That Night by Alice McDermott Read Free Book Online Page A

she was there but also feeling still the wise, amused eyes of whoever it was who was watching him, knowing the truth. He was young enough to believe that his foolishness, his humiliation in love, could not go unnoticed and once noticed could never be forgiven.
    He set his face into a smirk, even chuckled as he pushed through the door of Newberry’s. He passed the counter where she sometimes bought earrings, hit the curtain of the instant photo machine. He passed the bins of white and beige pocketbooks whose odor filled the store, of plastic sandals, of discount makeup and perfume. He checked the wall of birthday and anniversary cards.
    In Woolworth’s, he paused at a table of scarves. They were piled loosely, bright and tangled and so thin that it seemed only their white price tags kept them from rising like smoke into the cooled air. He touched one—a pale yellow with almost colorless white polka dots—and its rough, familiar feel already seemed a reminder of something lost. He had untied the scarves she sometimes wore around her throat. Once, she had draped one across her bare shoulders like a stole.
    Again he checked the jewelry and the makeup. At the lunch counter, a child had just gotten sick. She stood pale and dazed as her mother seemed to beat at the front of her sun suit with a wet paper towel. A black janitor was wheeling a bucket and a mop to the spot. The other customers had scattered to either end of the counter.
    When he turned away, he found two teenage girls watching him. “Oh, sickening,” one said directly to him, and he recognized the invitation. He could talk to her, take her telephone number. He could bury his face in her stiff hair.
    “You’re ugly,” he said and saw her face change, just slightly, as if some small thing behind her makeup had slipped. He left the store.
    Now he was jogging. The big stores seemed to mock him with their narrow aisles and invisible doorways, their elevators and dressing rooms. He realized that he could just be missing her at every turn. She could be just on the other side of the mall sitting with her back to the trees, smoking a cigarette. She could stand and wander away just as he left the escalator in Klein’s. She could be fingering the very scarf he had touched just as he emerged into the sunlight once again.
    He imagined how he would later see it around her throat or her waist, laugh and say, “When’d you buy this?”
    She could be on the bus already, headed home.
    He called again and caught her mother by surprise. Her voice was cheerfully formal when she said hello. He asked if Sheryl was home yet. There was a terrible pause. “No, Rick,” she said. “No, she’s not.”
    At some time during that day he must have driven past her house. No sign of her, of course, but a startling memory of himself as he had been just days before: confidently climbing those steps, Sheryl there even before he had rung the bell. Himself stepping inside without thought or hesitation, without gratitude or, he realized, even pride. He would wait for her to finish drying the dishes or to run upstairs for her purse. He would stretch out in an armchair like the owner of the house, joke with her Polish grandmother like a favorite son. He would be as confident as a married man of how the evening would end.
    Just days ago, he had climbed those steps and she had been there behind the screen. Although last time she had been ready when he arrived and had not invited him in.
    He ate supper with his father and his sister that night, simply to define for himself the beginning of evening, the end of the lousy day.
    His sister said, “To what do we owe the great pleasure of your company—run out of pizza money?”
    He told her to stuff it, then added that she was becoming a bitchy old maid.
    She called him a punk.
    He said he didn’t see any boyfriends knocking down her door. “When was the last time you had a date?”
    She said, “Oh, shut up.” But he leaned closer to her as she