The Armory

The National Guard armory stood at the north end of Ashford's one street, a long brick building with a flag and a gravel lot, and on the third Saturday of May it held an open house with a bounce house, a K-9 demonstration, and a table where a recruiter tried to sign up every sixteen-year-old who walked past. The Ardens went because Faye had decided that Tessa needed to be seen in public and that Roxy would go where Tessa went and that a mother must not be particular about methods.

They were standing by the K-9 truck when a young man in a green uniform came across the gravel toward them with the loose, happy stride of someone who has been told all his life that he is welcome wherever he goes.

"Mrs. Arden. Miss Arden." He had a hand out for Faye and a smile for all five of them at once, and he was, Hollis thought, the best-looking man she had ever seen in her life: dark, compact, clean-shaven, with a mouth that had been smiling before he arrived.

"This is Dexter Cray," Faye said, glowing. "He is with the unit at the armory. He has been in Ashford since March and he told me his mother was a Beekman."

"I did tell her that," said Dex Cray, "and it's true, and she was a better person than I am. Miss Arden." He had turned to Hollis. "I have heard a great deal about you."

"None of it from me."

"All of it from everyone else."

He walked with them to the demonstration. He was easy in a way that was not laziness; he knew how to talk to Roxy so that she stopped sulking, and to Petra, who had come along with a book and was ignoring everyone, and to Tessa, who could not stop staring at him. He told a story about a Humvee and a flooded culvert in such a way that Faye laughed twice. And when K-9 was over he walked back with them to the car and asked if he might call at the house.

He called on Tuesday with a bag of peaches from the market in Poughkeepsie, which was a strange thing to do in May and which everyone forgave, and he sat on the porch with the whole family and told them about himself. He had grown up on the Ashcroft place. His father had been the Ashcroft estate manager for thirty years; the old man, Roman's father, had been godfather to him, had paid for his schooling, had promised him a place in the family office when he was old enough and had put the promise in a letter. Then the old man died. Roman Ashcroft was twenty-eight and had just taken over a company he did not yet understand, and he had read the letter and thrown Dex out.

"Thrown him out," Faye said, rapt.

"He gave me ten thousand dollars and a character reference for a job I did not want," Dex said. "The living was worth sixty thousand a year and a house. He read a letter his father wrote with his own hand and he said the word 'inappropriate' and he wrote me a check. That is the man. Ask anyone at the office. Ask the woman who ran the stables for thirty years; he pensioned her off at a third of what she was owed and she is living with her niece in Troy." Hollis never asked the woman in Troy. In July she would wish she had.

"Why?" said Hollis.

Dex looked at her honestly, with the particular frankness of a man who is telling the truth about the part of the story that costs him nothing. "Because his father loved me. Because I was the son that came in from outside and he never forgave me for it. Because he is cold. He has been cold since he was a boy, and the cold ones learn to make it look like principle."

Hollis believed him. She believed him completely and at once, in the way you believe a story that arranges the world into the shape you have already decided it has. The evidence of her own eyes was a man who had said one stupid sentence at a dance. The evidence of her own feelings was that the sentence still burned three weeks later. And Dex Cray had the great advantage of telling her something she wanted to be true.

"He is coming to the Kesslers' barbecue on Saturday," she said.

"Then I will avoid the Kesslers' barbecue," said Dex, and grinned, and there was no bitterness in it at all, and Faye said he was the most charming young man in the county and Roxy said she would die if he did not come again, and Hollis walked him as far as the mailbox and thought about a man in a dark coat standing by a door, refusing coffee.

That night she wrote to Corinne Nash: I have met the man Ashcroft ruined and he is exactly what I expected.

Corinne wrote back: Of course he is.

Gil, who had been sitting on the porch through the whole visit with the newspaper folded on his knee and who had said almost nothing, came into the kitchen while she was washing the peaches and stood for a minute at the counter.

"You are very sure about Mr. Ashcroft," he said.

"I am."

"On the evidence of one sentence and one young man who told you a story about yourself."

"On the evidence of my own eyes."

"Your eyes are excellent," said Gil. "They are the best eyes in this family and they have been wrong about exactly as many things as everyone else's. Do not take a position so early, Hollis. The world has not finished showing you what it is."

"I am not taking a position. I am making an observation."

"Observation," said Gil, and kissed the top of her head, and went out, and left her standing at the sink with a peach in her hand, absolutely certain.