Long Tale Press

I Bookends

September 17, 1999

He never liked weddings. And this one in particular made his hands itch. The bride wore white, as was expected, with her chocolate caramel colored hair swept up and pinned back against a simple lace veil. She was a pretty girl, no need for embellishments. The groom enjoyed himself, made some sort of witty, side comment when he turned for the rings. The best man, Jonathan Taylor, reached into his pocket, dragged out the gold bands and missed the commentary completely. But he smiled and nodded his head as if he’d heard it. The groom turned back, grin plastered across his face. Rings were exchanged. A few more ceremonial words thrown in by the animated Wesleyan minister and then it was all over.

Jonathan spent most of the reception in the parking lot by himself, smoking under the far reaching eaves of the hotel’s side entrance. The hum of air conditioners and heaters competed above him. From room to room the hum differed, the temperature hovering between too hot and too cool, depending on your age and level of physical activity. The constant drip of lukewarm water from slate skies confused the equation. Jonathan held his suit jacket beneath his arm.

The weather suited his mood. Rain had been falling steadily for the past week and showed no signs of letting up. Autumn in New England had turned wild, wet and windy late in September. The apple red, pumpkin orange and squash yellow leaves spent more time off the trees than on this year, stripped off early by violent thunderstorms. Now it just drizzled day after day, as if the faucet in the sky had a leak and the plumber couldn’t come until next Tuesday. Just as well, he thought.

He paced across the concrete sidewalk in front of the stairs leading up to the hotel’s side entrance occasionally. He leaned against the brick face of the old building mostly, in between decorative ivy and racist, but no less artistic graffiti. He watched heavy, grey clouds move across the sky with a vacant expression on his stereotypically handsome face.

“You’re Jonathan Taylor, aren’t you?” A woman, tall, poised and young, materialized beside him wearing a mauve silk dress, plain black sweater and patent leather black heels. Her face was flushed from the crowd inside and dancing. She had comely features, delicate and similar to the bride, must be a cousin.

“Yes, that’s right,” he answered, cigarette between his teeth, holding the half-filled carton out and silently offering her a cigarette as he did. She took one, pulled a lighter from her clutch handbag. Mauve colored handbag, mauve colored lighter, mauve colored lipstick.

“Thanks,” she replied.

“Anytime.” He didn’t ask how she knew his name because he didn’t care. Besides, she had already committed herself to this conversation and she’d continue no matter what he said. This is the way these things work.

“I’ve read your book a dozen times!” she blurted out then immediately apologized for being too enthusiastic. He waved it off good-naturedly, didn’t care if she’d read the book, didn’t care if she’d liked it. She assured him she did. “You really are an inspiration to the younger generation, Mr. Taylor. When my cousin mentioned she was working for an English professor at Whitehall a couple years ago, I never dreamed it was you. I wonder why she didn’t mention it?”

He exhaled upwards. The rain pushed the smoke right back towards the ground. “I think she might have been more impressed with a colleague of mine, a psychology professor.” He sighed, tipped his head towards the inside of the building and the hotel reception room, where the bride and groom currently whispered at the head table and Lady Marmalade played on the dance floor. The girl in the mauve colored dress smiled knowingly.

“I’m Amy, by the way.” She held out her hand. He took it with a curious smile on his face. She probably misread it as amusement or perhaps an invitation. She continued, “The ceremony was beautiful, wasn’t it?”

He laughed, a tired, absurd, bittersweet laugh. He couldn’t help himself. The woman in front of him didn’t understand the joke, tipped her head slightly and regarded him critically. He held up his hands in a concessionary way, still conscious enough of conversational rules to realize he needed to explain himself.

“Sorry, I just don’t see this marriage lasting,” he said bluntly, never one for tact.

“That’s not really appropriate talk for a wedding.” She blinked, shocked. He read her thoughts by the expression on her face. Did the groom know his best man felt this way? More importantly, did her cousin, the bride?

Jonathan half-smiled at her, again a tired, absurd, bittersweet half-smile. This cocktail of emotions suited him best lately. His social life was suffering because of it. He didn’t care much about this either.

