Here on Earth

“I’m shocked.” Hollis shakes his head, but he’s smiling. It’s so easy to rile people like Susanna Justice; they’re like push-button dolls.

“I mean it,” Susie tells him. “Fuck you.”

“Susie,” March pleads. Hollis and Susie were always like this; you couldn’t keep them in the same room for more than a few minutes before they started in on each other.

“I think I’ll have to be the one guy in town to pass that offer by,” Hollis says.

“Are you staying here?” Susie Justice asks March. “Because I’m leaving.” Susie already has her keys in her hand, and she jangles them like a bell. She takes a good look at March. “You’re going to stay, aren’t you?”

“I’m having one more drink.” March is making certain not to glance over at Hollis. “That’s it.”

Susie leans forward, so she can whisper. “You’re insane. I hope you realize that. Be smart when you leave. Call Ken Helm for a ride. Don’t do this all over again.”

“She never liked you,” March says as they watch Susie make her way to the door.

“Not one bit,” Hollis says. “You did, though.”

March looks away.

“You still do,” Hollis tells her.

“Oh, really?” March laughs. She’s always been surprised by his vanity and his pride. With anyone else she’d be repelled, but with Hollis emotions were so rare that whenever one showed, March couldn’t help but be charmed.

“I knew you’d come back, but I thought I might be eighty before you got here, hobbling around like Jimmy Parrish,” Hollis says, nodding to an old man at the bar.

What nerve, March thinks. “Believe me. I’ve done perfectly fine without you.”

March’s voice is cold; in another instant, she’ll stomp away, as she sometimes did when she was a girl. Hollis must sense this, because he puts his hand on her arm.

“Well, I haven’t,” he says. “Not without you.”

He waits till that sinks in, then lets go of her. If she’s going to walk away, she’s going to do it now. But instead, she goes on looking at him. And then he knows, just as he’s always known. At the core, they’re identical. People who didn’t know the family often judged them to be brother and sister. It was their dark eyes. Darker than midnight, that’s what people used to say to their faces. Black as whatever hole he crawled out of, they used to whisper when they thought Hollis couldn’t hear.

As the hour grows later, the clientele of the Lyon has become more disorderly. Conversations are incoherent; misunderstandings have begun to arise. Before long, there is sure to be a brawl, as there is at every Founder’s Day celebration. The bar is now filled past capacity, and people keep right on coming. There is Regina, the waitress from Dimitri’s, who waves when she sees March. There’s Larry Laughton and his wife, Harriet, who own the lingerie shop, and Enid Miller, who works at the library and can hush small children with a single look, and Mimi Frank, who styled so many heads today at the Bon Bon that she has a perfect right to down a few beers.

There are a dozen boys and girls that Hollis and March went to school with, all grown-up and drunk as can be, but March doesn’t notice any of them. Hollis is leaning toward her—he has to in order to be heard above the din, or at least, that’s what March is telling herself. Surely, he’s not doing it solely to get close to her; that’s all in her mind. Her extremely warped mind, since she’s got everything to lose and nothing to gain. She tries to remind herself of that, the life she leads, the responsibilities she has, and yet when he says, “Let’s get out of here,” she nods as if she were a rational woman. She lets him grab her hand so he can lead her through the crowd.

The people they pass by are enjoying the party; they’re not bothering to think of tomorrow or even today. But that doesn’t mean several women who’ve set out to have a good time don’t notice what’s going on. Mary Anne Chilton elbows Janice Melnick, and over at the bar, Alison Hartwig turns away when she sees Hollis and March together and she orders another whiskey sour. These are just a few of the women who know that when Hollis drives, he keeps the windows in the truck rolled down, no matter how raw the weather. If he can’t take you back to your place—if you’re married, or living with someone, or if you and the kids have been forced to move back in with your mother—he’ll bring you to Olive Tree Lake, and park in a spot where it’s so overgrown you can’t see the stars.