Although a few times, the really awful times (the time she slammed a serving spoon across Willa’s cheekbone and gave her a black eye, the time she threw Elaine’s lovey doll in the fire), she apologized like a heroine in a movie, sweeping them into her arms and crying, “Dear hearts, can you ever forgive me?” and burying her face in their necks and weeping hot tears. In the old days that had made Willa weep too, and cling to her and blurt out how scared she’d been and how of course she forgave her; but now it embarrassed her to remember that. Now she stayed stiff in her mother’s arms on such occasions and turned her face to one side, and eventually her mother would draw back and say, “Oh, you’re a cold one, Willa Drake.”
Still, this morning her mother was looking so fresh and attractive, with the rosebuds bringing out the pink-and-white of her skin, and the house was smelling so cozy, and the world was back to how it should be. So Willa said, finally, “Scrambled, I guess.”
“Scrambled it is! Lainey? For you?”
“Scrambled too, Mommy,” Elaine said in her stupid baby voice, and when their mother caroled “Coming right up!” and turned to leave, Elaine went with her, even though she was still in pajamas.
Then Willa climbed out of bed and spent a long while washing and dressing, and clamping her hair down with two barrettes, and staring at her own serious face in the bathroom mirror.
By the time she got downstairs, the others were halfway through breakfast—the three of them in the dining room, as if it were Sunday. The table was set with the good china and they were even using the toast rack, with the toast standing up in a row like the teeth of a comb. “Morning, honey,” her father said.
“Morning,” Willa said, not looking at him. She slid into her seat.
“Somebody took her time,” her mother said. Which made Willa send her a sideways glance, checking the set of her mouth. Was it held a little bit crooked, the top lip not quite aligned with the bottom lip because she was gritting her teeth? But no, her lips were soft and curved, and when she rose to pour Willa’s father more coffee she touched him lightly on the shoulder before she sat down again.
The scrambled eggs were lukewarm by now but they still tasted good, with a little cheese stirred in just the way Willa liked, and the bacon was nice and crisp with no fatty white spots. She helped herself to three strips.
“I guess I should let Doug Law know I won’t be needing a ride,” her father was saying, and her mother said, “Oh, I meant to tell you. I think the car seems to be having this teensy little problem.”
“What kind of teensy little problem?” he asked.
“Well, any time you turn it on a red dot shows up on the dashboard.”
He raised his eyebrows. He said, “You’ve been driving all around with the idiot light lit?”
“The idiot…?” she said, and Willa tensed, worrying that she had taken it the wrong way. But then she said, “Oh. Well, yes, I suppose I have been.”
“And you didn’t think to get it looked at?”
“I know! I’m awful,” she said gaily. “I’m so hopeless with mechanical things.” And she made a silly-me face at Willa and Elaine.
“Can you believe her?” their father asked them. But he seemed amused, more than anything. From his expression, he might have been asking, “Don’t you think she’s wonderful?”
Elaine was too busy spreading jam on her toast to notice. Willa just looked at him and said nothing.
Their mother peered into the cream pitcher and shook it a little, and then she got up and carried it out to the kitchen. Elaine, meanwhile, started talking again about Dommie Marconi’s rabbit, except now she was calling it a bunny. “Bunnies are real quiet and Dommie says they don’t need walking,” she said. “Can we get a bunny, Pop? Please?”
But he was studying Willa. He said, “Willa, honey? Are you still mad at me?”
She shrugged.
“I didn’t quite understand about last night,” he said. “What was that? Can we talk about it?”
His voice was meek but pushy, Willa thought, and she didn’t feel like answering him, but she knew he would keep on pressing her until she did. So she shrugged again and said, “I was just overtired, I guess.”
“Oh,” he said.
That seemed to satisfy him. At least, he didn’t ask anything more.
In the silence that followed, Willa’s eyes met her sister’s, and the two of them exchanged a long, stunned, stricken gaze.
1977
WILLA’S COLLEGE had a jitney that made several runs to the airport before any major holiday. She herself had never taken it—plane travel was expensive, and she went home by Greyhound bus if she went at all—but in the spring of her junior year her boyfriend suggested that he come meet her family over Easter weekend, and it was his idea they should fly. What else, he asked: ride sitting up on a bus all night only to do the same thing going back again two days later? Well, yes, that was what she would have done. But she didn’t argue.
Derek paid for her ticket out of his monthly allowance, but Willa told her parents he had happened upon it for nothing in a buy-one-get-one-free deal. Heaven only knew if there were such deals, but her parents weren’t used to flying themselves and they took her word for it.
In the jitney he and she were surrounded by friends, mostly his, and they couldn’t carry on much of a conversation. Derek was president of the senior class and captain of the tennis team; he had a warm, friendly way about him that everybody liked. So there was a lot of backslapping and wisecracking and calling from seat to seat, while Willa held her purse in both hands and looked on, smiling. She had dressed up for the plane, which she would not have done for the bus. She wore a powder-blue wool suit and her hair was smoothed into a bun. (Derek said she was the prettiest girl in the school when she did her hair that way.) He, on the other hand, was in jeans and his usual tan corduroy blazer, because he came from California and flying was not such a big deal to him. But he was so square-jawed and clean-cut, a full head taller than anyone else—and two heads taller than Willa—and with his short blond hair he could not have looked sloppy if he’d tried, Willa believed.
Kinney College was in northern Illinois, surrounded by farmlands as flat as pool tables, and on this April afternoon the few trees they passed were still stark and bare. At home it would be spring already. The Lenten roses had come and gone, her mother had written; they always finished up before Easter. Derek was going to like seeing some green for once. He couldn’t get over the long midwestern winters.