“You’ll have to forgive me.” He wiped the smile from his face and dropped the end of his cigarette onto the pavement between his feet. He grabbed another before closing the box and slipping it into the pocket of the jacket under his arm. He struck a match, and muttered, with his unlit cigarette held between his teeth again, “This is the anniversary of my wife’s death.”

“Oh, I’m sorry! How long ago?”

“A year to the day.”

“How awful!”

“Yeah, well...what can you do?”

“I’m so sorry, I had no idea.”

“How would you?...”

Awkward silence settled between them. He was a man inclined to thinking deeply and at inappropriate times. The woman grasped for conventional wisdom.

“She’s in a better place.”

“Maybe.”

“It will get easier in time...”

“I’m sure.”

She had nothing more. No one near or dear to her had ever died. She was too young, too lucky and too…mauve. The color took on a depressing hue. He would be happy with grays and beige for the rest of his life.

“How old was she?” The woman, Amy, spoke cautiously now, in a quiet voice he could choose to ignore if he liked.

“Not old enough,” he answered predictably, shortly. She nodded and wondered if she should go back inside. She wondered if she needed to say more, or say nothing at all. She had no idea how to untangle herself from this disaster of a conversation. All because you thought he’d find you instantly charming and obviously irresistible…stupid, Amy. So stupid. Should’ve danced with one of the college boys. She bit her lip in consternation. Introspectively, he rolled his cigarette between his thumb and first finger and paid her no notice at all.

“I hope I haven’t—” He stopped her before she could finish.

“No harm,” he answered with a smile, less cynical this time, approaching real warmth.

“I am sorry.”

“You’ve said that.”

“I know, I just…,” Amy paused. Yes, she should have gone back inside. She dropped the cigarette in her hand and ground its burning end into the pavement with the heel of her shoe. “I’ll leave you to your thoughts.”

Amy lifted her mauve-colored hem as she climbed the steps back into the lobby. Jonathan didn’t watch her go.

I’ll leave you to your thoughts.

So she said and so she did. And this is how it went.

II Rum and Coca Cola

“La mer—qu’on voit danser…” The little French girl, Adèle, is on a carousel, on a white horse with a burgundy bridle, singing. She has a pale, North Sea complexion, pleasing features, bright pink cheeks, black and scarlet striped costume dress. Her waist length hair falls in brown curls down her back, held back from her face by loose ribbons. She laughs frivolously and often. Charlotte Brontë’s china doll creature.

“I’m in a terrible mood,” says Jonathan, leaning on a lamppost. He’s across the street, waiting for the Greyhound, which passes by at ten o’clock every morning of every Thursday of every week. The runny-nosed commuter in the second seat sets his watch by it. “And it’s all because of that goddamn girl.”

“Oh be quiet, Jonathan,” Eliza answers curtly, because she’s otherwise occupied. Rolls the dice and moves to St. Charles Place, lately renovated and in need of a final paint job. If you can’t say something nice…

The bus comes, but it’s late and he decides that he doesn’t want to get on anyway. He’s older now and oh, so much wiser. He walks to a restaurant just outside of Portland. A small, art nouveau diner with plain, blue curtains. The floor creaks under heavy footsteps. He takes his coffee black. Eliza orders a salad without the house dressing, a brandy infused catastrophe. She dislikes sliced tomatoes and takes them out, places them on the side of Jonathan’s plate. They wait an hour for the bill.

“This is ridiculous,” he mutters.

“I’ve never met anyone as impatient as you,” she answers.

“Liar…”

“Le long des golfes clairs…”

“Waiter!” Jonathan looks up, annoyed. “Shut her up, please.”

“Of course, Herr Kaiser,” the waiter answers. He’s a tall Italian man with dark eyes and thick lashes. He bows, holding tightly to a bottle of dry, white Cabernet.

“No, that doesn’t make any sense at all.” Eliza throws her dinner napkin on the table and leaves. She sits down on the stone steps of the funeral home in New York, where they arranged calling hours for the old man who lives on Bay Street. It’s Tuesday morning, the street is still. Adèle is beside her, drawing pictures of six-pointed stars and vector spaces. “If you aren’t rational, I won’t take part in this.”

