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your friends?” She leaned forward as if to see inside the truck. Jack and Hettie had the windows closed and were wrapped around one another, necking.
    â€œYou know she’s not there. No, she’s inside the town hall, at the party.”
    Lillian turned around and faced the crowd of people coming toward her and spreading over the lot, headed toward their cars. “Really? Looks like the party’s over,” she said. Then she glanced up at the lighted window above and to the left of the door—Wade’s office. “Oh, look!” she exclaimed. “Isn’t that Jill up there with the mask on? What’s she doing up there? Isn’t that your office?” Lillian waved her hand, and suddenly Jill’s face disappeared from the window. A second later the light went out.
    Wade said, “She told me she wanted to wait for you there.”
    â€œOh. While you went off for a few beers with your friends in the truck?”
    â€œNo. She wanted to stay up there alone,” he said. “Once she got it into her head that she was going back to Concord, I guess she felt a little uneasy around me or something. I mean, I wasn’t exactly tickled by the idea,” he said. “I looked forward to this weekend a lot, Lillian.”
    â€œYes, I imagine you must have.” She looked past him into the cab of the truck. “Is that Hettie Rodgers there, with whatzizname?”
    â€œYeah.”
    â€œShe’s grown up some, hasn’t she?”
    â€œOh, Jesus, lay off, will you?” he said. “It looks like you’ve won this fucking round already, so lay off a little, for Christ’s sake.” Wade was vaguely aware of Bob Horner off to his left by the car door, and as Jill came out of the town hall, Horner walked quickly around the front of the car and started toward her.
    â€œHorner!” Wade said. “Leave her be. This’s got nothing to do with you, so you just act like the chauffeur. Got it?”
    â€œWade,” Horner said, and he stopped and stuffed his hands into his jacket pockets as if suddenly searching for amatch. “Nobody wants any trouble,” he said in his high reedy voice.
    Lillian had already turned and was walking almost regally to greet her daughter, who had removed her mask—at last, Wade thought. That goddamned mask.
    In a voice loud enough to stop several people crossing near them, Wade said, “I don’t want her to go, Lillian.”
    â€œDon’t cause a scene.” She had her hand on her daughter’s shoulder and was escorting her to the rear door opposite Wade. Lillian peered across the top of the car and said to him, “The child is obviously upset enough. No one’s trying to win any ‘rounds.’ We’re both, I assume, only interested in Jill’s happiness,” she announced. “Don’t make it any worse, will you?”
    â€œGoddammit,” he said. “I’m not making it worse. You are. You and this clown here. Me and Jill, we could’ve worked this thing out okay on our own, for God’s sake. It’s a normal thing, a spat like this. I mean, it’s normal for a kid to feel a little strange coming back here like this. It’s even normal for me to get a little touchy about it. Believe it or not. You two, you come butting in here like this, how the hell do you think it makes me feel? Treating her like some kind of tragic victim or something, how do you think it makes me look to her?”
    People leaving the town hall for the parking lot were now cutting a wide circle around the Audi and Jack’s truck, many of them staring as they passed, for this was another public and potentially exciting chapter in the ongoing twenty-year saga of Wade and Lillian Whitehouse.
    Horner had walked back around the front of the car to the driver’s side and opened the door. With his back to Wade, he said quietly, “Get in, Lillian.”
    â€œYou