Danny looked at the woman, but he didn't answer. He left it to the others to lean into the circle and lower their voices, to explain that she was a mask designer, that she and Bob were “quite close.” I would learn the details over time: that he liked to take her for flights along the coast to see fireworks on the Fourth of July; that they snow-skied and drank a grape-Tang-and-vodka drink called a Purple Jesus. But that night, Danny only stood looking at Bob and the woman while the guilt rose up in me, guilt and jealousy and something else, too, some uneasiness I couldn't name that left me wondering if it was the entrepreneur in Bob that Danny so admired, or if it was this other thing, this thing with the woman, or if it was both, or something else entirely, something he didn't understand any better than I understood why I couldn't bring myself to tell Danny what I'd so easily told Bob: that I was writing a book.
IT WAS TWO DAYS before Christmas when Ally finally returned to the park, and it was not a Wednesday but a Monday. It was one of those funny mornings when the moon appears as a filmy white chink in the sky when you think it really ought to be somewhere else, glowing on the dark side of the earth. I was sitting alone on the bench where we'd all first gathered, watching Maggie and Davy run around with other children on the playground, when Ally sat down next to me.
She was rail thin, her thighs sharp under the patterned cotton of her skirt as she set her hands in her lap. Her hair was carefully brushed, falling in a single dark wavy sheet until it caught between her back and the park bench. And she was as pale as that moon.
She didn't have Carrie with her. I didn't ask where she was. We just sat together, watching the children play for a long moment before Ally looked up at the sky and asked, “Have you been watching?”
I had been. Watching the television coverage of Apollo 8, yes. And watching the silent windows of Ally's house, the man I would glimpse occasionally opening the front door in the evening, the same door that never opened to a child going out to play. Sometimes I saw the curtains move, as if Ally was watching us the way I now imagined she'd watched us months ago, before she finally appeared in the park the day Bobby Kennedy was shot. But only the man ever came out.
“Yes,” I said.
Ally's gaze remained fixed on the translucent circle of white in the sky.
On the playground, Davy stumbled, and I watched to see if he would pick himself up without me having to go to him, and I tried to imagine what it would be like to be here every Wednesday morning as Ally had been, watching all that love she could not have. And I couldn't imagine it. I couldn't imagine there was anything in this world I would not give up to have Maggie and Davy.
“Ally,” I said, wanting to say something but not sure what. Had she thought about adopting? Maybe that. But I didn't know what to say, how to start that conversation, whether she would see my words as an intrusion or pity, or some failure of belief that she could, if she would just keep trying, eventually have a child. So I just looked up at the moon with her, at that circle that seemed so small and uncertain a thing from where we sat but was now, from the Apollo 8 spaceship, looming larger than the earth itself.
“It must be weird to be up there, free of the earth's gravity,” Ally said. “Circling round and round a whole other world.”
THAT JANUARY, Brett told us she was pregnant—three months already!—and even though Ally wasn't, she and Carrie were again joining us every Wednesday, and Ally was honestly happy for Brett. Linda continued to run by my house each morning. And Kath slipped into a marriage that some days I understood completely and other days I couldn't understand at all. That autumn of tears and anguish rolled into a winter of silence, which settled into a spring of some weird kind of acceptance, or denial, or both. Lee wasn't leaving her, she'd decided—or tried to convince herself she'd decided, though you could tell one part of her still lived with that fear. Not leaving her yet, we all worried, but we never said that, not to Kath anyway, because it seemed that what kept her getting out of her antique four-poster bed every morning was the idea that since Lee hadn't left her yet, he wouldn't. He always had burned hot with girls at first, and then he grew tired of them—that was the way it was before he'd married Kath. Which only left me wondering: Had Lee married her because she was different from those others he'd wearied of, or would she have been consigned to the Lee Montgomery heartbreak pile, too, if Anna Page had not been in the works, or if their daddies hadn't been friends?
Still, you could see hope blooming in her as time went on and he continued to come home at night: this was just a passing dalliance, just sex maybe, or the excitement of a new conquest, and when the newness wore off, this other woman would lose her charm for Lee and he would come back. If Kath confronted him, it would just make it worse. And it didn't really matter as long as he didn't love the girl, as long as he still loved Kath, which she'd decided he did. He'd just forgotten a little—which she seemed to think was her own fault.