“Eliza, dear, you don’t have a choice.” Jonathan closes the front door behind him, softly. She rises and goes down the front walkway, stepping between the flowers, wilting lilies and yellow-eyed daisies, framing its sides. At the end of the sidewalk, she thinks better of it, turns around and confronts him directly.

“And whose fault is that? I never asked to be here.” She wets her lips, waits for him to explain himself. But it’s too early for that sort of thing. He takes her arm as they walk into the office Christmas party, steers her clear of Bill O’Hara, at her request, and Eddie Gardner, at his discretion. He leaves her by a platter of brie and pear-shaped crackers while he mingles. The hilt of a cheese knife is balanced on the edge of the platter. He laughs loudly at simple jokes with ironic punch lines. She spends the night nervously fiddling with the silver bracelet on her left wrist.

Do you want a drink? Jonathan doesn’t ask her this, though Bill O’Hara does, twice. He’s a short man, takes care with his appearance, has an eager manner and a self-deprecating style of speaking, laced with compliments.

“He wants to sleep with you.” Jonathan’s mood is not improving. He pulls up to the curb in her grandfather’s Cadillac, charcoal leather interior, with all the bells and whistles. She should have sold it years ago. Now it sits in the garage, under a tarp, collecting dust and taking up space.

“I know,” she replies shortly. She’s angry that he would assume she wouldn’t recognize these things. Nevertheless, she opens the envelope in her hand calmly, reads its contents impassively, and adds, only as an afterthought, “I’m not a child.”

“A des reflects d’argent la mer.” Adèle is a child, seven or eight, with thick waves of dark hair and dark eyes, the color of molasses. She wears dresses fashionable in the nineteenth century and clean white pinafores. Jonathan presses the horn of the Cadillac firmly, to drown out her voice. The sound echoes off the bluffs and down the shoreline, near where Eliza stands at the edge of the water, pleasantly consumed by salty breezes. Jonathan looks past her at the little girl. If anyone should be able to control her, for God’s sake, shouldn’t it be him? She isn’t real and he knows it.

And yet…

“Des reflects changeants, sous la pluie.” The little French girl, undisciplined and ill-mannered, sticks her tongue out, mocking him. Jonathan drives off in a fury; Eliza sighs and follows him.

“You can’t change the rules halfway in and expect anyone to follow them.” They walk the length of Hamilton Hall and Eliza puts a record on. It switches randomly between “The Kalendar Prince” and “Evenflow.” But she can’t stand the sound of Eddie Vedder’s voice anymore. Besides, after spending almost four thousand hours at the piano in her grandfather’s downstairs dining room, she can’t help but be partial to Rimsky-Korsakov.

“Don’t be pretentious, Eliza.” Jonathan doesn’t look up from the papers he’s grading.

“I’m not trying to be!” She hates Wednesdays. She would be happier if she could sleep straight through to Thursday.

“La mer—au ciel d’été confound…” As a young man, Jonathan ignores his family’s advice and quits Cambridge after three years. But that’s not surprising. He ignores them when they tell him to go to Berkley too. None of it matters…he’s brilliant and becomes a full professor in little more than a decade. If reading literature for a living is brilliance, Eliza teases more than once.

The sun’s out and she opens the drapes in her grandfather’s bedroom, pushing the thick folds of heavy cloth to either side. The dull, filmy midday light filters through a haze and then crawls through Venetian blinds, laying in stripes across the hand-stitched quilts and the pale, weathered skin of her grandfather’s old, German hands. The air in the room is stale, almost as damp as it is outside. The telephone rings.

“Why would you come here?” Jonathan lays down the ace of spades, because he has it and because it’s his favorite.

She doesn’t answer, occupied with cutting up vegetables, onions and carrots, potatoes and radishes. She gathers them all together in two hands and drops them into boiling water. Her hands are covered in droplets and the warm coating of steam against her skin fits like wet kidskin gloves.

“This is suppression, sweetheart.” He’s trying to antagonize her, or make her cry. Either way, she dislikes him then, more than she ever has in her entire life. She won’t satisfy his curiosity, not like this. She hangs a black dress in the back corner of her closet. She digs out a belladonna shrub in the garden and her mother tells her how high is too high after smoking with two post-modern Belgians for a long weekend. Deadly nightshade…

I didn’t mean to make you angry. He writes letters often, at his kitchen table or at the three drawer desk in his office. A habit he picked up at Cambridge, when he first fell in love with Bridget MacNamara and he realized that the meager stipend they gave him barely covered food and lodging, let alone everyday overseas phone calls.

