The Last Girls (7 page)

He did not seem surprised to see her sitting by the window with
Jeremy on a pillow in her lap. He walked over and kissed the top of her head. “I got a ride from the airport,” he said. “I guess you've had a hard night.” Hawk stripped and lay down on the bed and was instantly, soundly asleep. Courtney could always tell by his breathing. Finally she put Jeremy down and then she got in bed, too, pressing herself against Hawk's back. The bones of his legs were so long from knee to hip; he was a big man. She ran her fingers along his collarbone and his jaw and through the hair on his chest and then traced his nipples and his ribs one by one. Morning came slowly in the window until everything soft and dark grew hard and visible.

As soon as Hawk went to the bank, Courtney called and canceled a pediatrician's appointment for Jeremy and a “Mother's Morning Out” for Scotty, then packed them up and drove over to her twin sister's. She left a note for Hawk. It was not a very good place to go, but she couldn't think of another. Their mother had died years before.

“I think you're crazy,” Jean said when she got home from work and heard the whole story. “Maybe he
did
get a ride home from the airport. How do you know he wasn't telling the truth?” Jean was a shorter, sturdier version of Courtney. Once they'd been inseparable, Burton High cheerleaders together. But then Jean had enrolled at NC State and met Buzzy while Courtney had gotten the scholarship to Mary Scott. Their lives were different now.

“Oh, come on.” Despite her lack of sleep, Courtney felt more clearheaded than she'd ever been before in her life. “No plane comes in at four o'clock in the morning. No friend gives you a ride at five. Besides, he wouldn't have stuck his head in the window like that, if it was a guy. You don't do that with a guy.”

“I guess you're right.” Jean lit a cigarette and tapped it nervously on her ashtray. The ashtray said Kings Dominion. Under it were coupons Jean had clipped.

“I've had it,” Courtney said. She sat on Jean's couch and looked out Jean's picture window at the neat yards and the neighbors' look alike
houses. Why couldn't she live in a nice little brick house like this one, like Jean and Buzzy, and get a job? Why hadn't she ever thought of
working
anyway? She'd had two years of college. But all she'd ever done was get married. A cement mixer rolled slowly down the street and it occurred to Courtney that her life had been like that, once she met Hawk it was just like that, a big machine set in motion and she was on it, by God, and it was going and going and there was no getting off. Courtney felt as brittle and clear as glass that day in her sister's living room, smoking her sister's Newports. They drank some wine and then took a walk in the arboretum, Jean pushing the stroller while Courtney carried Jeremy in a Snugli. Jean loved these kids—she and Buzzy were still trying, no luck so far. Courtney had always had all the luck.

When they got back to the house, Buzzy was sitting at the kitchen table drinking a beer.

“Courtney just came by for a little visit,” Jean said.

“Yeah, well, that's good, because you might have forgot but tonight's my poker night, the guys are coming over, we gotta get ready, babe. You haven't been to the store yet?”

“I mean, Courtney needs a place to
stay
for a little while,” Jean said.

Buzzy turned and looked at Courtney. His jaw dropped open. “Yeah?” he said. “You
sure,
little sister?”

Courtney nodded. Scotty was running a toy car along the kitchen table, then up and over Buzzy's hands. Buzzy picked him up and hugged him.

“Okey-doke,” he said. “Why don't you take the kids upstairs and get them settled down? Just pull out that couch in the spare room, you know, my office, and make up a pallet for the kids on the floor. You want to go with me, Jean? We can pick up some pizza along with the beer. You know anybody that likes pizza?” he asked Scotty, who bobbed his head up and down so vigorously that everybody started laughing.

“Buy some milk, too,” Courtney said.

But while they were gone, the doorbell rang, and when Courtney ran down the stairs to open it, she found Miss Evangeline there on the stoop with her new gray Cadillac (big fins; it looked like a shark) waiting at the curb behind her. Walter was driving. He waved. Courtney waved back.

“Gramma, Gramma, Gramma,” Scotty came bounding down the stairs.

“Oh my! Oh, my darling!” Miss Evangeline acted like they'd been missing for years, like they'd been kidnapped. She grabbed Scotty up though she was too frail for it, really, kissing his round little face again and again as he started playing with the pearls at her throat. Since Stephen had died in Vietnam, Hawk was her only child, these her only grandchildren.

