Yet it was Beau who regarded himself as “important” in the community, a figurehead and social pillar. Netta shared that belief. Both Beth and Henry Conner would have deemed silly the suggestion that their family was “important.”
Such, in outline, was the background of Netta Bailey, née Meddes; such therefore was the etiology of her emotion when she carne downstairs while her husband was on the telephone, occupied by nothing more than a marriage-long habit of anxious inquisitiveness and a very slight feeling, not that the phone call was of a serious nature but that her husband had been a little quieter, a little more obsequious than usual. She saw now that Beau was frantically afraid. His swift effort to dissemble went to no purpose: She said, “What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. Nothing whatever.”
“Beau. You can’t fool me.”
“I’m not trying to!”
Netta walked around the bleached mahogany table in the room’s center. Her eyes needled. She was somehow made more ominous, where it would have rendered most women ineffective, by the fact that she had been “experimenting” after supper with creams and lotions: her rusty-musty hair overtopped a towel and dangled from it and her face gleamed greasily.
“Okay,” she said steadily. “Who was it?”
“Netta, for God’s sake! It was a business call.”
“Your business, though. Not the bank’s.”
Beau made a tactical error. “How can you tell?”