The Little Friend

Pemberton Hull was driving home from the Country Club in his baby-blue ’62 open-top Cadillac (the chassis needed realigning, the radiator leaked and it was hell to find parts, he had to send off to some warehouse in Texas and wait two weeks before they arrived but still the car was his darling, his baby, his one true love and every cent he made at the Country Club went either to putting gas in it or to fixing it when it broke down) and when he swept around the corner of George Street his headlights swung over little Allison Dufresnes sitting out on her front steps all by herself.

He pulled over in front of her house. How old was she? Fifteen? Seventeen? Jail bait, probably, but he had an ardent weakness for limp, spaced-out girls with thin arms and their hair falling in their eyes.

“Hey,” he said to her.

She didn’t look startled, only raised her head so dreamily and vaporously that the back of his neck tingled.

“Waiting for somebody?”

“No. Just waiting.”

Caramba, thought Pem.

“I’m going to the drive-in,” he said. “You want to come?”

He was expecting her to say No or I Can’t or Let Me Ask My Mother but instead she brushed the bronze hair out of her eyes with a jingle of her charm bracelet and said (a beat too late; he liked this about her, her lagging, drowsy, dissonance): “Why?”

“Why what?”

She only shrugged. Pem was intrigued. There was an … off-ness to Allison, he didn’t know how else to describe it, she dragged her feet when she walked and her hair was different from the other girls’ and her clothes were slightly wrong (like the flowery dress she had on, something an old lady would wear) yet there was a hazy, floaty air about her clumsiness that drove him crazy. Fragmentary romantic scenarios (car, radio, riverbank) began to present themselves.

“Come on,” he said. “I’ll have you back by ten.”

————

Harriet was lying on her bed eating a slice of pound cake and writing in her notebook when a car revved swankily outside her open window. She looked out just in time to catch a glimpse of her sister, hair in the wind, speeding away with Pemberton in his open-top car.

Kneeling on the window seat, her head stuck out between the yellow organdy curtains, and the yellow taste of pound cake dry in her mouth, Harriet blinked down the street. She was dumbfounded. Allison never went anywhere, except down the block to one of the aunts’ houses or maybe to the grocery store.

Ten minutes passed, then fifteen. Harriet felt a small pinch of jealousy. What on earth could they have to say to each other? Pemberton could not possibly be interested in someone like Allison.

As she stared down at the illumined porch (empty swing, Ferdinand the Bull lying on the top step) she heard a rustle in the azaleas that edged the yard. Then, to her surprise, a shape emerged, and she saw Lasharon Odum creeping quietly onto the lawn.

It did not occur to Harriet that she was sneaking back for the book. Something about the cringing set of Lasharon’s shoulders maddened her. Without thinking, she hurled what was left of the pound cake out the window.

Lasharon cried out. There was an abrupt disturbance in the bushes behind her. Then, a few moments later, a shadow darted clear of Harriet’s lawn and skittered down the middle of the well-lit street, followed at a good distance by a smaller one which stumbled, unable to run so fast.

Harriet, kneeling on the window seat with head out between the curtains, stared for some moments at the sparkling stretch of empty pavement where the little Odums had vanished. But the night was as still as glass. Not a leaf stirred, not a cat cried; the moon shone in a puddle on the sidewalk. Even the tinkly wind chimes on Mrs. Fountain’s porch were silent.

Presently, bored and irritated, she abandoned her post. She became absorbed in her notebook again and had almost forgotten that she was supposed to be waiting up for Allison, and annoyed, when a car door slammed in front.

She slipped back to the window and, stealthily, drew the curtain. Allison, standing in the street by the driver’s side of the blue Cadillac, toyed vaguely with her charm bracelet and said something indistinct.

Pemberton barked with laughter. His hair glowed Cinderella-yellow in the street lamps, so long that when it fell in his face, with just the sharp little tip of his nose poking out, he looked like a girl. “Don’t you believe it, darling,” he said.

Darling? What was that supposed to mean? Harriet let the curtains fall and shoved the notebook under the bed as Allison started around the back of the car towards the house, her bare knees red in the Cadillac’s lurid tail-lights.