“It better not be that delivery boy back for more,” Frances says now. “I’ll give him a real piece of my mind.”
“I’ll get it.” Gillian goes to the door and swings it open.
Ben Frye is on the porch, wearing a yellow rain slicker; he’s holding a box of white hurricane candles and a lantern. Just seeing him makes a chill go down Gillian’s spine. From the first, she’s been figuring that Ben was taking his life in his hands each time he was with her. With her luck and her history, anything that could go wrong would. She’d been sure she’d bring disaster to whoever loved her, but that was back when she was a woman who killed her boyfriend in an Oldsmobile, now she’s someone else. She leans out the front door and kisses Ben on the mouth. She kisses him in a way that proves that if he was ever thinking of getting out of this, he’d better stop thinking right now.
“Who invited you here?” Gillian says, but she has her arms around him; she’s got that sugary smell anyone who gets too close to her can’t help but notice.
“I was worried about you,” Ben says. “They can call this thing a storm, but it’s really a hurricane.”
Tonight, Ben has left Buddy alone to bring the candles over, even though he knows how anxious thunder makes the rabbit. That’s what happens when Ben wants to see Gillian, he has to go on and do it, no matter what the consequences. Still, he’s so unused to being spontaneous that whenever he does something like this he has a slight ringing in his ears, not that he cares. When Ben returns to his house he’s bound to find a telephone book shredded or the soles chewed off his favorite running shoes, but it’s worth it to be with Gillian.
“Get out while the going’s good,” Gillian tells him. “My aunts are here from Massachusetts.”
“Great,” Ben says, and before Gillian can stop him he’s inside the house. Gillian tugs at the sleeve of his rain slicker, but he’s on his way to greet their guests. The aunts have serious business ahead of them; they’ll flip their lids if Ben careens into the kitchen assuming he’s about to meet two dear old ladies. They’ll rise from their chairs and stomp their feet and turn their cold gray eyes in his direction.
“They arrived this afternoon and they’re exhausted,” Gillian says. “This is not a good idea. They don’t like company. Plus, they’re ancient.”
Ben Frye pays no attention, and why should he? The aunts are Gillian’s family, and that’s all he needs to know. He lopes right into the kitchen, where Antonia and Kylie and Sally stop eating the minute they see him; quickly they turn to see the aunts’ reaction. Ben doesn’t catch on to their anxiety any more than he notices the fiery scent rising from the pot on the stove. He must presume the smell emanates from some special cleaning fluid or detergent, or perhaps some small creature, a baby squirrel or an old toad, has curled up to die underneath the back doorstep.
Ben goes over to the aunts, reaches into the sleeve of his rain slicker, and pulls out a bunch of roses. Aunt Jet accepts them with pleasure. “Lovely,” she says.
Aunt Frances runs a petal between her thumb and forefinger to verify that the roses are real. They are, but that doesn’t mean Frances is so easily impressed.
“Any more tricks?” she says in a voice that can turn a man’s blood to ice.
Ben smiles his beautiful smile, the one that made Gillian weak in the knees from the start and that now reminds the aunts of the boys they once knew. He reaches behind Aunt Frances’s head, and before they know it, he has pulled from thin air a chiffon scarf the color of sapphires, which he proudly presents.
“I couldn’t accept this,” Frances says, but her tone isn’t quite so cool as before, and when no one’s looking, she loops the scarf around her neck. The color is perfect for her; her eyes look like lake water, clear and gray-blue. Ben makes himself comfortable, grabs a piece of pizza, and begins to ask Jet about their trip down from Massachusetts. That’s when Frances signals to Gillian to come close.
“Don’t screw this one up,” she tells her niece.
“I don’t intend to,” Gillian assures her.
Ben stays until eleven. He fixes instant chocolate pudding for dessert, then teaches Kylie and Antonia and Aunt Jet how to build a house of cards and how to make it fall down with a single puff of air.
“You got lucky this time,” Sally tells her sister.
“You think it was luck?” Gillian grins.
“Yeah,” Sally says.
“No way,” Gillian says. “It took years of practice.”