The Little Friend

Harriet concurred with this. Her Dufresnes uncles were all more or less like her father: deer hunters and sportsmen, loud rough talkers with black dye combed through their graying hair, aging variations on the Elvis theme with their potbellies and their elastic-sided boots. They didn’t read books; their jokes were coarse; in their manners and preoccupations, they were about one generation removed from country sorry. Only once had she met her grandmother Dufresnes: an irritable woman in pink plastic beads and stretch pantsuits, who lived in a condominium in Florida that had sliding glass doors and foil giraffes on the wallpaper. Harriet had once gone down to stay with her for a week—and nearly went insane from boredom, since Grandmother Dufresnes had no library card, and owned no books except a biography of a man who had started the Hilton chain of hotels and a paperback entitled A Texan Looks at LBJ. She had been lifted from rural poverty in Tallahatchie County by her sons, who’d bought her the condominium in a Tampa retirement community. She sent a box of grapefruit to Harriet’s house every Christmas. Otherwise they rarely heard from her.

Though Harriet had certainly sensed the resentment that Edie and the aunts had for her father, she had no idea quite how bitter it was. He had never been an attentive husband or father, they murmured, even when Robin was alive. It was a crime how he ignored the girls. It was a crime how he ignored his wife—especially after their son had died. He had just carried on with work, as usual, hadn’t even taken any time off from the bank, and he had gone on a hunting trip to Canada hardly a month after his son was in the ground. It was hardly surprising that Charlotte’s mind wasn’t quite what it used to be, with a sorry husband like that.

“It would be better,” said Edie angrily, “if he just went on and divorced her. Charlotte is still young. And there’s that nice young Willory man who just bought that property out by Glenwild—he’s from the Delta, he’s got some money—”

“Well,” murmured Adelaide, “Dixon is a good provider.”

“What I’m saying is, she could get somebody so much better.”

“What I’m

saying, Edith, is that there’s many a slip twixt the cup and the lip. I don’t know what would happen to little Charlotte and those girls if Dix wasn’t earning a good salary.”

“Well, yes,” said Edie, “there is that.”

“Sometimes I wonder,” said Libby tremulously, “if we did the right thing by not urging Charlotte to move to Dallas.”

There had been talk of this not long after Robin died. The bank had offered Dix a promotion if he would relocate to Texas. Several years later, he had tried to get them all to move to some town in Nebraska. So far from not urging Charlotte and the girls to go, the aunts had been panic-stricken on both occasions and Adelaide and Libby and even Ida Rhew had wept for weeks at the very thought.

Harriet blew on her father’s signature, though the ink was dry. Her mother wrote checks on this account all the time—it was how she paid the bills—but, as Harriet had learned, she didn’t keep track of the balance. She would have paid the Country Club bill happily enough if Harriet had asked; but the threat of Camp Lake de Selby grumbled black at the horizon, and Harriet did not wish to risk reminding her, by mention of Country Club and swimming pool, that the registration forms had not arrived.

————

She got on her bicycle and rode over to the Country Club. The office was locked. Everybody was at lunch in the dining room. She walked down the hall to the Pro Shop, where she found Hely’s big brother, Pemberton, smoking a cigarette behind the counter and reading a stereo magazine.

“Can I give this money to you?” she asked him. She liked Pemberton. He was Robin’s age, and had been Robin’s friend. Now he was twenty-one and some people said it was a shame that his mother had talked his father out of sending him to military school back when it might have made a difference. Though Pem had been popular in high school, and his picture was on practically every page of his senior class yearbook, he was a loafer and a little bit of a beatnik, and he hadn’t lasted long at Vanderbilt, or at Ole Miss or even Delta State. Now he lived at home. His hair was a lot longer even than Hely’s; in the summer he was a lifeguard at the Country Club, and in the winter all he did was work on his car and listen to loud music.

“Hey, Harriet,” said Pemberton. He was probably lonesome, Harriet thought, there all by himself in the Pro Shop. He wore a torn T-shirt, madras plaid shorts, and golf shoes with no socks; the remains of a hamburger and french fries, on one of the Country Club’s monogrammed dishes, were near his elbow on the counter. “Come over here and help me pick out a car stereo.”

“I don’t know anything about car stereos. I want to leave this check with you.”