Somebody Else's Music(39)

“I know. I know. It’s okay. It’s just—well, never mind. I’m not in a very good mood this morning. You’re sure there aren’t any urgent telephone calls?”

“Nothing I can’t handle.”

“Right.”

Now, pulling into the parking lot at the Sycamore, it hit her: she hadn’t told Debra about the dog, and Debra hadn’t asked, which meant Debra didn’t know. She shut down the engine and looked at Geoff through the rearview mirror, safely strapped into a backseat.

“You ready?”

“I want to go to McDonald’s.”

“There isn’t a McDonald’s in Hollman, as far as I know. This is where we used to go out for hamburgers when I was a kid. I’ll buy you an ice cream soda.”

“Can we sit at a different table from Maris?”

Liz made a face at herself in the mirror and got out to get Geoff out. The Sycamore looked the way it had always looked: a low, white building surrounded by trees, with a wide window on one side that had been built for the days when there had been “car service.” She couldn’t imagine that whoever owned the Sycamore now still sent girls racing out to cars with trays of food that could be hooked to a rolled-down window. The street—still Grandview Avenue—curved around the edge of the Sycamore’s lot. Across the curve to the front was a small grocery store. Across the curve to the side was something that called itself the Hollman Adult Theater. Liz blinked.

“What’s the matter?” Geoff said.

“Oh, nothing. I was just surprised at how some things have changed since the last time I was here.”

She locked up. Then she took Geoff by the hand and took him in through the Sycamore’s front door. It was more like a house than a restaurant.

Inside, in the dim cool put together from shaded windows and ceiling fans, Liz looked up and down among the tables and the booths, fully expecting to find no sign of Maris. Maris was always late. Maris turned out to be taking up the big booth in the back corner, and for just a second, looking at her, Liz went cold. She remembered all about that corner booth. By the time they’d all been seniors, it had been an unspoken but vigorously enforced social law: nobody sat in that corner booth but Maris and Emma and the girls they were friends with. Students who came in to the Sycamore when it was packed to the gills refused to sit in that booth if it was empty. Students who broke the law found their lives uncomfortable for weeks to come, especially if they were girls. Even the greaser boys didn’t take that booth, and they did everything they were supposed not to do.

“Crap,” Liz said, under her breath.

“You should say ‘carp,’” Geoff said automatically. Liz tugged him along to the back. The Sycamore was probably the one thing almost everybody who had gone to Hollman High School since 1950 had a memory of, but Liz’s memory of it was faint. She’d only been in it half a dozen times. When she was in high school, coming here had been like volunteering for abuse. No matter what Jimmy thought, she didn’t volunteer for abuse.

“Don’t you think this booth is a little big for the three of us?” she asked Maris as she slid Geoff in between them. “Or are you ambushing me with a bunch of people I have no intention of talking to?”

“It was just force of habit,” Maris said. She looked around the big room, at the empty tables and booths, at the empty stools at the fountain counter. “Nobody is in here anyway. It won’t matter. This place doesn’t start to get crowded until after school.”

“Is school still in session?”

“Until June fifteenth.”

“God, I don’t remember going that late. Did we? Sometimes it seems like the whole school year changed sometime while I was in graduate school. Do they start in August here, now? I think I would have killed somebody if I’d had to go back to school before Labor Day.”

The waitress came up, with her pad and a Bic pen, a tired-looking fortyish woman with deep lines on either side of her mouth and streaks of gray in her hair. Liz ordered Geoff a vanilla ice cream soda and a plate of french fries. She ordered herself a salad and a Diet Coke. Around the corner on the other side of the booth, Maris ordered a club sandwich and a regular Coke. She only ordered regular Coke when she was spiking her drinks. Diet Coke tasted awful when you combined it with gin.

“Well,” Liz said. “Here we are. I don’t know why, but here we are.”

“It seemed like a place to go. And it’s quiet this time of day. I don’t understand what you’re all worked up about, Betsy. Nobody is locking you in the utility closet these days.”