Are You in the House Alone? Read Free Page A

Steve said as we strolled along in the shadows of the oaks. “If I know my brother’s habits, which I do, he’ll be down in the Village Center at the Nutmeg Tavern. Let’s wander on down there, and I’ll borrow his car. Then we can drive out to the lake.”
    “We’d better not. Mother—”
    “I heard your mother when we left. She meant me to. But it’s early yet. We’ll be back in an hour or so.”
    We were already walking toward the Village Center instead of back to my house, I noticed. Either Steve was steering me, or my feet had minds of their own. “I don’t think we’d better.”
    “You mean you don’t want to.”
    “Don’t push me into that role,” I said.
    “You mean the well-known playing-hard-to-get?”
    “That’s the one. It’s a little late for that, isn’t it?” The leaf shadows made the brick sidewalk wavery underfoot. We paced along with our arms around each other’s waist.
    “You’re still . . .”
    “I’m still what?” I said.
    “Taking them.”
    “The pill?”
    “Yes. Why not just ask me that all in one sentence?”
    “I don’t know,” he said. “I guess I come from a long line of Italian peasants who don’t speak the sacred word s-e-x out loud. But it’s more than just that with us, isn’t it?”
    “I guess—yes. But I don’t know how much more. Alison is always—”
    “Let’s leave Alison out. There’s no room for her in this conversation.”
    “It’s just that she’s so positive about what she wants. I mean how can she know what’ll be right for her ten years from now? I can’t see ten minutes ahead.” I gave up then because I couldn’t get my words to fit around my thoughts. Even talking seemed hopeless, without mentioning basic things like money and what our parents thought and the fact that neither one of us had really gone with other people.
    “Just answer me one thing,” my mother had said back when Steve and I were first together. “Would you be half as interested in this boy if he weren’t the plumber’s son? You surely know how clannish these . . . local families can be. What if he were a boy from your own background? Then how would he look to you?”
    “Then he wouldn’t be Steve,” I told her, but she said that was no answer. And it wasn’t.
    “Some people just concentrate on the present and let the future take care of itself,” Steve said finally.
    “Are you like that?”
    “No.”
    “Neither am I.”
    But we went out to the lake anyway. Out to that empty cottage that Steve’s dad used for a fishing shack in the summer. The only place where we thought we were alone.

CHAPTER
Two
    The next night the eleven o’clock news was winding down through sports and local weather, promising a golden oldie classic for the late show. I sat through the commercials in the faint hope that I hadn’t seen the movie before. I had. Victor Mature, Carole Landis, and Betty Grable in
I Wake Up Screaming.
For the second time in a month. And not golden or classic. Just an oldie. The switchboard operator, Harry, kills Carol Landis. And Betty is safe in Victor’s arms, but it takes them ninety minutes to get there.
    I turned off the set and checked my watch against the mantel clock. Eleven thirty-one. Twenty-nine minutes until the going baby-sitter rate rose seventy-five cents an hour. Not that I was miserly, not then. In fact I felt I owed Mrs. Montgomery a rebate. She always had Angie and Missy fed and bedded before I came on duty, even though the older one was nearly five and hyperactive. So it was easy money at Mrs. Montgomery’s. All I had to do was hold the fort and stare at my homework or the set.
    She kept a pretty meager refrigerator, but it was always good for a can of Diet-Rite. I drifted down the dark hall to the kitchen. The sink was full of dirty dishes. I wouldn’t have minded washing them except that Mrs. Montgomery never exploited her sitters with domestic chores. She didn’t go in much for chores herself.
    A monument to her