How are you today, Polly?

Fine, Alan. I’m fine.

In fact, she was terrified. it wasn’t that her hands were so awfully painful at this very second; she almost wished they did hurt, because the pain, bad as it was when it finally came, was still better than the waiting.

11

Shortly after noon today, she had become aware of a warm tingling-almost a vibration-in her hands. It formed rings of heat around her knuckles and at the base of her thumb; she could feel it lurking at the bottom of each fingernail in small, steely arcs like humorless smiles. She had felt this twice before, and knew what it meant. She was going to have what her Aunt Betty, who’d been afflicted with the same sort of arthritis, called a real bad spell. “When my hands start to tingle like electric shocks, I always know it’s time to batten down the hatches,” Betty had said, and now Polly was trying to batten down her own hatches, with a notable lack of success.

Outside, two boys walked down the middle of the street, tossing a football back and forth between them. The one on the rightthe youngest of the Lawes boys-went up for a high pass. The ball ticked off his fingers and bounced onto Polly’s lawn. He saw her looking out the window as he went after it and waved to her. Polly raised her own hand in return… and felt the pain flare sullenly, like a thick bed of coals in an errant gust of wind. Then it was gone again and there was only that eerie tingling. It felt to her the way the air sometimes felt before a violent electrical storm.

The pain would come in its own time; she could do nothing about it. The lies she had told Alan about Kelton, though… that was quite another thing. And, she thought, it’s not as though the truth is so awful, so glaring, so shocking… and it’s not as though he doesn’t already suspect or even know that you’ve lied. He does.

I’ve seen it in his face. So why is this so hard, Polly? Why?

Partially because of the arthritis, she supposed, and partially because of the pain medication she had come to rely on more and more heavily-the two things together had away of blurring rational thought, of making the clearest and cleanest of right angles look queerly skewed. Then there was the fact of Alan’s own pain… and the honesty with which he had disclosed it. He had laid it out for her inspection without a single hesitation.

His feelings in the wake of the peculiar accident which had taken

Annie’s and Todd’s lives were confused and ugly, surrounded by an unpleasant (and frightening) swirl of negative emotions, but he had laid them out for her just the same. He had done it because he wanted to find out if she knew things about Annie’s state of mind that he did not… but he had also done it because playing fair and keeping such things in the open were just part of his nature.

She was afraid of what he might think when he found out that playing fair wasn’t always a part of hers; that her heart as well as her hands had been touched with early frost.

She stirred uneasily in the chair.

I have to tell him-sooner or later I have to. And none of that explains why it’s so hard; none of that even explains why I told him the lies in the first place. I mean, it isn’t as if I killed my son…

She sighed-a sound that was almost a sob-and shifted in her chair.

She looked for the boys with the football, but they were gone. Polly settled back in her chair and closed her eyes.

12

She wasn’t the first girl to ever turn up pregnant as the result of a date-night wrestling match, or the first to ever argue bitterly with her parents and other relations as a result. They had wanted her to marry Paul “Duke” Sheehan, the boy who had gotten her pregnant.

She had replied that she wouldn’t marry Duke if he was the last boy on earth. This was true, but what her pride would not let her tell them was that Duke didn’t want to marry her-his closest friend had told her he was already making panicky preparations to join the Navy when he turned eighteen… which he would do in less than six weeks.

“Let me get this straight,” Newton Chalmers said, and had then torn away the last tenuous bridge between his daughter and himself.

“He was good enough to screw, but he’s not good enough to marry-is that about right?”

She had tried to run out of the house then, but her mother had caught her. If she wouldn’t marry the boy, Lorraine Chalmers said, speaking in the calm and sweetly reasonable voice that had driven Polly almost to madness as a teenager, then they would have to send her away to Aunt Sarah in Minnesota. She could stay in Saint Cloud until the baby came, then put it up for adoption.

“I know why you want me to leave,” Polly said. “It’s Great-aunt Evelyn, isn’t it? You’re afraid if she finds out I’ve got a bun in my oven, she’ll cut you out of her will. It’s all about money, isn’t it?

You don’t care about me at all. You don’t give a shit about m@’ Lorraine Chalmers’s sweetly reasonable voice had always masked a jackrabbit temper. She had torn away the last tenuous bridge between her daughter and herself by slapping Polly hard across the face.

So Polly had run away. That had been a long, long time ago-in July of 1970.

She stopped running for awhile when she got to Denver, and worked there until the baby was born in a charity ward which the patients called Needle Park. She had fully intended to put the child up for adoption, but something-maybe just the feel of him when the maternity nurse had put him in her arms after the delivery had changed her mind.

She named the boy Kelton, after her paternal grand father. The decision to keep the baby had frightened her a little, because she liked to see herself as a practical, sensible girl, and nothing which had happened to her over the last year or so fit that image. First the practical, sensible girl had gotten pregnant out of wedlock in a time when practical, sensible girls simply did not do such things.

Then the practical, sensible girl had run away from home and delivered her child in a city where she had never been before and knew nothing about. And to top it all off, the practical, sensible girl had decided to keep the baby and take it with her into a future she could not see, could not even sense.

At least she had not kept the baby out of spite or defiance; no one could hang that on her. She found herself surprised by love, that simplest, strongest, and most unforgiving of all emotions.

She had moved on. No they had moved on. She had worked a number of menial jobs, and they had ended up in San Francisco, where she had probably intended to go all along. In that early summer of 1971 it had been a kind of hippie Xanadu, a hilly head shop full of freaks and folkies and yippies and bands with names like Moby Grape and the Thirteenth Floor Elevators.

According to the Scott McKenzie song about San Francisco which had been popular during one of those years, summertime was supposed to be a love-in there. Polly Chalmers, who had been no one’s idea of a hippie even back then, had somehow missed the love-in. The building where she and Kelton lived was full of jimmied mailboxes and junkies who wore the peace-sign around their necks and, more often than not, kept switchblades in their scuffed and dirty motorcycle boots. The most common visitors in this neighborhood were process servers, repo men, and cops. A lot of cops, and you didn’t call them pigs to their faces; the cops had also missed the love-in, and were pissed about it.

Polly applied for welfare and found she had not lived in California long enough to qualify-she supposed things might be different now, but in 1971, it had been as hard for a young unwed mother to get along in San Francisco as it was anywhere else. She applied for Aid to Dependent Children, and waited-hoped-for something to come of it. Kelton never missed a meal, but she herself lived hand to mouth, a scrawny Young woman who was often hungry and always afraid, a young woman very few of the people who knew her now would have recognized. Her memories of those first three years on the West Coast, memories stored at the back of her mind like old clothes in an attic, were skewed and grotesque, images from a nightmare.