Jolly by John Weston

kitchen. “Just a minute,” she said to Jamie. He stopped a hamburger halfway to his mouth to watch her move toward the kitchen.
    He’d been willing enough to come up to the room after midnight when she got off. He’d looked a little surprised when she asked him, but he’d grinned and said sure, he’d probably be there. Well, she had another surprise for him. She wondered if he’d grin about that news.
    She put on the blue dress. The zipper wouldn’t close. She ought to have known that, after all this time. She pinned the dress closed. She sat before the dresser and combed her blond hair down long over her shoulders and inspected its roots. Then she wiped off the old makeup on a Kleenex, and, carefully bent toward the mirror, she worked on her eyebrows and lashes and her lips. She brushed off the shoulders of the dress with two or three impatient flicks of her hands. Standing back from the mirror she turned sideways to it, and placing her palms flat on her thighs, she tried to view all of her figure at once. She could not see it all here, but she had seen it enough in store windows she passed to know it was still all right. Except for a rounder stomach than before—and wasn’t that to be expected—it was still OK—and bigger up above and that was good.
    She moved the one chair closer to the window and sat gazing down into the dark street that ran by, three floors below, between the apartment building and the gray-stoned Baptist church that sulked across the way. Only now and then a car passed by up the hill away from town.
    “He’ll like you,” she crooned to the sleeping child. “He’s got to.” She wondered what she was going to do when—if—he came. What could she do to make him stay this time? How, she wondered, do you make somebody feel the way you want them to? There wasn’t any way that she knew of. She had tried holding out on them, and she had sure-god tried the other way. But one way didn’t seem any more sure than the other. Maybe it was because she hadn’t felt this way about any of the others. Maybe you both had to feel something at the same time. Not that there had been too many of them. After the baby—and Jamie was the first, no matter what they said about her in school—she had fooled around some with that big Gusperson kid and some of the other high-school boys, and there was that older guy, the bachelor, but he was scared. And then that bastard, Freddy. She hated Freddy, but then a person has to do something. If Jamie would just take her away from Freddy she’d be happy. She’d be satisfied.
    When the knock sounded on the door she almost didn’t hear it. She whirled to face the door and found she couldn’t speak. The knock came again, more prolonged and a little louder.
    “Come in,” she said. She cleared her throat and repeated. “Come in.” As the door opened her hands went to her hair lightly, and then she stood from the chair.
    “Hi,” he said and grinned. He closed the door.
    “Hi, Jamie. Come in. Here, sit down. What’s in the sack? Here, sit here.” She had found her voice again, but now it was running away from her. “I put on my blue dress,” she said.
    Still grinning, he set the sack on the dresser and stepped nearer. “I see. You didn’t have to do that for me. I didn’t think we were going to church or anything.”
    She moved back a step, involuntarily. “Wait a minute, Jamie.” She moved again so that his back was toward the crib. “Is that a bottle? Sit here.” She turned the chair for him. “You want some ice?”
    Jamie laughed. “OK. Have it your way.” He sat on the chair and tilted it back against the side of the bed. He watched her open the icebox and take out a sack of store-bought cubes. “You’re still OK, Mandy,” he said.
    “Sure. I’m just fine.” She kept her back toward him and worked slowly over the ice and glasses.
    “You’re not kidding.”
    “You look different, Jamie. I mean, sort of white. Pale like.” She turned