Sharla’s purple dress lay on the floor, where she’d dropped it when we first got into the hot tub. The sparkly necklace spread over it like fireworks.
Midnight must be close, I thought. Please let midnight come soon, so I can go to bed.
We had finished the egg rolls and more wings. The caramel apple pie oozed half-eaten on the edge of the tub.
Jade broke a fingernail getting a Diet Coke open. Tsk, went Sharla, sucking her teeth. She brought out her nail polish case. After she fixed Jade’s nail, she painted all our nails and glued a little fake diamond on each tip. My hands looked like they belonged to somebody else. To Sharla, actually.
Jade and Sharla kept talking and talking while I stayed quiet.
If a person thinks she knows something, should she tell? And tell who, anyway—Sharla? Ron?
I could tell Grady, maybe, but he looks down on gossip. I could just keep quiet. I thought, too, about Sharla’s three babies that didn’t happen.
By then Jade and Sharla were deep into the high school teacher issue. Whether she really had a thing going on with some boy. Whether or not she would be fired, although they seemed to agree she should be.
Sharla was betting the teacher would be canned for sure. Jade said the story might just be wishful thinking by the students. Sharla snorted at that.
“I’ve seen her giving Ron the eye,” Sharla said. “She should have her teaching licence taken away.”
They got into a bit of a fight, in a mild way.
While they argued, I got out and found a diaper for Daisy. I sat on the edge of the tub to cool down a bit and let Daisy stay dry. I sang along to the music playing on the radio. Quietly,quietly, me and Daisy alone together. The others didn’t notice. I sipped my drink. Grady’s drink.
“What do you think, Dixie?” Sharla said. She wanted someone on her side.
“About what?”
Sharla ground her teeth. “About the teacher!”
Daisy had drifted into sleep on my shoulder.
“I guess—I don’t know. Does she love the guy?”
“I don’t think that’s the point,” Sharla said sharply.
I stared at her. She was so pretty on the outside and so prickly on the inside.
“I think I am a bit drunk,” I said. “Isn’t love always the point?”
Jade shook her head. “Not to me, not if the boy was my son. If it’s true, then it’s abuse—”
But that wasn’t what I meant. I talked faster.
“I mean, if she really loves the guy, she won’t want to wreck his life. So she wouldn’t sleep with him, because that would wreck his life.”
They stared at me.
“If she doesn’t love him, she might have slept with him. Abused him. Or just—told him she’s in love with him, or something. Whatever really happened.”
Hard to talk about a teacher I’d never seen. I kept imagining her: really beautiful, with long dark hair. And lonely.
“I remember high school,” I said. “It’s like a very small town. Hardly any possible men. You know, the drama teacher is gay, the principal is old... So the one good man seems like everything. Maybe he has a mean girlfriend. Or maybe he’s just really decent, really kind, and she—maybe she does love him.”
My strategy was not working. I had almost talked myself onto Jade’s side.
“You can get carried away by that secret, the secret of loving somebody,” I said. “She might feel like wrecking her own life, losing her kids—I mean, the school kids. The job.”
Sharla stared at me, as if a fish had started to talk.
“I mean, what she feels isn’t necessarily real love.” I knew I wasn’t making any sense.
Jade looked at her hands under the water. The fake diamonds on her nails glittered.
“Anyway, we don’t know what happened,” I said. “So we can’t judge her.”
I sounded like Grady.
I bent down and slid Daisy, fast asleep, into her car seat.
Then my arms felt so light.
“It’s got to be midnight by now,” I said. “Shouldn’t we bang the pots and pans or sing?”
Sharla stood up in the water.
“It’s so hot in here,” she said. “I’m boiling. I need some air!”
She jumped out and pulled open the patio door.
Beyond the misted glass, the night outside had changed. It had warmed up, and the wind was gone. Clean snow lay over the back yard like a blank sheet of paper.
Jade got out, too. She went to the door. Steam rose in clouds off her long back and legs. “Oh, this is good,” she said. “I needed this!”
She took a deep breath and then ran out onto the deck and down the stairs. She jumped full-length into the snow, face down.
Sharla gave a short scream, as if Jade was in danger.
Running into the snow looked like a really good idea to me.
I went past Sharla and out, walking barefoot through the snow. I’d been hot and sleepy for so long, I felt great. I slid down the deck steps and fell backwards into a patch of untouched snow.
The snow was so, so, so cold! It felt like burning on my skin. I flapped my arms and legs to make an angel.
Sharla was laughing her head off. The night was quiet. Her laughter crackled in the air. She said, “Oh, I can’t, I can’t!” But she did. She ran out into the snow. She had nothing on, she must have frozen instantly.
I stood up to check my snow angel. Not bad. My feet were numb. Jade flapped her legs and arms, too, and Sharla managed to flap once before she had to jump up and run back. I almost beat her back, to slide into the hot water again.
Jade came more slowly. Her skin was beet red in the blue light from the tub.
We thawed.
“Okay,” Sharla said. “I’m putting coffee on. If those guys don’t come back in fifteen minutes, I’m going to bed.”
She hauled herself out one last time and went to the kitchen.
Jade said, “I didn’t tell my husband who the guy is. The one I’m in love with.”
I nodded.
“I had that much sense,” she added.
I laughed.
After a minute, she said, “You were right to say what you did. I don’t want to wreck Ron’s life. Or mine.”
She looked so sad I could hardly bear it.
“I think about leaving Grady all the time,” I told her. “I have a list of what to pack.”
She put her hand on my arm.
“I might be wrong,” I said. “Maybe yours is real.”
Jade shook her head. “No. I don’t think so. Things aren’t real until you... get together, until you are both... until you’ve talked to each other.”
Sharla came back with a stack of pink towels.
“I guess the whole story is wishful thinking,” Jade said.