Mr and Mrs Bo Jo Jones by Ann Head

Author:Ann Head [Turow, Scott]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-10-04T00:00:00+00:00

I got out a jar of marmalade. “You didn’t think I’d do anything like that without a reason, did you? I’m not that immature.”

“Nooo,” Mary Ann said, “but then I didn’t think you would do the other. I mean, it scares me. It actually scares me ... you of all people ... you always seemed so clever and sure of yourself ...”

“So all right, I’m a loose and wanton person, but please let’s skip the sermon.” I don’t know why I was so hurt. I hadn’t expected her to be anything but shocked.

“You don’t understand,” her voice sounded as though it had tears in it, “it’s not you I’m thinking about. But me. Alan and me. It scares me about us....”

“It shouldn’t,” I said crossly, “this could never happen to you and Alan. You’re, you’re different.”

“That’s what scares me,” Mary Ann said. “I wish I could think you were just all those things you said and be shocked and feel superior and let it go at that. Instead my whole entire point of view is knocked for a loop, and I don’t know what to think. I mean Alan and I have been in love, or thought we were, for almost two years, and it has never occurred to either of us not to wait until ... It makes me wonder if ... if ...well, if he is really as crazy in love as he says, and... and ... what I would do if he ever really wanted me to bad enough-” She wheeled up from the table and went into the living room. “You do have a record player, don’t you? How about some glad noise for a change?”

“The records,” I said, “are under the bookcase.”

I knew she’d put on a Belafonte, one of the gay, soft ones, and she did. I felt simply terrible. Alan was the only secure thing that had ever happened to Mary Ann. All she’d had until he came along was a steady turnover of mothers and stepmothers and half brothers and sisters and noisy divorces.

I thought about this as I cleaned up the kitchen. When I went into the living room she was sitting on the sofa looking down onto Hatty Barnes’ terrace.

“She’s having tea,” Mary Ann said, ‘‘with Preacher Dobbs. I hear he’s courting her. She’ll never marry him, but I wonder why she never has married...”

It was an easy out. A good topic of conversation. I could go over and look out the window too and talk about Hatty Barnes until it was time for Mary Ann to go home. It would save me a lot of humiliation and maybe once she got home and thought it over she’d see it all differently. But then again she might not.

I said, “Look, don’t get the wrong impression. I mean this thing with Bo Jo and me, this thing between us ... whatever it was that happened it ... it ... wasn’t because we or maybe he, was so much in love we, he, couldn’t help it.

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