Miss Evangeline didn't weigh ninety pounds dripping wet. Her yellow-gray hair was piled haphazardly up on her head; her filmy blue eyes had tears in them. “Come along now, dear,” she said to Courtney. “Come along home.” Then Miss Evangeline must have given some kind of signal to Walter because he got out of the car, tipped his hat to the curious neighbors who had gathered in their own yards to see what was going on, and came right into the house and went upstairs to get their things. Jeremy slept through it all.

Soon afterward, Courtney got a new car, a Volvo station wagon, and Buzzy got the electric contract for Hawk's new downtown financial center. Little Evangeline was born, then Lydia. Without ever discussing it, Hawk and Courtney worked things out. Courtney ran the house and supervised the children, though Hawk was a good father, both strict and generous. He attended ball games, graduations, and recitals. He and Courtney chaired the Greater Raleigh United Way Campaign together. They were a team.

When Miss Evangeline finally died, they established a music scholarship in her honor at Meredith College, where she had gone to
school. Hawk bought banks in South Carolina, banks in Tennessee. Following an antiques tour of England with several friends, Courtney renovated Magnolia Court. She became a famous hostess. Here in front of the hearth, she is poised, serene, beautiful. Those are the candlesticks she brought back from England, eighteenth-century coin silver. Courtney's hair is held back by a velvet band; she wears a close-fitting black velvet jacket and a floor-length red plaid skirt. Courtney and Hawk make a handsome couple as they stand before this glowing fire, which is not really a fire at all, though these new gas logs they make now are so realistic you just can't tell the difference. Courtney's bright red smile stretches all the way across her face. She holds a silver tray of hors d'oeuvres, one of her favorites—shrimp tarts, Miss Evangeline's recipe.

Oddly, the same hors d'oeuvres are visible on the table in
this
photograph, too, in the scrapbook devoted to Little Evangeline's wedding which Courtney held at home. Vangie wouldn't get married at Saint Matthews because she didn't believe in God, she said, and neither did Nate, her fiancé as Courtney kept referring to him, hopefully, as if this designation would somehow make him shape up and act like one—like a fiancé, like a husband, instead of like a bass guitar player, which he is.

In the photograph, Nate and Vangie are laughing hysterically and feeding each other bites of cake which is falling all over the seed pearl bodice of Vangie's wedding dress. It cost twenty-two hundred dollars. Vangie has taken out her nose ring for the occasion. The long lace sleeves nearly hide the vine tattoo on her upper arm, and of course nobody can see the butterfly on her thigh and who even knows what other tattoos or piercings she might have or where she might have them? Courtney shudders to think. Vangie has never told her mother much about her life, which is just as well. As with Hawk, she'd rather not know. The things Courtney
does
know about her daughter, the public things, are disturbing enough, such as the name of Vangie's
band, the Friends of the Library. But at least Courtney has the satisfaction of knowing that
she
has done her duty, by all of them, her entire difficult family. This wedding alone took a full year of work.

She could never have done it without Gene Minor, that sweet thing. His presence is everywhere in this wedding album—everywhere and nowhere, for of course he is not pictured. His company, Florenza, handled everything. Gene Minor convinced her to be more, well,
theatrical
than she'd ever considered. “If it's not fun, don't do it” is Gene's motto, and since Vangie didn't care one way or the other—she was on a West Coast tour and hadn't wanted such a big wedding in the first place—Courtney did it all. She did everything Gene Minor suggested, and it was brilliant. People are still talking about it.

Gene was the one who held out for an evening wedding, the one who convinced her to go with the red roses for all the bouquets, Vangie's too, the one who ordered the tent and supervised its erection in the back garden and had it all rigged up with those thousands of tiny white twinkling lights and wound the tent poles round and round with garlands of baby's breath. Gene Minor personally created the spectacular soaring silver and red arrangements on each table (“Hey, baby, you gotta think vertical!”). He wove roses and silver sprays through the ivy of the old arched trellis where Vangie and Nate would say their vows, a project that could not be accomplished until the afternoon of the wedding itself. While Gene Minor was out in her backyard doing this, Courtney hovered between house and garden like a butterfly, too nervous to light down anyplace, though once she dared to tiptoe up behind him and actually touch his sweaty T-shirt. Gene Minor jumped as if shot, then toppled off his little ladder onto his back like a giant turtle, arms and legs waving helplessly in the summer air. “Why, Mrs. Ralston!” he exclaimed in that high squeaky voice. “Oh my, Mrs. Ralston, oh oh!” Courtney got so tickled she had to sit down right there on the grass, too, holding her sides in laughter. “Mom! What are you
doing?
” Vangie cried out the window.
But Courtney couldn't quit laughing for the longest time—in all her life, nobody has ever made her laugh so hard as Gene Minor. He is such a
nut!

