Free Are You in the House Alone? by Richard Peck

being out of work. “I was worried about him,” I said.
    “Is that what’s been bothering you lately?”
    “Isn’t that enough?” I darted off to Gernreich’s geometry.
    *   *   *
    I had it all timed so that he’d pick me up a few minutes after Dad and Mother left. A few minutes, no more. Dad left on schedule, walking down to the Village Hall for his board meeting. But Mother dawdled, changed her clothes twice.
    “Come in, Stephen,” I heard her say. She must haveseen him coming up the walk and made it to the door before he rang. I was just starting down the stairs.
This is all I need. If she attacks him for being her daughter’s seducer.
    But she was on her dignity, with a little added open-mindedness. “We never get to see enough of you, Stephen,” she accused kindly. I stopped on the stairs, trying to see Steve through her eyes. How does a plumber’s son look to the wife of an unemployed professional man? The class system seemed to be lying in a heap of rubble on the hall rug. I wondered if Mother knew that the Pastorinis were more secure in their world than we were in ours. I wondered if that was a taunt to her. It would have been so much easier for her if Steve had been a sweathog: cigarette dangling from bad teeth, shifty eyes, black leather over bad posture.
    But he wasn’t that. He was next year’s valedictorian who happened to be having a Relationship with her daughter. Puppy love and The Pill. She may have taken it all more seriously that it was. I could see why she was off balance. But I couldn’t see Steve through her eyes. I could barely see him through mine. I was beginning to feel pretty cut off from everybody.
    The library was closed. A sign on the door said: “Due to continuing budget cuts and increased operating expenses, this library will no longer observe evening hours until further notice.”
    “The lake?” Steve said. “We’ll build a fire in the cabin stove. There’s kindling.”
    “No, I don’t think so.”
    “No, I guess not,” he said. “You’re someplace where I can’t find you.” So we drove around, up and down Meeting Street, out along the Woodbury Road and into the country. Past the barn where the Slaneks lived, with trapezoid-shaped windows throwing light across a weedy yard whereMr. Slanek’s welded I-beam sculpture stood around, casting angular shadows.
    It was pouring rain, and I was steaming inside my slicker. Once, on a straight stretch of road, Steve reached over and took my hand. I jumped and pulled away without thinking. “It’s not you,” I tried to explain. “It’s me.”
    We stopped at Friendly’s, which was midweek empty. A couple of malteds didn’t loosen our tongues. Steve wasn’t the type to fill in with easy conversation. I had the feeling he was brooding about his unwritten Roosevelt paper.
    It was almost a relief when the door burst open, and a gang of sweathogs, mostly male in black leather, flocked in, streaming rain water and glittering with chrome studs. They staked out three or four booths. Blue air and that eye-cutting sweet pot smell hung over them. They were all heads, of course.
    “Okay,” the waitress bawled from the safe distance of the soda fountain. “Don’t smoke that junk in here. Cigarettes yes. Joints no.”
    The sweathogs greeted this interruption with a barrage of catcalls, mostly beginning with the word
mother.
There were a couple of girls with them. Girls you sometimes saw at school, but not usually. The loud one was LaVerne Shull who always wore three-quarter-length boots, wide at the tops like a drum majorette’s. She withdrew a pack of Kents from her boot top and offered them around to the guys who were smoking their roaches down to hot husks of brown paper.
    “Hey? They close school?” LaVerne yelled over the din of the others. “I mean, they close school or sumpin?” She struggled to get the attention of the others who were trying to spell out words on the table with a squeeze bottle of ketchup.