I didn’t beat around the bush. I gave it to them straight and they acted about the way you’d expect a group of teenagers to act when one of their own got stabbed to death and showed them all for the first time they were mortal. There was shock and a lot of tears and wailing. Most of the boys turned into cardboard, frozen and ready to be knocked over with a feather. Most of the girls held on to each other. Lund hunched in the back of the room with his head in his hands.
I gave them a little bit for the news to settle in but got to the reason I was there before the trauma took over completely.
“She was killed on Friday night after the play. Now I need each and every one of you to think. Do this for Hattie now. Who did she leave with that night? Did any of you meet up with her afterwards for a party, anything like that?”
“Some of us went down to Dairy Queen, but she didn’t show up there,” said the boy who played Macbeth. He looked more like he was losing his mind now than he had up on stage a few minutes ago.
“Tommy was at the performance, wasn’t he? Didn’t she leave with him, Portia?” one of them asked.
Portia Nguyen unwrapped herself from another crying girl and looked up with a flat, wet face. Her crown was tilted in her hair. “Maybe. I don’t know. I didn’t talk to her much. I didn’t even say congratulations.”
“Tommy would have given her a ride if she asked. He would have done anything she wanted him to.”
“Tommy who?” Jake asked.
“Tommy Kinakis,” I answered. Hattie’d been dating him for most of the year, if I remembered right. I’d watched him as an offensive lineman on the varsity team last fall. He was solid, hard to get around, had never let his quarterback get sacked in any of the games I’d been to. If a kid like that wanted to put a knife through somebody, there wasn’t much that would stop him.
“I know what killed her.” Portia stood up and faced me like she was ready to start rattling off one of those long speeches from the play. “It was the curse.”
“Come again?”
Some of the kids gasped and covered their mouths.
“The curse killed Hattie. The curse of Macbeth.”
PETER / Friday, August 17, 2007
CONGESTIVE HEART failure was going to kill me.
I was twenty-six years old and in the best shape of my life. Granted, I had nowhere to go but up. I’d evolved from the skinny high school nerd to a guy who ran at least fifteen miles a week. I could’ve probably even benched weight if I ever dared go into those weight rooms full of sweaty, meathead guys. I ate an organic, vegetarian diet and I didn’t smoke—but congestive heart failure was ruining my life.
“What do you want for dessert?”
I watched Mary across the table. She’d scarcely spoken since they brought our entrees and kept glancing at her watch like we were out past curfew.
“Chocolate mousse?” I asked with a grin. After seven years together, I knew she couldn’t resist anything with chocolate in it. I’m sure a lot of people say that about their wives, but I’d once watched Mary eat chocolate-covered bacon at the state fair. Fried pig fat dipped in chocolate. And she’d laughed at my green face and said it wasn’t all that bad.
“I guess so.” She shrugged.
I waved the waiter over and ordered a coffee along with the dessert. This was the kind of place where you could wave a discreet waiter over, order a caffè americano, and they nodded in approval. Drop lights hung over the tables, wrapping each party in their own cocoon of light. It was modern yet romantic, a place that probably catered to the medical crowd from Mayo. Mary hadn’t wanted to drive all the way into Rochester, but the restaurant choices in Pine Valley were a Dairy Queen or a café that closed at 7:00 p.m. Besides, there was no movie theater in Pine Valley and this was our traditional dinner-and-movie date, except that unlike most couples we always switched the order. Movie first, then dinner, so we could discuss what we saw. That’s what we’d done on our first date when we watched American Beauty and argued over each character’s moral superiority until the waitress actually asked us to leave so they could turn over the table. Lengthy, flirtatious debates weren’t going to cause any seating issues tonight.
The coffee came and I sipped it right away, burning my tongue. I didn’t care. I kept drinking and watching Mary, trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong.
Her hair was down tonight, reflecting a luminous gold halo from the light, and it fell in her face as she stared at the table, the other diners, the bay windows, anything that wasn’t me. Mary had an apple face, the kind of wide cheeks that could scoop up happiness and share it with buoyant democracy, but I couldn’t find any joy in her tonight.
She wore her 1950s blue shirtwaist dress, and I’d hugged her when she came downstairs at the house, kissed her cheek, and whispered, “Hello, beautiful.” She smiled and ducked away. I assumed it was because Elsa was sitting on the couch watching us, but Mary acted the same way the rest of the night. Polite. Distant. Like the entire evening was more of a chore than mucking out Elsa’s chicken barn. The movie didn’t help and that was completely my fault. I picked Knocked Up because Mary liked romantic comedies and it had gotten good reviews, but neither of us laughed much. We hadn’t used birth control since our wedding night and after three years of trying for a baby, she had to sit there and watch two idiots pretend to get pregnant in a sloppy one-night stand.
“I’m sorry about the movie.”