Free Rich Rewards by Alice Adams

the night” did seem a strange way to end a marriage. I asked, “She left a note?”
    “No, no note. Dad was really upset. Of course he saw her car was gone, but Jesus, she could have driven over a cliff. Or jumped off the bridge.”
    That was quite true, I thought, remembering Ruth’s desperate face, her slightly crazy delivery. And I thought, Well, this will make things easier for Royce and Stacy, and I felt a little envious: how nice for lovers when people just move out of their way, and how infrequently that happens. And how unfair that it should happen to Stacy, already so gifted with beauty, and with money.
    However, I next thought, maybe Stacy would not be entirely pleased? Maybe Royce was not quite rich enough to be acceptable as an unmarried man? Maybe he was only as rich as her former husband had been, which wouldn’t do.
    “Finally Dad called her office,” Caroline went on, “and there she was. She’s living there, on Pine Street. She told him that she’d never been happier in her life.”
    “Couldn’t that be true?”
    “Oh, sure, I guess. Actually I don’t see why he’s so shook up about it. He keeps going on and on about the terrible neighborhood. How she’ll get beaten up, or shot, or something.”
    “Well, that can happen anywhere.” And I told her about the woman on my street out walking her dog and her husband getting shot, my first week in San Francisco. Caroline seemed not to have read about it, and I gave her points, at least, for avoiding the local papers.
    In fact, she couldn’t seem to focus on anything other than her parents’ splitting up, although their story obviouslyirritated and depressed her. To my account of the murdered man, his wife and the dog, she merely said, “Oh, wow,” which I already knew was not the way she talked.
    Then, “Let’s leave this mess,” she said, gesturing at the cups and saucers, the teapot. Not my idea of much of a mess, but Caroline was a tidy person; the whole room showed that she was.
    We went down to the other end of the room, and we both sat—or, rather, sprawled—on the piles of pillows there, beneath the long windows, at that hour filled with strong western sunlight streaming in. In that illumination I saw for the first time that Caroline’s brown hair was really a combination of yellows and golds, like her sweater. I told her how pretty I thought it was, her hair. “It’s the liveliest brown I’ve ever seen,” I said—which was true.
    “Oh, it’s just clean,” she said. “I’m a clean-hair freak.” But she was pleased. I think women of her age don’t compliment each other much, or not on things like pretty hair; in their way they are much more serious than we were.
    The telephone in the kitchen area rang just then, a long turned-down sound that Caroline seemed attuned to. She got up, excusing herself, and went back to that corner of the room.
    During her monosyllabic but rather prolonged conversation, I looked around—having tendencies to snoopiness. However, Caroline was so orderly, everything put away, that there was not much to see. Therefore, the pair of earrings on top of her bookcase struck my attention for several reasons: most obviously, because they were duplicates of the ones ripped off from me; secondly, that seemed a funny place for them to be, as though Caroline had for some reason not known what to do with them; and third, I could not imagine her wearing them. With so much long hair, big earrings wouldn’t work; they were not in her style at all.
    And looking at those earrings made me nervous, perhaps foolishly; I next concentrated on her books. A sympathetic, if not distinguished library, it was at least eclectic: Jane Austen, Colette, some Dickens, too much Anaïs Nin; Forster’s
Howards End
—somehow this last was the most unlikely inclusion; odd to see a copy of my old favorite book in young Caroline’s library. Eldridge Cleaver, H. Rap Brown, Marcuse, Tolkien, Jung.
    I looked up at the earrings