Free Second Nature by Alice Hoffman Page A

happy to be defended by his ex-wife. “Oh, don’t pay any attention to Roy,” he told her. “Nobody else does.”
    “Let’s get ice cream,” Paul whispered to Michelle.
    “And here he is,” Roy said. He was truly smooth when he wanted to be. There was that smile, for one thing. “The man who’s living with my wife.”
    For a brief moment, Robin had the sense that something horrible could happen. Stephen’s eyes were hooded and cold; along his neck a line of veins rose up. He was face to face with Roy, and although his mouth was curled, he didn’t appear to be smiling.
    “Hamburger,” Robin said. She took one of the plates from Stephen and shoved it at Roy. “This is Stephen,” she told Stuart. “He’s studying landscape design.”
    Robin had drawn Stephen over to her brother, but he was still looking at Roy.
    “Will you be working with the Doctor?” Stuart asked. “Roy’s father plotted out the arboretum for our grandfather.”
    “I’m working with Robin,” Stephen said.
    “You should come see the moon garden Robin did for me,” Kay suggested. Hers was an all-white garden: white hybrid tea roses, masses of white lilies and bearded iris, Miss Lingard’s icy phlox, clematis that opened to look like a handful of snow.
    “Thank you,” Stephen said. Robin nodded at him, so he knew he was doing well, but his heart was pounding. “I will,” he told Kay. He could still feel the bad thing between him and Roy; if they were honest about it, they’d be circling each other right now. But men weren’t honest; they sipped beer and smiled and didn’t show their teeth.
    “When did you plan to tell me about him?” Michelle whispered as Paul tried to guide her toward the dessert table.
    “There’s nothing to tell,” Robin insisted. “Really,” she swore, but by that time no one was listening to her.
    “Is the cat driving you crazy?” Stuart asked Stephen. “When I stayed at Robin’s the damned thing used to jump on me in the middle of the night. I’m convinced the sole purpose of its existence is to shed.”
    “The cat doesn’t bother me,” Stephen said carefully. This was it, this small encounter was what they had practiced for. The true test, Robin had said, the real McCoy.
    “You’re a tolerant man,” Stuart said. “Lemonade?”
    And that was when Stephen knew they had actually accomplished it. Stuart had no idea that he’d talked to Stephen dozens of times in that room with bars on the windows. Just blink your eyes if you want to answer yes. Shake your head for no. All Stuart saw now was the sports jacket from Macy’s and the Nike sneakers and the sunlight, and what he saw he believed. Tell me anything at all, say one word, Stuart had pleaded, while Stephen sat across from him, in a hard-backed chair, considering how easy it would be to break his neck, then steal the ring of keys from his belt.
    Bees buzzed around the pitchers on the table, and out in the rear of the yard a bat cracked against a ball and sent it flying. Robin glanced over at Stephen, pleased, as if their accomplishment had turned him, all at once, into the person he appeared to be on this one fine day in May. People all around them were talking, they sounded like birds, or water in a stream, unintelligible and constant. There were women in cotton dresses, and boys running through the new grass, and here he was, dressed like a man, accepting a tall glass of lemonade beneath a clear blue sky, more than a thousand miles from home.
     
 
In that first week of June, when the tide was so low that children went far out across the mud flats, collecting baskets of mussels, the roses bloomed all at once. People stopped at their own gates, openmouthed, surprised by the profusion in their own gardens. Everywhere on the island, roses spilled over lawns and climbed over rooftops, a glorious infestation. Thorns and brambles choked lawn mowers, allergy sufferers went crazy with sneezing, little girls complained they couldn’t sleep