Living Witness(6)
“Give me a minute,” Henry said. He looked out on Main Street again. Annie-Vic was still walking. She was ninety-one, but she walked more than he did, and she walked faster. He ran his tongue along his lips and wondered why they hurt.
“If you don’t need me,” Christine said.
“Did you ever meet Annie-Vic?” Henry asked her. “Meet to talk to, I mean.”
“Of course I’ve met Miss Hadley,” Christine said. “She’s come here, you have to remember. She’s come to talk to you about the lawsuit. With those people from Fox Run Estates, and that lawyer from Philadelphia.”
“Ah,” Henry said.
“I don’t like it, “ Christine said. “I don’t like those people over at the development. They move here from wherever. They don’t even have real homes, if you think about it. They don’t put down roots. They don’t care about their neighbors. They just come in here and all of a sudden we’re all supposed to change to suit them.”
This was new. Christine didn’t usually talk like this. Or maybe she did, at home or at church, but she didn’t usually talk like this in the office. They’d taught her better than that at Katie Gibbs. Henry looked at her long and hard. She was young and pretty in that smalltown way that wouldn’t last, all fair skin and “cute” features. She had a small solitaire diamond on the ring finger of her left hand. The boy she was engaged to had never managed to make it past his second year at community college, but he had a “good” job doing something or the other at one of the technical companies, where all the really good jobs went to the people who lived in the development, and who had moved here from somewhere else.
“I don’t like it,” Christine said again, obviously getting ready to go. “And I don’t like Miss Hadley, either. She thinks she’s better than the rest of us. She thinks she’s smarter. She thinks we’re all idiots. But she doesn’t know everything. She doesn’t know the Lord.”
Henry cleared his throat, but Christine ignored him. Surely she knew he “didn’t know the Lord” any more than Annie-Vic did, but there was that thing again, that thing Annie-Vic did to people. If she was in the room, nobody noticed anybody else.
Christine turned on her heel and walked out, closing Henry’s office door behind her. In another kind of woman, the exit would have said volumes, none of it pleasant. Christine was incapable of making that kind of gesture, or any kind of gesture, with any kind of force.
Henry went back to the window and back to looking at Annie-Vic. It wouldn’t work out, in the long run, if things kept on going as they’d been going. Annie-Vic didn’t know enough about what was going on to be the sole spokesperson for the lawsuit. She wouldn’t know what to say when the time came to say it, or she would say whatever came into her head, whether it helped the cause or not. Besides, it was Henry who filed the lawsuit in the first place. It was Henry who put the coalition together.
“Damn,” Henry said, so close to the window that his breath fogged it.
On the street, Annie-Vic looked as strong and vigorous as a forty-year-old. She really was a force of nature. She wasn’t likely to be going anywhere anytime soon.
4
Alice McGuffie couldn’t remember a time when she had not been angry, and she couldn’t remember a time when she had not been laughed at. People in town thought she didn’t know what they said about her, but they were wrong. She had always known, all the way back to elementary school, when that prissy Sheila Conoway had called her “a really stupid moron” in the second-floor girls’ bathroom right after lunch. Alice was fifty-three now—and she knew she was supposed to be over it, but Alice never got over anything. It didn’t matter how “stupid” she was supposed to be, or how many people said she couldn’t think her way out of a paper bag—that was Sheila Conoway again, in high school that time, when they’d had that big fight over Alice’s asking questions in Miss Marbledale’s class. Alice had a memory that wouldn’t quit. She remembered every giggle. She remembered every sneer. Most of all she remembered every one of the hundreds of classes she had attended over time, when she had been called on and unable to answer, or just called on and left standing at her place, unable to say anything at all. That was what school had been like for Alice McGuffie, and that was why she hadn’t spent a single day in a classroom after she’d finally managed to graduate from high school. She hadn’t known it at the time, but she was being prepared for a Great Mission. She was on that mission now, and she didn’t intend to quit.