On the screen of the computer, Naomi had this:
Hello! to everyone in the BHS class of ’79. This is your class correspondent, Naomi Brent, and boy, do I have a lot to report!
Thunder and lightning rolled across the sky outside. The screen flickered. Naomi gnawed her lip. She did have a lot to report, but for the moment it all seemed silly. Cheryl Donners Cray was having another baby. Delia Caberdon was finally getting married. Mostly, Naomi reported on the girls who had been in her high school sorority, Gamma Alpha Mu, or in one of the two other high school sororities that counted. Births. Deaths. Marriages. Graduations. The only really exciting thing that had happened to anyone in the Class of ’79 had happened to a girl named Julia Morrissey, who hadn’t counted at all. Julia Morrissey was now a United States Congresswoman from the state of Virginia.
Naomi swiveled her chair toward the window. They hadn’t boarded anything up up here, although they probably should have. Naomi could see right down Main Street, past Maggie Kelleher’s bookstore, past Rose MacNeill’s Victorian-housed shop. Everything was boarded and dead-looking. The sky was absolutely black. Only the rain hadn’t started yet. Naomi didn’t think it would take long.
There was a sound of footsteps on the stairs. Naomi turned her chair to look at the open door to the room. She heard Beatrix Dean say, “Oh, hell,” and relaxed a little. A moment later, Beatrix was there, all five feet eleven inches of her, looking faintly ridiculous. Beatrix always looked faintly ridiculous. She had never really accepted the fact that she was tall. She had never really stopped trying to hide it.
Thunder rolled again and Naomi’s computer screen went blank. She cursed at it, then sighed.
“I know I shouldn’t be trying to do this,” she said. “I know we’re going to lose the power.”
“I can’t believe you’re still here,” Beatrix told her. “Don’t you want to go home? Don’t you have cats to worry about?”
“I used to have cats,” Naomi said, “but they all ran away on me. Like men. Maybe they were tomcats.”
“Oh,” Beatrix said.
“I think I’m going to ride out the storm right here,” Naomi said. “My house isn’t on any higher ground. And what would happen to me if I left now? I’d probably get caught in the rain. I’d probably get electrocuted by a downed power line. With my luck, I’d probably get hit by lightning.”
“You could come with me to my church,” Beatrix suggested. “I’m meeting a van out on Main Street in fifteen minutes. We’re driving all the way out on the Hartford Road. We won’t get any seawater out there.”
“I’m sure you won’t.”
“Besides, Naomi, I think it would do you good. To see the inside of a church for once.”
“I’ve seen the insides of churches, Beatrix. I got married in three of them.”
“Reverend Holborn says this hurricane is a judgment. Like that bombing out in Oklahoma City. Like that thing with the World Trade Center. Reverend Holborn says America has sold its soul to the Devil and now the Devil is having his way with us.”
“Reverend Holborn,” Naomi said carefully, “thinks hangnails are a judgment from God.”
“Well, Naomi, maybe they are. I know you don’t take religion seriously, but maybe you should. I mean, look at what’s happened to this place. To Bellerton, for goodness sake. Lesbians. And atheists. It’s like we’re turning into a spiritual sewer.”
Naomi had her pocketbook sitting next to her swivel chair on the floor. She picked it up, put it in her lap, and riffled through it for her cigarettes and slim gold lighter. Most of the time, Naomi didn’t smoke in the library building. She had gotten used to the new rules that said even a whiff of secondhand smoke could instantaneously give old ladies terminal lung cancer. Still, she needed a cigarette now, and she thought she deserved one.
The gold lighter was from Dunhill. One of her husbands had given it to her on their first anniversary. If Naomi remembered right, that marriage hadn’t lasted another six months. She put a Virginia Slims menthol into her mouth and lit up.
“Spiritual sewer,” she said through a haze of smoke, “I presume, is a direct quote from the saintly Reverend Holborn.”
Beatrix frowned. Naomi was suddenly struck by how aggressively ugly the woman was—not just unattractive, like most of those women up at the camp, but ugly. It was something that went beyond Beatrix’s weight, which was monumental. It was something that had settled into her features, like indelible grime.