He's the one who suggested the fireworks, too, which were fabulous, capping off the evening. Here's a photo of the grand finale when six or seven were fired off at once, exploding like an arrangement of celestial lilies in the sky over Magnolia Court. Looking up, the whole crowd went “ooh!” at once, three hundred faces bathed in the colored light. And who would ever guess that inside the potting shed which you can barely see in the bottom right-hand corner of this photograph, the mother of the bride and the florist were locked in a long, damp, passionate embrace?

OF
COURSE
,
GENE
M
INOR
is not pictured in photograph after photograph of the children—Gene Minor is just for
her,
just for Courtney. He has no business here among these boys in various groups and various uniforms, shining heads all in a row, smiling or squinting into the sun, holding different kinds of balls. There's Jeremy's little face, Scotty's big grin. Oh, if our children actually knew how much we love them, they'd never be able to hit any of these balls, they'd be simply immobilized by the force of it, by the awful force of our love. Probably in the long run it's best that our children are shielded from us, as they are, by schools and churches and teams, by teachers and friends and other people.

Then little girls in tutus, little girls on ponies; bigger girls in bodices, in dust caps, in plays; girls in bathing suits, with breasts. There's Lydia grown hugely tall and toothy, carrying her hockey stick, making a goal. There's Lydia hugging her teammates in an all-out way that makes Courtney vaguely uneasy. Lydia teaches now, history and hockey, at a prep school in Virginia. She runs marathons, and does not make hors d'oeuvres. Scotty is getting an M.B.A. at Duke. But Jeremy, well, something's wrong with Jeremy, though Hawk will
not even admit it and no one seems to know what it is. “It's just a phase . . .” Courtney has been saying this for years.

But he was such a normal child. Look at him in these photographs, he looks just like every other boy on his Little League team, doesn't he? Like every other boy in his Rainbow Soccer league, like every other boy in his graduating class. But like Gene Minor, Jeremy is not really pictured here either. Courtney doesn't know where her sweet little Jeremy went or even when he disappeared. Why did his grades start going down, and why did he drop out of school freshman year at Williams College, despite his famous IQ? Courtney has no idea. Hawk is simply disgusted, calling Jeremy a “slacker.” And now he's cut him off, which Jeremy seems not to mind or even notice. For several years now he's been in Boulder, Colorado, living in a rented room over the secondhand bookstore where he works. Courtney tells everyone who asks that Jeremy is “finding himself,” though she doesn't really believe it and would be even more worried about him if she didn't have other, bigger fish to fry.

S
PEAKING OF FISH
, here's a picture to catch your eye: Hawk with that sailfish he caught off Cozumel two years ago on his annual trip with Scooter Bowles and Martin Hanes. Held upright by a block and tackle at the dock, this fish stands even taller than Hawk, who's grinning ear to ear behind his sunglasses, beneath his fishing cap. Bare-chested, barefooted, he's wearing those crazy, baggy old Hawaiian shorts he loves, looking just as much at home on this foreign dock as he does in a boardroom. A man accustomed to killing things—deer, birds, fish. Big fish. A man who can still stop a girl dead in her tracks just as he did—oh Lord, yes, didn't he?—so many years ago.

But Hawk's most recent fishing trip, earlier this summer, in May, is not pictured here.

Actually Courtney was in bed with Gene Minor when she found out about it. Wednesday afternoons are always theirs. Gene closes the
flower shop and Courtney meets him at home—
his
house—with lunch, something delicious. It's fun to cook for Gene because he likes food so much. (Hawk, on the other hand, always carries a pocket counter for fat grams.) That particular afternoon (Was it only two months ago? God, it seems like years) Courtney had fixed lamb chops and new potatoes with mint from Gene's herb garden right outside his kitchen door. She'd left the door wide open, letting the spring sunlight and Gene's cats, Stan and John, into the dingy old fifties kitchen. She'd set two places at the red and gray plastic dinette table. She knew he'd bring her some flowers for lunch, which he did, five blue irises in a slim yellow vase.