Vivian hoped Eddie Fischer wouldn’t mention anything about her driver’s license to Edward. She’d lose the upper hand if Edward knew she’d gone to Syracuse, and she couldn’t have that. The upper hand was all she was hanging on to at this point. Holding on to the ends of slippery fingers.

She’d heard Eddie tell the police he wasn’t going to hurt Charlotte, just wanted to talk to her. “She’s my sister, right?” But he didn’t have an excuse for throwing the brick through the window. Vivian saw that brick and she saw the rage. She knew what that looked like. He would go back to Syracuse, maybe to jail. Vivian wasn’t sure if he had broken any laws by coming to Ohio, but she’d be glad when he left and went back to his life in New York. You’ve seen your father now, so that’s finished. Vivian’s insides clenched as a thought tiptoed into her mind. What if it wasn’t finished, though? What if this person was to be part of their lives now?

Edward and Vivian had left the police station in silence, and rode home in silence. They had entered the house in silence, and Vivian had helped Edward tape newspaper over the broken window in silence. Vivian would’ve been aware of the silence if her mind hadn’t been running a steady stream of chatter on its own. Did his son tell him I was in Syracuse? Is he angry with me? Is he angry with his son? What gives him the right to be angry? I’m the one who should be angry!

Charlotte skipped the Valentine’s Day dance and kept herself shut up in her room with an acute case of temporary agoraphobia. She’d played her Eddie Fisher record all night, and then all day Sunday, and would have played it all that next week, except the smaller story, on the second page of The Daily Record, after the story about Gilbert Ogden, told her that Edward “Eddie” Fischer was the name of the man who’d been arrested for destruction of property at the Dalton residence, and for assaulting Charlotte Dalton. Charlotte knew that she’d never again hear the name Eddie Fisher (no matter how it was spelled) without thinking of that attack.

It was all over school the following week. Eddie Fischer attacked Charlotte, and threw a brick through the window in their house. Some of the more gullible students believed it had been the crooner Eddie Fisher, and they wondered how Charlotte had even met him. She must have been some kind of girl to make Eddie Fisher crazy enough to throw a brick through her window. Sue, in particular, found that to be the absolute limits of hysterical. Not better than The Myth of Syphilis, but a close second. She went out of her way to encourage those rumors.

“Char,” she had said over chipped beef in the cafeteria, “if Eddie Fisher was throwing a brick through your window, you’d invite him in, at least, wouldn’t you?”