The Girl in the Yellow Suit

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We would be sitting around, and there would be a special silence. You could see on every face that look which meant we were all thinking of Miranda, and missing her so badly it was like a big simultaneous toothache. Or heartache.

Dan Cheney was the one who hurt the worst. He’d get up and plod in aimless circles, looking like some overgrown kid who wants to cry and is trying desperately to be a man. Everybody had known it was inevitable Miranda would marry Dan. I don’t know what they quarreled about. Her money, maybe. Dan is a proud guy. He let her go away mad, a year ago, and she went to St. Thomas and came back married to that Fletcher Hopper.

Miranda was intensely alive, in that special and rare way you seldom see. By all the rules of life she should have been a neurotic shambles. An only child, parents divorced and remarried to other people of their same stamp — idle, wealthy, selfish, borderline alcoholics. When they’d feel a little twinge of conscience about a 12-year-old kid off in one of those schools in Switzerland, they’d mail her a nice check. But she grew up to be something.

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