sun. She stayed on her own side of the street, because that's where the library was. She went around to the side of the library's new addition and let herself in the back door. It was ten minutes to nine. She had just enough time to put away her things and get her hair brushed before the doors opened. If business was slow, as it always was on Tuesday mornings, she would be able to run across the street to JayMar's to take out a cup of coffee, or over to Mullaney's, near the railroad tracks, for a package of crackers and peanut butter to eat.
She put her handbag behind the take out desk. The lights were all on, meaning that Laurel was already here. She took out her brush and ran it vigorously through what hair she had left. She was balding badly, but she didn't know what to do about it. She thought about trying Rogaine, but that seemed to be for men. She looked at her reflection in the security mirror above the main desk, put her brush back in her bag, and started walking toward the front.
“Laurel?”
“I'm up here.” The sound came from the front foyer of the addition. Nobody went into the front foyer of the main building anymore. Once the addition had been fully up and running, the main building had been turned into a museum of things nobody wanted to see. Who cared how people had lived in Hollman in 1865?
“What are you doing?” Belinda asked. She was coming
up between the stacks. Laurel was there, at the very front, pinning something on the cork bulletin board.
“I'm putting up a notice. Did I tell you? I couldn't have. You haven't been here. Anyway, she came in late yesterday afternoon, to return some overdue books she found on a shelf somewhere and ask me if her mother had anything else out that I might be looking for. God, she looked great. Do you know if she's had plastic surgery or not? I mean, no crow's-feet at all. Of course, her mother doesn't have them, either, so maybe it's genetics. Wouldn't that be lucky genetics to get? I already look like a road map in the top half of my face.”
“So, what did she say? Just that about the overdue books?”
“Oh, no,” Laurel said. “We talked about her coming here and doing a program, and she said yes right away. On Saturday, at our regular meeting of the Friends. I've been frantic ever since. I had to call the
Home News
and put in a notice, and I had to make this sign.” Laurel gestured at the paper she was tacking to the corkboard. “It's not a very good one, but the letters are big. And I ran off a whole bunch of them to pass out. I mean, of course the Friends will all be there, but I'll be embarrassed beyond belief if we can't get a bigger crowd than that. She's going to talk about covering a political campaign. Did you know she covered the campaign in Connecticut the last time Rosa DeLauro ran for Congress?”
Belinda had never heard of Rosa DeLauro, but she had an instinct not to say so. Obviously, she was somebody Laurel recognized, and that other people would, too. The sign was just an ordinary piece of legal-sized paper printed in red capital letters, boldface and in italics:
ELIZABETH TOLIVER IS HERE.
Underneath, there was smaller lettering, giving the day and time and location and a brief sentence about the subject of the talk.
“Do you think a lot of people are going to be interested in an election in Connecticut?” she asked, because she couldn't help herself.
Laurel waved this away. “It's not an election in Connecticut. It's campaign finance reform and celebrity perks and the way the media treats women running for Congress. Especially somebody like Rosa DeLauro, who's so feminist. Oh, and you've got to remember. She likes to be called Liz, not Betsy. She's really adamant about it. It
upsets
her to be called Betsy.”
“Betsy Wetsy,” Belinda said.
“What?” Laurel blinked.
“Betsy Wetsy,” Belinda said. “That's why she hates to be called Betsy. It was a doll when we were all children, a baby doll that you fed with a bottle and then the water came out the other side and you had to change its diaper. So we called her Betsy Wetsy.”
“In high school?”
“In kindergarten and all the time after. It was just one of those things.”
“What an awful thing to do to somebody.”
“I don't see why. It was just a nickname. Lots of people have nicknames when they're children. I had a nickname.”
“What?”
“Lindy.”
“Not quite the same, is it?” Laurel made a face. “I've read things about how awful she was treated here as a child. I never really thought about the particulars. I think it's a miracle she's willing to be here at all. She must be incredibly close to her mother. And now doing a program for the library, too. You're making me think she's some kind of saint.”
“It would have been different if it really fit,” Belinda said. “But she didn't really wet herself. It was just a nickname.”
“Right,” Laurel said. She had finished putting up the folder. With its red lettering, it would be hard to miss. She stepped back and rubbed the palms of her hands against her sky-blue linen Talbots pants. “Pay attention to me. You will
not
call her Betsy while she's here. In the library, I mean. I don't care how natural it feels. If people had called
me a name like that when I was growing up, I'd have gotten away as soon as I could and never gone back. It's unbelievable how children treat each other, it really is. No wonder there are school shootings every spring. I've got to clean up the files on late returns this morning. Do you think you can handle things yourself?”
“I don't see why not.”
“Good.” Laurel looked her poster up and down. “Good,” she said again. “You'd think people would learn, but they never do. And it always comes out the same. Incredible. You can open up now. It's five after nine.”
Laurel strode off through the big main room. Belinda watched her for a while and then did what she'd been asked to do. Laurel, obviously, hadn't heard about the dog. Either she didn't watch the local news in the morning, or the story hadn't appeared there. It wouldn't have appeared in the paper, because that only came out once a week. Belinda looked at JayMar's, and English Drugs, and the railroad tracks, and Mullaney's. She couldn't imagine putting her hands in a dog's intestines. She didn't even like to handle raw chicken. Besides, this was the kind of thing that would appear in the news somewhere, and when it did it would make all of them look likeâ
âlosers.
There were people on the street now, although not many of them. Belinda checked them out to see if she knew themâshe didn'tâand went back inside and closed the door after her. For the first time, she considered the possibility that
Betsy
might take the dog seriously. Maybe, to Betsy, the dog would be a warning she needed to heed. Then she'd give this up as a bad job, and pack her children into her fancy expensive car, and go back to Connecticut.
For the first time, Belinda truly hoped that Betsy Toliver was scared to death.