Charming Billy by Alice McDermott

back and Dennis and Mary, now standing at the edge of the water, talked and talked.
    When did he fall in love with her? Probably it was the day before, before she had even come clearly into his view. But that afternoon he fell in love with the rest of his life, and that was better still. The days ahead when he would come to the beach here and the child he held, the children who ran to them, wet and trembling, would be theirs and when the flesh
of her arms and her throat and her sweet breasts would be as familiar to him as his own.
    It was there, that life, that future. It had been there all along. He simply hadn’t known it until now, or had the capacity to imagine just a month ago that something like this might be his. That this golden future, this Eden, had been part of the same life he’d been living all along. Wasn’t that something? He hadn’t known until now that it was there.
    They met again the next afternoon and the next. Dennis and Billy began to quit work a bit earlier each day, and at times it was nearly dusk before they left their boots on the steps by the front door.
    The Mr. and Mrs.—or so the girls called their employers—were in Washington for the week, and so it was easy enough for them to tell the driver not to come until six or so, then seven. The children were glad to be out late and to have their supper at the shore, with the candy Billy brought them for dessert.
    At night the boys still made their slow circuit of the stately homes, but now with a keener interest and intent, to discover the house the girls lived in. Although they tried gentle questioning for the first few afternoons (“You’re not in one of those places on the beach, are you?”), it was only by direct inquiry that they learned which house it was exactly and then were rewarded that same night with the sight of Eva, glimpsed through the only opening in the high hedge that until now had made the house uninteresting, crossing the front path, barefoot, and going up the steps to the porch.
    Late in August, a Tuesday night, they met the girls at the house itself. It was nine o’clock. The Mr. and Mrs. had said the girls could go out, but only after the children were asleep, and the girls told them to come around to the back and knock at the kitchen door.
    At deep blue twilight they passed through the village and
down the now-familiar streets. They were newly showered and shaved and they wore the white shirts they had washed out in the morning and left to dry in the sun all day long and then ironed themselves, with an ancient, secondhand Proctor-Silex, on a towel under a pillowcase spread out on the kitchen table. They turned in, as they had been instructed, past the tall hedge, and the crackle of their slow wheels on the gravel drive was enough to set their nerves drumming, the way the fanfare did in the moment before a curtain was raised on a stage.
    They parked, and now locusts and the hush of the ocean filled the air along with the odor of honeysuckle and salt water. There was a line of windows across the back of the house and each of these was warmly lit, and on the nearest side a simple set of steps led from the driveway to a darkened door.
    These they climbed, whispering, “Is it here?” and peering in before they knocked to a small square hallway lit by a rectangle of curtain-filtered light from the room beyond. There were the familiar shovels and pails, the swim tubes and the hamper. They heard Mary’s voice, and then the inside door was pulled open and there she was in a pale dress, opening the door to let them in.
    “We’ll need another minute,” she said. “There’s a mutiny in progress.”
    The room they followed her into was huge—easily as large as the apartment where Dennis had been raised. A kitchen with a table as big as a bus and an icebox that could have housed a short family. The room was softly lit now and quiet, but it was possible to imagine the chaos there must have been just an hour or two before. You