The second story in Ryall Wyndham’s column was about a dinner party at the house of somebody Annie had never heard of. If Wyndham had to stick to real Philadelphia Society for his columns, he’d make it into print about once a month. She looked at the picture of Ryall Wyndham himself up at the top near the headline and the byline. The picture was almost vanishingly small, and even more murky than the others, and she could get no impression of the man beyond what her memory served her. She tried to imagine what he had looked like in the back of a car being sucked off by Patsy Lennon, and couldn’t do it. She couldn’t imagine any man like that, and she had seen a few in the act.
The coffee was terrible. She didn’t care. She had long ago learned to live with it. She was hungry, but it was too much trouble to go looking through the refrigerator to see if there was anything she wanted to eat. There might be, or there might be just the raw vegetables Lucinda liked to stock up on for making chicken soup. She wondered why she couldn’t make herself sleep later. There was nothing to be done this early in the day, and by the time she got to the point where there was something to do, she was exhausted. She fiddled with her Freedom FROM Religion button. There was a part of her that was terrified that she would one day accidentally wear it upside down. Then she turned to the paper’s front page.
It was a bad picture of Charlotte, one of those posed portraits women had taken when they were chairwomen of charity committees. The pearls were fake—Annie knew the difference between Charlotte’s fake pearls and her real ones, but she would have suspected even if she hadn’t—and Charlotte’s skin looked sallow, as if she had recently been ill. It was not the picture Charlotte would have chosen if she had known she would appear on the front page of a newspaper, but Charlotte would never have wanted to appear on the front page of a newspaper. Seeing that picture, somebody who didn’t know her would assume that Charlotte was a grade-A bitch. They would be right.
The problem, Annie thought, was that she felt a little too sick to her stomach. She was sure that if she’d had something inside her to throw up, she would have done it. Instead, she licked her lips, and then bit them. Something had happened to the nerve endings under her skin. She had no nerve endings under her skin. Her head hurt. Her body ached. She couldn’t read the words on the page. Everything was blurry.
Outside, it started to rain. Annie could hear the drops hitting the panes of the kitchen windows, harder in that section of the wall where the gutter had collapsed and not yet been replaced. She got up and took her coffee with her. The house felt too quiet around her, just as the street felt too quiet around the house. Sometimes they had one or more of the girls staying over, waiting for a ticket home or to go to a treatment program, but this was not one of those times. Later on there would be scheduled activities and events: an encounter group; a self-assertiveness class; a class on how to use a computer. Annie wanted noise, distraction, company. Even the gunfire of a gang war in the street would have been better than this silence.
Lucinda was in the front parlor—the living room, she called it, and Annie tried to call it that too. The curtains were pulled back to let in what little sun there was. The glass of the windowpanes shone, newly polished. Lucinda had been working. She had taken all the books off the shelf so that she could dust.
“Well,” Annie said.
“Did you just get up?” Lucinda asked her.
Annie came into the living room and sat down on the couch. It was an exceptionally long couch, big enough to fit half-a-dozen people. She remembered thinking, when she bought it, that Adelphos House would have crowds of young women on the premises all the time. They would need some place to sit.
“You left the paper on the table,” Annie said. “You had it open to Ryall’s column.”
“Did you read it?”
“Ryall’s column?”
“The paper.”
“I read the front page,” Annie said. “Why didn’t you wake me up?”
Lucinda had finished dusting the shelves. She put her dust cloth and the Pledge on the floor and began to pick up books and put them back. “I didn’t see any point,” she said. “You can’t do anything about it. It wouldn’t have changed anything if I’d made you get up even earlier than usual and you ended up even more tired than usual when tonight came. And I didn’t want to leave it, right there, where you’d just sort of walk in on it, without warning. It wouldn’t seem right, somehow.”
Annie wanted to say that she had walked in on it without warning. Whatever else could she have done when she wasn’t expecting what she eventually saw? She looked over her shoulder at the street. It was empty. The three houses that faced this one directly had all lost all the glass from their windows. One of them leaned, slightly, backwards.