On Sundays students and faculty ate breakfast and lunch on their own, giving Angelina a chance to use her kitchen. She baked scones and fixed French-press coffee.
She hadn’t spoken with Everett, and wouldn’t, now. Trevor was right. Why she hadn’t seen it without him baffled her. With Alec Olsen who had been Kaya’s lover until a few months ago, and who was so essential to the poetry classes, just waiting to take her back? Not to mention Kaya actually threatening to leave Angelina over her “affair of the heart.”
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And Everett? Angelina never suspected his wife had left him because of her, his lesbian girlfriend from high school.
Deh-de, Deh-de, Deh-de, tapping both feet down the stairs, Kaya said, “Scones?” and kissed Angelina’s neck.
“Might as well start without him,” Kaya said in the sunny main room. “The Chinese girl, Ya-Ya, has moved in.”
Thank goodness Trevor had roped in his love-life. When Ya-Ya was working in the boutique, he still saw Jazmine, Lauren, and Crescent, but no others. Since half of North Carolina had elected Trevor their messiah, think how easily he might lead masses of people into hysteria.
“Speaking of that,” Angelina stretched her leg, “what’s Everett doing about Polly?”
Two weeks ago Everett had told Kaya that Polly’s sister had reported her missing. And Angelina believed she was hiding nearby.
Trevor knocked on the door, his not quite dready braids damp from the shower. “Blessings, Mommies.” He kissed them and took his seat between them. Turning aside, Kaya bit her lip. She was far from over Trevor—if anything she fixated on him more all the time—but had begged that he treat her just like Angelina.
He stretched one arm over the couch, behind Angelina, and accepted a full coffee mug from Kaya. “Wh’appen with Polly?”
“Who knows if you don’t, Trevor? Isn’t Everett depending on you for a solution?” It amused the women that the police department’s trickiest citizen had saved the chief’s marriage.
“I-and-I no problem. It’s Polly or kill me dead.”
Angelina said, “Margaret’s afraid it will end in catastrophe.”
Margaret, Polly’s older sister, had been Angelina’s roommate at Duke. So it was no secret that Polly wasn’t right. She couldn’t settle into college or keep a job.
Ten years after Margaret became a nurse and married a neurologist, Polly had slashed her parents’ upholstery. This terrified them so much that Margaret took her sister in.
If she and her husband had wanted children, they would not have risked having her in the house. And Polly would have gone to a half-way place. But until assessments were made, Polly stayed with them, apparently recovering right away. Margaret bought her a sewing machine and Polly constructed whimsical women’s dresses, which fetched high prices.
Reclusive Polly lived in that spare room for twelve years without incident. True, she had a habit of cutting herself but not severely.
Two years ago, when Kaya decided she loved Alec Olsen, and the heart-broken Angelina visited Margaret, Polly forgot her shyness. The skinny sister was now a scrawny, middle-aged woman but she giggled, seeing Angelina. And followed her everywhere, reciting Denise Levertov and other women poets from the original Black Mountain College. When Angelina went home, Polly called her and wrote letters.
Soon at Angelina’s Black Mountain lodge, Polly was doing the laundry and shyly registering guests on vacation. Her dresses sold as well here as they had in Raleigh. They weren’t lovers, but Angelina didn’t mind Polly’s company. Putting aside the times when Polly fumed in a solitary cabin. “But hurting nobody.”
“She’s raging now, though,” Trevor said, firing up some ganja. “An unless somebody talks her down, she gonna cut people.”
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