By the time Johnny and Stacy came in, red-cheeked, all the men had left, except Grandpa, who was picking at a few last crumbs on his plate.
“Everyone’s gone?” Johnny asked, looking around.
No one answered. Mom was at the sink with her back to him, running water, and Emilie stood next to her, scowling, a dish towel in hand.
“I should probably go, too,” Stacy said. “Good night, everyone!”
“Good night,” Mom murmured.
“Good night, Stacy!” I called, and she gave me a little wink.
“Umm...Stacy’s going to need a ride home,” Johnny announced, jiggling his keys. “I’ll be back in a half hour.” I watched the two of them head down the sidewalk together, with both of her arms wrapped around his waist. Johnny opened the passenger door of his truck and escorted her inside with a flourish.
“It doesn’t take half an hour to get to the other side of Watankee and back,” Emilie observed drily.
Mom gave Dad a look—the look.
“I don’t think we were ever like that,” he said, giving her a playful nudge with his foot. His sock, I noticed, was worn thin at the heel.
In the moment before the interior light in the truck was extinguished, I saw that Stacy had scooted across the bench seat, so she was riding with the left side of her body pressed up against Johnny.
“No,” Mom said, refusing to take the bait. “I don’t think we ever were.”
I never learned where Stacy had seen Johnny for the first time. Maybe it was between classes and he was shelving books in his locker, or maybe he was standing in line at the cafeteria, but I liked to believe that she first saw him when he was wrestling, crouched in the stance perfected on all those long summer nights, a number on his back, battling his way through the bracket and coming out, just about always, on top.
seven
After that evening, Johnny’s wrestling nights became rarer and then tapered off for good. There was something a little awkward about being around Johnny and Stacy, something that made everyone else feel like a third wheel. They couldn’t stop touching each other, and they practically sat on top of each other on the couch, even though, as Mom liked to point out, there was plenty of room to spread out. On warm-weather weekends, Johnny’s friends used to congregate in our driveway, their Fords and Chevys idling, finalizing plans for cliff jumping in Manitou Park or riding their bikes down Clay Pit Road to the old quarry. But once Johnny and Stacy were officially dating, the guys Johnny had known his whole life—guys he’d played with since elementary school—basically disappeared.
Stacy’s sixteenth birthday coincided with Labor Day weekend, our last truly free moments of life before school began. Stacy delivered the party invitation herself, her hair swinging in a thick French braid.
“It’ll be small, just family and a few friends,” she said at dinner. She’d become a regular fixture in our lives in a short span of time. “My parents just want to meet everybody, you know, officially.” She grinned at Johnny, and he smiled back at her.
“Well, that sounds very nice,” Mom said with a tight half smile she generally reserved for the women she didn’t like at church, or the times when Grandpa invited himself over and didn’t seem inclined to leave. “Doesn’t that sound nice?” she continued, looking around the table. “Please tell your parents we wouldn’t miss it.”
Later, Emilie made a valiant effort to plead for freedom. “When you said we wouldn’t miss it, you meant you and Dad, right?”
Mom stiffened her jaw. “We’re all going,” she said, throwing her gaze onto me.
I tried to shrug casually, but it was no secret to anyone that Stacy Lemke had become my idol. When I was alone I tried to imitate the way she walked, with just a little slouch to her shoulders. I loved how she parted her straight hair right down the middle and had tried it with my own, wetting my hairbrush under the faucet. Emilie had studied the end result critically. “What happened to your hair? You look like a drowned rat,” she’d pronounced.
As it turned out, the Lemkes lived less than two miles from us, on the south side of Watankee, not far from the juncture at Passaqua Road. I noticed right away that their white house looked neater than ours, as if it were standing up a little straighter in its frame. Half a dozen kids were bouncing on a huge trampoline on the lawn—the sort of thing Dad would never approve of because it killed the grass. Behind their house, tucked between a row of evergreens and a three-car garage, the yard was set up for Stacy’s party. Crepe-paper streamers twisted from surface to surface, and bouquets of helium-filled balloons floated from the backs of folding chairs.
“I thought this was just a small thing,” Mom said as we pulled into the driveway, which was lined with parked cars. Johnny’s truck was already there, behind a shiny burgundy Buick.
Stacy, wearing a white dress with eyelet trim and red sandals, rushed over to greet us, followed by her parents. Mr. and Mrs. Lemke, tall and tanned, might have been siblings. If they were cookies, they would have come out from practically the same cutter. I couldn’t stop staring at Mrs. Lemke; she looked pretty enough to be on television. Her hair was sprayed upward and rode on her head like a reddish-blond helmet. She wore a pink shift dress with platform sandals, and her fingers glittered with rings. Mr. Lemke wore a bright Hawaiian shirt with white pants and navy deck shoes. They were as polished as a pair of Kennedys.
“Looks like they’ve come straight from the country club,” Mom muttered under her breath. But she smiled broadly; a second later she held out a hand to shake with Stacy’s parents.
“Oh, homemade potato salad, Bill!” Mrs. Lemke exclaimed, taking the dish from Mom, followed by a conspiratorial whisper in Mom’s direction, as if she were revealing a state secret, “It’s his favorite, and I just don’t have time to make it from scratch anymore.”
“Oh, I’m so glad,” Mom said. Without the salad bowl to hold, she clasped her hands in front of her stomach awkwardly.
I set our gift—a soft white cardigan with tiny pearl buttons that Mom had picked out and Emilie had judged “too fussy”—on a card table already heaped with presents, and then stood uncomfortably in the middle of a circle of strangers. Emilie spotted a group of teenagers that included Joanie Lemke and wandered over, perfectly at ease. It wasn’t difficult to spot Heather Lemke; even in a sundress, she was just as fearsome as she was on the playground. She was giving a piggyback ride to a little boy about half her size, who wobbled on her back like an oversize doll. I made my way over to the drink table, where my parents stood uneasily, sipping out of plastic cups. I reached for one of the massive plastic ladles but was redirected by Mrs. Lemke.
“Oh, no, Kirsten. Have some punch from this bowl,” she said and laughed, steering me by the shoulders to a bowl floating with lumps of orange sherbet.
Sipping the too-sweet punch, I joined my parents, who were in the middle of a polite set of introductions.
“John’s a farmer and Alicia works at the hospital in Manitowoc,” Mrs. Lemke announced to the group. “Can you believe that? She’s a lot tougher than me, working around blood and guts all day long.”
Dad and Mom grinned and nodded, looking as out of place as I felt. We had dressed
