It was Sunday afternoon, around four o’clock, and most people in Lawrenceville were sitting around, relaxing on the porch, or in the shade of a tree, or inside the house, near a fan. Or two. Or three. Yes, it was hot all right. But it was summer. And the citizens of Lawrenceville tended to take life easy in July and August.
Lawrenceville could be so damp and rainy in the fall. And cold and snowy in the winter. And teasingly warm and sunny as spring approached. Then suddenly all wet and drizzly as that promised season receded, not yet April but oh-so-sick-of-March.
So today, despite the heat — the radio had said it was 92 degrees — people were content.
Or somewhat so. Because you see when you mix a lazy afternoon with warm air and nothing to do, you get time on your hands. And the mind begins to wander. The mind takes on a life of its own.
Cynthia Huxtable could not stop thinking about her ringless fourth finger. She moaned in despair: “I can’t even call it my wedding hand. It’s just my plain old left one. The one I don’t write with. Don’t play tennis with. Can’t open jars with. My left hand was born to be married. And here it is: ringless, purposeless, with nothing to do in August of 2012 and it’s friggin’ 92 degrees outside.”
The worst of it, Cynthia realized, was that she had no prospects. In her teens, she had dated at high school but never anyone in particular for too long. And come to think of it, it was always too long between anyone in particular.
Her choice of college had been a good one academically but it was an all-girls school so no groundwork had been laid in the Prince Charming department. Now here she was back in Lawrenceville, where there were no single men, not a one, unless you counted Mr. Richards down at the hardware store. Yuck. Who was even counting, she thought.
Across the street, Edna Louise was washing the last of the floury bits off her hands and preparing to put her two peach pies in the oven. She was bound and determined to win the Lawrenceville peach pie contest this year and refused to entertain even the slightest possible notion that Mrs. Garrett would take the blue ribbon yet again. Mrs. Garrett did not have her secret ingredient. Mrs. Garrett was getting forgetful. And Mrs. Garrett was . . . well all Edna Louise could think of was that even though Mrs. Garrett had won three years in a row, this year the Best Peach Pie in Overton County belonged to Edna Louise.
Twelve-year-old Bobby Martin, over on Millerton Circle, was preoccupied. He wasn’t thinking about pie. He had no intension of getting married ‘cause girls sucked, in his opinion. And right now all he could think about, as he sat under the big maple tree in his front yard and slammed his genuine autographed Chicago Cubs baseball into his well worn leather glove — the one his brother Todd had given him just last year before he signed up for what he called the war in Eye-Rack — was why Tommy Tupper had chosen to bicycle out to Carson’s pond with Richard and Tyler and those two new girls in town, Kaneisha and Alyessia, when this was the time they always, and I mean always — without fail! — played catch over at Riverton Middle School.
Thwack. That was the sound Bobby’s ball made as it landed in his glove, never missing that well-warn dent in the palm. Thwack. Never losing the beat. Thwack. Never breaking with Bobby’s hypnotic routine and maybe, just once, flying up into the air over Bobby’s head, which would require Bobby to look up, anticipate and gauge the arrival of said ball and stretch out his gloved hand. No, there was no chance of that happening. Not today.
Thwack. Bobby’s hand reached in to get the leather orb, raised it, threw it — with such intension — right back in. Thwack. Damn you Tommy Tupper, Bobby thought. Thwack. Damn you too, Tyler Wells. Thwack. Damn you Richard and Keneisha and Alyessia, or whatever your names are. Thwack. Damn you all to hell.
And then, without knowing why or how, Bobby looked up and over at his bike and wondered how long it might take him to ride on out to Carson’s Pond. It was 92 degrees, for Christ’s sake. Time to swim. Time to hang out with friends. And later it would be time to go downtown and eat peach pie. Now where had his mother put his swim trunks.
“Mom,” he yelled as he walked toward the house. “Where are ya?”
