Rowing in Eden by Elizabeth Evans Page B

“Let’s just not make a big deal of it, okay?”
    â€œWill you look at this?” Peg lifted the missing checkbook from her purse. Gave Franny a look that suggested she believed the girl had just planted it there.
    â€œSo.” Martie leaned her forehead into Deedee Pierce’s broad upper arm. “I don’t suppose anybody bothered to take messages for me while I was gone?”
    â€œThat Ed from Lake Okoboji called,” Peg said. “He’ll call back. And, oh, Roz, I forgot: Mike Zanios called while you and Tim walked down to the mailbox. He wanted to know if you’d like to hear some visiting piano player on Monday night.”
    â€œJeez”—Martie grinned and set her hands on her hips, some imitation of comic exasperation—“why’s Mike never asked any of the rest of us to come listen?” Then, without waiting for an answer, she hurried on, “By the way, Frances Jean, I saw that Prohaski out on the road, hitchhiking. Was he here again?”
    Tim Gleason began to whistle the refrain from an old Sonny James song called “Young Love.” Rosamund slapped his wrist—playfully—and Deedee Pierce laughed. “You don’t know the half of it, Tim,” Deedee said, and launched into a story of how, as a small girl, Franny had sat in front of the Ash Street house and pretended to baby-sit an even smaller girl. “She was trying to make the big guys driving by in their cars fall in love with her, weren’t you, Fran?”
    Franny rolled her eyes, though the story was true. She felt thankful that she could change the subject by announcing, “Someone’s coming up the drive.”
    â€œEduardo?” Martie said with a smile for Deedee Pierce. Deedee smiled back, but when Martie ran for the front hall, it was all that Franny could do to keep from calling, “ Martie , beware!Remember Roger! Remember Steve and Mark and Daryl!”
    â€œEduardo?” Tim Gleason raised an eyebrow as he pronounced the name. He lifted one of Peg’s copper aspic molds—a leaping fish—off its peg on the kitchen wall, and cradled it in his arms. “Eduardo?” he crooned to the fish.
    Rosamund sputtered a laugh at this, but Deedee Pierce growled a low, “Shut up, you two.”
    â€œNow, now,” said Peg, but she grinned at Tim Gleason and Rosamund, and what did that mean? Franny felt right in not laughing—really, she did not see what was funny about Tim and the fish, and she appreciated Deedee Pierce’s defending Martie—yet not laughing made Franny feel somewhat superior, and surely that contaminated whatever was right about not laughing.
    â€œHere’s Eduardo, everybody!” Martie called as she pulled into the kitchen a handsome, fair-haired boy who grinned rather shyly, perhaps because his nose was painted with a slick, white coat of zinc oxide.
    â€œEduardo!” Peg cried, and Rosamund, too, “Hey, Eduardo!”
    Eduardo! Eduardo! As if they’d been missing him! Eduardo was no object of ridicule! Eduardo was their pal! Embarrassed, confused, Franny edged into the back hall. Who was this Eduardo from Lake Okoboji, and would they all hate him tomorrow, and did they even like him today?
    Farther down the hall, Franny peered in at the hamster. Still asleep. “Snoopy,” she whispered. She wished he were awake. But this was not his time to be awake. She listened to the laughing and talking of the others in the kitchen; then, as quietly as possible, she picked up the cage and made her way out through the garage and around the house to the screened porch. There were guests out there, but they ignored her and, after a little grappling with the door, she managed to carry the cage back into the house, and up the stairs to her bedroom, and there she set it on the floor of her closet for concealment and safekeeping.

C HAPTER S IX
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    A NOTHER WEEKEND . A NOTHER PARTY ABOUT