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dream I was having. But her small dry palm was all too real. “Marina Os’wal, I am please to meet you,
sir.”
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Oswald, I haven’t seen him today.” Not true; I’d seen him go out just after noon,
not long after Ruth Paine’s station wagon swept Marina and June away to Irving.
“I’m worry for him,” she said. “He . . . I don’ know . . . sorry. No mean bother for you.” She smiled
again—the sweetest, saddest smile—and wiped the tear slowly from her face.
“If I see him—”
Now she looked alarmed. “No, no, say nutting. He don’ like me talk to strangers. He come home
supper, maybe for sure.” She walked down the steps and spoke Russian to the baby, who laughed and
held out her chubby arms to her mother. “Goodbye, mister sir. Many thanks. You say nutting?”
“Okay,” I said. “Mum’s the word.” She didn’t get that, but nodded and looked relieved when I put
my finger across my lips.
I closed the door, sweating heavily. Somewhere I could hear not just one butterfly flapping its
wings, but a whole cloud of them.
Maybe it’s nothing.
I watched Marina push June’s stroller down the sidewalk toward the bus stop, where she probably
meant to wait for her hubs-bun . . . who was up to something. That much she knew. It had been all
over her face.
I reached for the doorknob when she was out of sight, and that was when the phone rang. I almost
didn’t answer it, but there were only a few people with my number, and one of them was a woman I
cared about very much.
“Hello?”
“Hello, Mr. Amberson,” a man said. He had a soft Southern accent. I’m not sure if I knew who he
was right away. I can’t remember. I think I did. “Someone here has something to say to you.”
I lived two lives in late 1962 and early 1963, one in Dallas and one in Jodie. They came together at
3:39 on the afternoon of April 10. In my ear, Sadie began screaming.
3
She lived in a single-story prefab ranch on Bee Tree Lane, part of a four-or five-block development of
houses just like it on the west side of Jodie. An aerial photograph of the neighborhood in a 2011
history book might have been captioned MID-CENTURY STARTER HOMES. She arrived there
around three o’clock that afternoon, following an after-school meeting with her student library aides. I
doubt if she noticed the white-over-red Plymouth Fury parked at the curb a little way down the block.
Across the street, four or five houses down, Mrs. Holloway was washing her car (a Renault
Dauphine that the rest of the neighbors eyed with suspicion). Sadie waved to her when she got out of
her VW Bug. Mrs. Holloway waved back. The only owners of foreign (and somehow alien) cars on the
block, they were casually collegial.
Sadie went up the walk to her front door and stood there for a moment, frowning. It was ajar. Had
she left it that way? She went in and closed it behind her. It didn’t catch because the lock had been
forced, but she didn’t notice. By then her whole attention was fixed on the wall over the sofa. There,
written in her own lipstick, were two words in letters three feet high: DIRTY CUNT.
She should have run then, but her dismay and outrage were so great that she had no room for fear.
She knew who had done it, but surely Johnny was gone. The man she had married had little taste for
physical confrontation. Oh, there had been plenty of harsh words and that one slap, but nothing else.
Besides, her underwear was all over the floor.