Read Online Search Party by Valerie Trueblood - Free Book Online Page B

girls. She knew and she should have known all along from her own experience that the way some men looked at you was a language, spoken in ways you thought were private, but they were not private, not reserved for you. Darla had fallen under the spell of Jake’s eyes with their dark circles, and his accent that made her think of Joan Rivers, and the jokes. And certain qualities abnormal in a male—an interest in any confession, a tenderness for mistakes when they were made by women—qualities made known to Abby only gradually, in private.
    Darla had taken trouble with her face and her big auburn permanent and was wearing her long green chiffon skirt, the same lop-hemmed style of skirt that Abby’s own granddaughter had in her closet, as her daughter had pointed out to her after Darla sat by them at the Messiah . Darla had the skirt on with boots, and a new blouse of thin white material, not real silk, opened low and straining a little at the first buttonholes, and she was going to town with her impersonation of a woman a good bit younger than herself. Several times Abby had had to cut in on the storytelling and loud laughter Jake and Darla got going between them in the quiet restaurant. They were in the Hilltop Room in the old grange hall that had become the inn.
    When Darla got up to go to the ladies room Jake stopped laughing long enough to watch the green chiffon drift across the lobby. A coldness passed over Abby, coupled with a mental picture of Jake in his open overcoat hurrying back into that same lobby after he had taken her home, and Darla waving her fingers at him from a table in the corner.
    â€œYour friend is something,” Jake said, with a lingering andalmost spiteful note in his voice, she thought, and one finger absently stroking away the grin he had been wearing through dinner. He filled his glass to the brim with the rest of the wine.
    Normally Abby could have thought of a remark that would give Darla her due as a good person to whom nothing much had ever happened, a flirt. But Abby was not as springy as usual. All evening she had been slowed by the effort of thinking what subject she might raise now that would have anything like the hypnotizing effect her words had had on Jake five years ago, when their acquaintance was new and it was all he could do to push himself back from her table after the windowpanes had gone dark and they had eaten up all of her lunchmeat and cottage cheese, and take the dishes into the kitchen the way he did and rinse them off for her, still putting questions to her over his shoulder while he emptied the ashtrays.
    â€œDarla wanted to come so much I called her up and said I didn’t think you’d mind,” Abby said. “She does my hair.”
    â€œSo she said.” He was stroking his sad mouth.
    Abby did notice he was not nervous, or no more so than usual. He was always high-strung, ready to laugh or groan, or even shed tears, or go into one of his long-drawn-out explanations, looking straight into your eyes to convince you—and this too had had its effect on Darla, whom Abby could picture right now in the ladies room going round and round her mouth with the pearlized lipstick and powdering her hot cheeks—when you had forgotten what you had said in the first place to get him started.
    Half the town was in the theater. People who had not called in years but who knew Abby’s story had been calling up, assuming she’d seen the movie and cleared it. “Nope,” she said. “I told him I’d see it when it was done. And if I hate it I can stand up and say, Lord, he’s lying. I can stop it in the middle. I can do whatever I want.” “Oh, but won’t you be embarrassed?” Darla had said, and then answered herself, “No, you won’t.” For Abby was tough, and known to be. “I’d be more embarrassed if it was about me in my twenties!” Abby said. “There you’d have something