Dale Loves Sophie to Death by Robb Forman Dew Page A

the living room with a glass of wine and glanced out at them through her windows. All the preparations were made, and she had no reason at all to be uneasy, but the wine was comforting even so.
    She went outside to meet them so that she could lead the way around the house to the narrow space of yard between the vegetable and flower gardens. They all sat under the oak tree and around the table, over which Dinah had simply spread an unhemmed length of brilliant green dotted swiss. Down the center of the table she had aligned six little clay pots of begonias interspersed with short, fat candles set out in miniature versions of the same clay pots. It was all very pretty, and she knew at once that it had been a mistake. Even this simple decoration said plainly that this was a party, and the inherent demand in that idea made everyone stiffen a bit. But when she brought out a huge jug of California wine and passed around plastic cups, an ease fell over the group.
    “This is nice, Dinah,” Buddy said. “It all looks so pretty.” He poured wine for everybody from the heavy bottle.
    “Well, I was just in the mood to do something special,” she said. “Thank you.”
    They began to enjoy themselves, all of them together, because it was so usual to be this way. This gathering seemed perpetual; sometimes Dinah thought it might be a way of capturing a bit of immortality at its most elusive—the imprint on time made by this particular selection of people.
    When she began to arrange the charcoal in the grill, Lawrence came over to help, and he put his arm around her waist in a companionable hug, so she leaned against him as one does with a friend. These hugs and casual touches of hands between herself and Lawrence were new since any previous summer, and she was glad they had overcome their long uneasiness with each other and could relax again. When they were sitting under the tree once more, Dinah found herself looking at Lawrence and Pam as they sat there across from her. Lawrence was still attractive, but they were of an age, and he had altered in the same ways she had: his cheekbones more prominent, small creases at his mouth and eyes. When she looked at Pam sitting beside him, so much younger than the rest of them, she felt aged all at once. She evaluated her thoughts to see if it was jealousy she was feeling, because for years she had been slightly possessive of Lawrence.
    For a long time it had been Lawrence, not Isobel Brooks, his younger sister, who had been Dinah’s closest childhood friend, even though she and Isobel were the same age and Lawrence two years older. But so much of their childhood Dinah and Lawrence had spent together in exclusion of Isobel and Alan Brooks, the oldest of the four of them. One afternoon she and Lawrence had been sitting in her bedroom playing checkers while she held her cat on her lap as she pondered the game. Lawrence knew all the strategies and often tricked her into a position where she could be triple-jumped. He almost always won.
    “I wish I were Thompkins,” Lawrence said, all of a sudden.
    Dinah had looked down at Thompkins’s notched ears and battered head in surprise, until suddenly she was paralyzed with a shock of understanding as she observed how comfortably Thompkins was nestled in the space made by the triangle of her legs as she sat cross-legged on the floor over the checkerboard. That was all he had said then, but they had played together less and less after that, and for a while she had resented and been intrigued at the same time, that he had brought such a thing out into the open between them. She had lain awake long nights thinking about it.
    All at once, about age thirteen, Dinah had become pretty after being ordinary for such a long time, and she began to gravitate to the company of Isobel, who had always been, and continued to be, lovely to look at. From that point on, and even now, Isobel was her closest friend, but since Isobel and Buddy had been divorced she had