“Just a beer,” Hank says. “One.”
“You don’t want to go in that direction,” Hollis says. “Considering your background and all.”
It is the worst possible thing Hollis could say to Hank and he knows it—the threat that he might take after his father. March can’t quite believe she has actually heard right.
“He had one beer,” March says. “I bought it for him. That doesn’t mean he’s an alcoholic.”
“Maybe I’ll stick to Coke.” Hank grabs a can from the counter. “It’s probably not a bad idea.”
“We’d better head out too,” Hollis tells March after Hank has left.
He says it easily, but he doesn’t mean it that way. Nothing is easy with Hollis. March looks at him closely. The evidence is in his eyes. That’s where the anger is.
“You could spend the night,” Susie says to March. She’s not fooled by Hollis’s pleasant manner, and she never will be.
Hollis laughs. “Aren’t you girls a little too old for pajama parties?”
March hugs Susie. “Thanks,” she says. “Another time.”
“You can come back whenever you want to,” Susie tells her, low so that Hollis has to strain to hear. “You know that.”
By the time March gets to the front door, Hollis is waiting with her coat and scarf. There’s confetti in the air and slow music playing, but Hollis pays no attention. He holds open the door for March, then lets it slam once they’re out of the house.
“Don’t ever do that to me again,” he says as they start down the snowy walkway leading to the sidewalk. They can still hear voices from the party drifting out of Susie’s place. Hollis is so furious that the air around him pops. “You should have been there when I got home, but you weren’t, and that’s the problem.”
He grabs her by the arm, to make his point, to make certain she’s listening and to reel her in, closer.
“I don’t like an empty house,” he says, in a voice so mean it’s barely recognizable.
March hears Susie’s front door slam as another guest leaves the party. Some man has stepped out onto Susie’s porch and March is mortified to think of the tableau which greets this stranger: an angry man, a woman who looks frightened, snow falling, ice on the herringboned brick path.
“What are you looking at?” Hollis is facing the stranger, whom March now recognizes as someone who works at the paper with Susie. The sports editor, she thinks. Bert something-or-other. Whoever he is, he was about to take his gloves from his overcoat pocket—he’s already got his car keys in his hand—but he stopped when he saw Hollis holding on to March.
“Hey, buddy,” he says to Hollis, his voice soft, as though he were talking to some maniac. “Come on. Ease up. It’s New Year’s Eve.”
March blinks back her tears. That’s how they look to him: A couple on the edge. A woman who’s about to be hurt somehow. And maybe he’s right. When it comes down to it, who is she anyway? The woman she thinks she is or the woman she appears to be?
“What did you call me?” Hollis says. He lets go of March and takes a step toward Susie’s front door. He used to talk this way to Alan and his friends when they followed him home, those boys who tossed rocks and curses just above his head. Buddy is just another way to say he’s nothing, and he doesn’t have to listen to that. Not anymore.
March is breathing frigid night air, but she’s burning up inside. What she wants is for Susie’s guest to go back to the party—then she and Hollis can walk away from this without any permanent damage. She wants that so badly she can taste it, but the taste is bitter, a cold soup made of stones.
The door behind the stranger opens again, and light floods the walkway. Two women, leaving Susie’s party, are laughing, but the laughter falls onto the ice and onto the sidewalk, where it cracks open into silence.
“Honey?”. one of the women calls when she sees Hollis and the stranger facing off. It’s the sports editor’s wife or his girlfriend, March realizes this from the measure of concern in her voice. “Honey?” The woman blinks several times, as if what she is seeing right in front of her eyes couldn’t possibly be so.
“Let’s go,” March says. Now she’s the one to grab Hollis, but he jerks away. When he turns to her, she would swear he doesn’t know her.
“Are you telling me what to do?” Hollis asks.
Susie’s three guests are watching in silence; all anyone can hear is snow falling.