The Most by Jessica Anthony

Author:Jessica Anthony [ANTHONY, JESSICA]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Published: 2024-07-30T00:00:00+00:00

6.

They had been living at Acropolis Place for over six months. For over six months, Kathleen had been listening to the sound of the Bluebird pulling into the carport. It was the little things, she knew by now, the small repetitions, that made a life. This morning Kathleen slowly drifted from one end of the pool to the other. She rested her back against the coping and lit a cigarette that she did not plan to smoke as she listened to her family walk up the stairs in silence, to Virgil opening the door to 14B. She heard her husband calling her name, and when Nathaniel first stepped out onto the balcony, she looked up at her eldest son — his long limbs, his brown hair and angular shoulders — and thought what she so often thought when she saw him: What is past is past.

Nicholas, cartoonishly shorter than Nathaniel, though only one year behind him, grabbed on to the balcony railing next to his brother.

“Mother’s in the pool!” he cried.

You could not go back. Kathleen had talked herself through it so many times, and was still unable to say for certain what happened. She didn’t see Billy Blasko in college — but she had seen him once after college, in the fall of ’48, just three months after she married Virgil Beckett and moved to Pawtucket.

Mrs. Beckett had held entire conversations in her mind, with judge and jury, about what she had done, the right and wrong of it, and had always, every time, concluded that Nathaniel was no one’s business but her own. Her decision to say yes to Virgil had meant saying no to tennis, and at the time, Kathleen thought she would have been a good tennis player; she was not entirely confident that she could have been great.

She had believed Randy Roman at first, the tennis scout who said he could make her famous, that scrawny, oddly complacent man from Brooklyn who told Kathleen several times during her senior year of college that she had Wimbledon “in her pocket,” who said he’d be her manager, travel the country with her — and if she did well here, Australia — right up to the moment he slid his hand around her bottom and squeezed. Kathleen turned down Randy Roman not because she loved Virgil Beckett more than tennis but because she hated losing. Margaret Osborne duPont was the greatest female player in the world, she also lived in Wilmington, and Kathleen started wondering how many tennis champions one city could contain. As soon as Mr. Roman’s hand swept itself across her ass, she suddenly could not trust that she would ever actually beat the record of Margaret Osborne duPont. Marrying Virgil, she thought, was the safer bet. Maybe she couldn’t win, but she wouldn’t lose.

It wasn’t long before Kathleen worried she’d made a mistake. Virgil had taken the first job he found. Kathleen knew he was lazy, but he didn’t even try.

The job was what Walter Lovelace would have called “a low-class operation” with some obscure insurance company in, of all places, Pawtucket, Rhode Island.

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