BY SEPTEMBER, JOHN was gone. He’d taken his saxophone and the clothes on his back. That was the story around town. I heard it from Bob in the gas station when John’s parents had pulled away after stopping to fill their tank. People said it with a touch of wonder and admiration.
He didn’t tell Jenny he was leaving, but he mailed her a thick letter. I wanted so badly to read it, but after she’d read it through, she took it out to the backyard and set it on fire. I watched her.
“He asked me to burn it,” she told me. She didn’t cry and at first she seemed proud that she’d been the one he singled out. He entrusted her with the secret of where he’d gone and why. School had started again and she rose to the sacrifice her loyalty required. But after school, she started closing herself in the bedroom with the window open, smoking cigarette after cigarette.
Bea could smell the smoke, of course, but she didn’t say anything. She wouldn’t risk upsetting Jenny, who could do nothing wrong in her eyes, or so I thought.
Some days, Jenny asked me to phone Frank’s Chicken and Pizza to tell them she wouldn’t be able to come to work. They were tolerant with her—everybody liked Jenny—but I worried she would lose her job.
One night, I heard Bea call, “Who used all the hot water?” I had my homework spread out on the dining-room table, and she came to the doorway of the kitchen and glowered at me.
“It wasn’t me,” I said.
Half an hour later, Jenny emerged from the bathroom, steaming and red like a boiled tomato. She slammed the bedroom door behind her. She was in a mood. These moods had become frequent.
I heard a strange thumping sound. I put down my pen and went to the door to listen. What was she doing in there? I opened the door a crack. Jenny was in a T-shirt and underwear, doing jumping jacks. Her breasts bounced with each jump.
“Close the door,” she said.
I did. The sound continued.
I went back to my homework. I pictured John stripping off her T-shirt. I pictured him pulling her against his bare chest. He said, “Maggie Dillon, where would you live where you could walk around all year with no shirt on?”
I couldn’t concentrate on my homework. The jumping had stopped.
“Jenny?” I said, opening the door carefully.
She was on the bed with a black look on her face, holding a bottle of cod liver oil. “Have you ever tasted this stuff?”
“Why are you drinking cod liver oil?”
“You don’t drink it. You are so dense sometimes, Maggie. Other times, you’re quite bright. But I can’t believe you haven’t figured it out yet. We do share a room.”
“It’s about John, isn’t it?” Suddenly I knew. “You’re going to run away to be with him, aren’t you?”
“Have you been watching soap operas with Bea? I’m not ‘running away’ with John, as you put it. Or any other way you want to say it. Don’t worry, I’m stuck here. Really stuck. Fuck it,” she said to the cod liver oil, and she reached for her smokes and lit one up.
“Don’t you care if Bea finds out?”
“Finds out what? That I’m pregnant?”
“What? Jenny, what? Jenny, no.”
She laughed. She laughed until she cried. Then she threw up in our little tin garbage pail.