Bob leaned back in his chair and considered the standing man with new interest. He looked suddenly younger, folding his arms behind his head with an easy authority, and said, “Yes, kicking the stone! I refute it thus!”
“They relax the brain,” the standing man said again. He seemed to understand, as he said it, that he was disappointing Bob and that he would always do so. He would read Condorcet, he seemed to say, with a vengeance.
Marg returned from the counter with her coffee and sat down without her usual force, carefully, as if not wanting to kick whatever invisible stones were bouncing between them, so real that they could inflict damage. Sylvia saw that and was grateful.
There had been a time, in that three-year period when Sylvia was not talking to Marg, when Marg allowed herself one mean remark. She was standing on Sylvia’s porch on one of those occasions when she’d wanted to talk and Sylvia had refused. Hugh was inside, cleaning up from dinner. Marg said, “You never noticed him until he was wounded.” She had not been referring to the accident. Or not only the accident. Sylvia never forgot it, although it was probably only a throwaway remark, not meant to be turned over and analyzed. But these things cannot be controlled. The remark stood out to Sylvia as vividly as the cool air that fall evening, the sharpness of the stars in the sky as Marg walked to her car, the smell of dirt and the season turning over, the way that the lake at their childhood cabin had turned over every spring. When Marg’s car started, her headlights had lit up the side of Sylvia’s house, the ivy casting shadows on the bricks, and then she’d swung out of the driveway and the beams had caught Sylvia too, and for just a moment, she and Marg were bound together by the brightness before the car made its way down the dark road.
On the evening of the same day that Sylvia had walked in on Marg and Roger, and on the same day that she’d pulled her chair close to Hugh as he sat on the porch reading Agatha Christie, everyone decided after dinner that they wanted to play a game. One of their friends had said, jokingly, Spin the Bottle! and there was a static awkwardness—maybe only Sylvia had noticed it—before they pulled out the board games that lined the top shelves. Many games were familiar from their childhoods—Candyland, Operation!, Clue—and many others from the evenings of board games after the accident. They finally settled on Pictionary. Marg told everyone, sardonically, that it didn’t need to be packaged and boxed; it could be played with paper and pencils and knowledge of the rules. “Syl and I played it as kids all the time,” she said.