The Grange

The Grange hall on Route 9 smelled of floor wax and coffee and, by nine o'clock, of a hundred people packed into a room built for eighty. There was a long table of covered dishes, a card table of raffle tickets, and at the end of the room a small stage where the Ashford volunteer fire department's band would play badly and loudly for an hour and a half. Ashford turned out for these things. Ashford turned out for everything. Hollis had known since she was eight years old that there was no escape from a town where everyone knows what your father paid for the place and how long your mother has been unhappy about it.

They came in at half past eight: Julian Reyes first, with a handshake for the fire chief and an easy, unhurried way of saying hello to strangers that made him seem like he had been in Ashford for years instead of four days. Behind him his sister, Camille Reyes, tall and beautifully dressed, who looked at the covered dishes as though one of them might bite. Behind her a pair named Laurel and Trevor Voss, who had the air of people who had come because they had been told to. And behind them, last, a man who did not shake hands with anyone.

Roman Ashcroft.

Somebody said the name and the name went around the room the way a coin goes down a drain. He was thirty-two or so, taller than Reyes, dressed in a dark coat he had not taken off, and he stood near the door with his hands in his pockets looking at the crowd with an expression Hollis could only read as: I am standing in this room, and I would like everyone to know that I am aware of the fact.

"Is he a friend of Reyes's?" Hollis asked Corinne Nash, who had come with her brother and who had the best information in town after Faye.

"College. Roman Ashcroft's family has a place up in the Berkshires. The Ashcroft Group. His father died four years ago and left him everything, and he has been insufferable about it ever since, according to my cousin who works at the bank in Poughkeepsie."

Hollis watched him refuse a cup of coffee. "He looks like a man who has never been told no."

"So do most men," said Corinne.

The band started. Julian Reyes danced with everybody: with the fire chief's wife, with Tessa, who was nineteen and would talk about it for a month, with Sylvie twice, and with Sylvie a third time because he forgot he already had. He was the kind of handsome that made people forgive him for being rich. By ten o'clock Faye had told four separate women that her eldest girl had a steady suitor and that the others would do well enough in time.

Roman Ashcroft did not dance. He stood at the edge of the floor with Camille Reyes and said something that made her laugh, and then he looked across the room, and Hollis, who had been watching him watch the room, found herself being watched back and looked away first.

It was near the end of the night, by the long table, that she heard him.

She had come to get her casserole dish. Julian Reyes was standing with his sister and Roman Ashcroft by the coffee urn, and Reyes was saying, "She is very pretty, and her sister is very agreeable. Come, Ashcroft. You must dance. You have danced with women ten times her inferior tonight and I will not have you insult my evening by standing there like a fire hydrant."

"You are wanted," Camille said. "And I am sure she will not mind. Everyone here is so very obliging."

Roman Ashcroft said, "She is tolerable, I suppose. But not handsome enough to tempt me. I am in no humour tonight to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men. Go back to your partner, Reyes, and enjoy her smiles. You are wasting your time with me."

Hollis stood on the other side of the long table with her casserole dish in both hands and felt the words land on her like a slap delivered by a stranger who has already forgotten your face. Then something strange happened: she wanted to laugh. Her face burned, and her hands were full of Pyrex, and the thing she wanted most in the world was to laugh, because the sentence was so perfectly, completely ridiculous that it deserved an audience. She carried the dish to the kitchen, and she did not laugh, and when she came back out Camille Reyes was smiling at her across the room with the sweet, dead-eyed satisfaction of a woman who has said a cruel thing precisely so that someone will hear it.

She found Sylvie by the door.

"I have been insulted," she said.

"By whom?"

"By Mr. Ashcroft. He says I am tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt him, and I am obliged to report that I am now a woman who has been publicly declined by a man she has never spoken to. It is the most interesting thing that has happened to me since the tank gauge."

Sylvie, who was kind, tried to be angry and failed. "He is dreadful."

"He is magnificent," said Hollis. "He is a gift. I am going to tell people for years."

And she did. She told the story at breakfast, and again at the farmers market, and twice more in the following week, and each time she told it she made it funnier and made the insult smaller, and each time she finished it she felt the same small, hard, pleasurable click in her chest: the sound of a door being shut and locked on a man she had decided, on the evidence of one sentence, to dislike for the rest of her life.