Chapter 20

The girls were still giggling in the den and had started playing some music on the PC in there, rather loudly. Denise and I sat at the table recovering from the intensity of the past few minutes, when unexpectedly the doorbell rang. Denise's face displayed a fascinating progression of wordless emotion: surprise, puzzlement, recollection, alarm.

She stood up and hiked up her pants and rebuttoned them and closed the fly, and then peeked out a window that gave her a view of her porch, and she said, "Oh crap! I forgot that I told Mr Uribe, like two weeks ago, that if he got lonely over the long weekend to feel free to stop by and visit. I'd told him you'd be visiting."

I recalled that Mr Uribe was their neighbor from across the street -- an older man of about 60, of Mexican descent, whom I'd met at David's funeral the year before and had immediately gotten along with well.

Denise continued, "his son and daughter-in-law and grandkids moved to the East Coast in August -- some new teaching position for his son. So he's alone for the Thanksgiving weekend, for the first time in years."

"Well, let him in," I insisted. "It's not like we're in flagrante delicto." I grinned at the funny face she made at this comment. "Don't keep him waiting," I insisted.

Denise gave me a wry smile and meaninglessly messed with her hair for a moment, as if forgetting that its current cornrows configuration meant she didn't have to worry much about the grave dangers of poofy, frizzy hair.

Then she opened the door and Mr Uribe and I were reintroduced. She had him come in and sit on the couch, and offered him a drink. Then she fled into the kitchen to fetch him a beer. Apologizing to the man and excusing myself for a second, I followed her in, since her nervousness was rather obvious. I could tell she was in turmoil, and was probably torn between a desire to be a gracious host and her desire to continue with our private games.

In hurriedly whispered tones, I said to her, "we can take a little break, you know." And added, "but we should probably warn Lissa -- I doubt the girls heard the doorbell with that music they're playing." I had managed to recognize Lady Sovereign's sassy rapping, among who knows what else, but they'd turned the volume up pretty high, it seemed to me, though the sound quality of the computer's small speakers was tinny and poor.

Denise put her hand to her mouth, in alarm, and then, pausing to compose herself, strode back into the living room to give Mr Uribe his beer. She was more composed, now, I saw as I followed her back out and sat down across from him.

Rather than sit down, Denise turned with a feigned look of slight annoyance, and went to the half-closed door of the den, and leaned in. "Hey, girls, can you turn that down?" But then Denise made the mistake of adding, rhetorically, "What're you two doing in there, anyway?"

Her daughter apparently took this second question a little too literally, and answered, quite audibly as the music abruptly cut off, "Me an' Marie found this cool website for playing truth or dare."

Truth or dare. I'd forgotten about that.

I suspected this was something Lissa and Denise had scripted quite some time ago, before the revelation of Finn's identity, as it matched the tasks as I'd originally structured them at the beginning of the long weekend. I imagined that the last half hour or so had been occupied with Lissa getting her friend to sign on to the project at some level -- though I doubted she would have told Marie the whole story.

Mr Uribe's eyebrows shot up quizzically as he overheard this, and I grinned at him lamely, and suspected that Denise was desperately trying to convey to the girls -- using some hieroglyphic hand signals I could easily visualize -- the fact that there was a visitor in the living room. Certainly, it suddenly became very quiet in the den, and then there was some whispering as she went completely out of sight into the room and pushed the door mostly shut behind her. We did overhear one of the girls, I couldn't tell which, utter a kind of loud but sincere-sounding "oops!"

I tried to distract Mr Uribe with some small talk, asking about his son's new job and refamiliarizing myself with his family's particulars. After a short while, with Denise still ensconced in the den, he said, "hey, please, just call me Frank -- no need to stay so formal. I keep reminding Melissa and Mrs Nguyen, but they seem to forget occasionally."

"Well, you can call me Jason, of course. And I'm sure my sister prefers Denise to Mrs Nguyen."

Things relaxed some more, and he told me how he had spent Thanksgiving Thursday volunteering with a meals-on-wheels food delivery program -- he worked in a social services program of some kind, I recalled -- then he told me how he had managed to waste the last two days trying to clean his basement. We were laughing at the tendency of this sort of task to become infinite, when Denise finally reappeared, looking calm and collected, and took a seat on the couch opposite Frank and joined the conversation.

I won't go into the details of the conversation, but it was pleasant and unforced, and I could tell that Frank and Denise had some substantial preexisting comfort with each other, as neighbors who trusted and liked one another.

After another ten minutes or so, the girls poked their heads from the den, looking slightly embarrassed and giggly, and said a quick hi to Frank. Then Lissa said to her mom, as clearly part of something prenegotiated, "Marie and I are going to start now, OK?" Marie was looking vaguely nervous but seemed in the thrall of her more confident friend.

Denise just said, "sure, darling." With that, the girls pulled back from the open door and quietly shut it completely.

She shrugged at the two us facing her, and commented, as if making an apologies, "you know how teenage girls can be -- they're fixated on playing this game, so rather than argue about it I just put some limits and said go ahead."

Frank smiled understandingly, "yes, I vaguely recall having a teenaged daughter -- I definitely understand."

"Oh, yes, I forget you have a daughter too. How is she?" asked Denise.

Frank looked troubled for minute, and explained that as far as he knew, she was fine. "We don't stay in touch very well," he explained, sadly. She had joined the Navy straight out of high school, and that had been 8 years ago. She had apparently decided it was the career she wanted, but even when on leave, she didn't come home to visit. It was a moment of sadness.

To change the subject, I think, Frank mused, "I haven't played truth or dare since I was a teenager myself," and sighed. He might as well have exclaimed, melodramatically, "ah, lost youth!" And he certainly played to the themes on Denise and my minds.

Denise and I exchanged a silly grin when he wasn't looking, and almost in unison we both said something to the effect of "me neither."

We broke into laughter at this and then there was a comfortable silence. Almost as if on cue, the door of den reopened and Lissa and Marie both trouped out, and positioned themselves standing in front of Denise.

"What's the joke?" asked Lissa, self-consciously, seeing all of us recovering from our moment of laughter.

The two girls then sat side-by-side on the remaining chair, a non-reclining piece that matched the couch and was catty-corner to it. Their thin, fourteen-year-old frames fit easily. The looked back and forth at each other, as if waiting for the other to speak.

"What's up, girls?" I asked, finally.

Lissa said to Marie, softly, as if just to her (but easily overheard), "well, it was your idea."

I sensed there was possibly something pre-programmed here, but I couldn't tell if Denise was in on it too, or even if Marie was, for that matter. Whatever it was, I sensed where things might be headed, and I doubted it had REALLY been Marie's idea, whatever it was. It seemed to me most likely that Lissa was playing the situation herself, with her recently revealed impeccable instinct for kinkifying situations. But somehow she'd gotten her friend to think it HAD been her idea, and so it was she who finally took a deep breath began to speak, in a barely-audible stream-of-consciousness that had Denise, Frank and I leaning forward to make sure to hear all her words.