“You’re out-dated, Jonathan.” Eliza casts left-handed and doesn’t care to catch a fish. Jonathan slices a peach into five sections and eats it.

“Ses blancs moutons…” Adèle’s on the porch of Jonathan’s house, on the steps near the swing with the white and yellow Manx cat asleep beside her, lying on the hem of her dress. She plays solitaire with a deck of 48.

“Did you ever read ‘Catcher in the Rye’?”

“Of course…”

“Well did you ever read ‘Alexander and the Catwings’?” Eliza reaches into the cupboard above the sink. Her grandfather needs a glass of water. He asked for something stronger, but she won’t give it to him. She has no taste for hard liquor and doesn’t keep it in the house. Her grandfather curses her under his breath and not for the first time. He knew every American curse word at the age of seven. He hurled them at the neighborhood boys, the New York natives, as they tormented his babushka-wearing mother with imitations of her Bavarian pronunciations.

“No, I don’t think so.” Jonathan’s in her library, flipping through pages of Grimm’s Fairy Tales and mutters, “I’ve never read these either.”

“Avec les anges si purs, la mer…”

“Oh, for the love of God!” He slams the book shut dramatically and it starts raining, in heavy droves, washing window panes, racing down rain gutters. He stands under the eaves of a tea house in Wales. Eliza stands in a light summer sundress, shivering, beside him.

“I don’t know this place,” she says with conviction. “I shouldn’t be here.”

“Of course you should…I told you about it.” He takes her hand and pulls her inside. They sit at a table by the window. The air is thick with cheap cigarette smoke and delicate laughter. Jonathan watches her face expectantly, waiting for an expression of disapproval. She notices the watercolor paintings, light blue and green pastels, river scenes, rowboats and floating wood docks/ducks, imitations of Monet, but she says nothing about them. The radio is playing, Annette Hanshaw, circa 1929. Heavy brass and jazz. No one can fill that vacant chair, home isn’t home when you’re not there.

“Do you want a drink, sir?”

“Bergère d’azur infinite.” The little French girl’s in the seat beside Jonathan. Eliza opens a box of crayons and hands her two shades of green and a paper placemat. She draws pictures on the back of the placemat, of flowers and trees and sunshine, a man wearing a top hat and a wrist watch.

“No but really, Eliza, how do I get her to stop?” He looks at Eliza, catches her eye from across the room. Eliza tips her head, wonders why he even bothers to look for her in this crowd. He’s a social man, easily distracted, won’t talk to her for the rest of the night.

“She’s finished now anyway, that’s all she knows. Two verses, no more.” Eliza stares out the window, twin blue and white striped umbrellas attracting her eye, hail the size of dimes falling around them.

“Well, good.” He would have liked it better if the little French girl would be gone altogether, but he’s not surprised by her presence, just not resigned to it. He orders a coke, spikes it with white rum from the flask in his breast coat pocket. The radio switches songs, Andrews sisters now. Bawdy lyrics flow from the little French girl’s mouth, heavily accented. She doesn’t look up from where she draws on the placemat. Both crayons are held in one hand.

If you ever go down Trinidad It make you feel so very glad Calypso sing and make up rhyme Guarantee you one real good fine time.

Jonathan leaves when she starts the chorus, but this time Eliza doesn’t follow him. She wanders along the boardwalk until she reaches the metal gate and then further, the parking lot. Abandoned now, the Ferris wheel won’t run until Memorial Day. There, she sits on the curb and watches boys practice tricks on skateboards down rows of empty parking places. Their voices carry in the expanse and the sky burns citrus flavored at dusk.

My sister has an imaginary friend. Who, Sharlene? No, the little one—Heather. I never had imaginary friends. Me neither. I had imaginary enemies but I killed them.

Eliza hides a smile. Jonathan doesn’t stay away for long and brings her back a music box from Vienna. Oval shaped and polished, with an attractive deep chestnut colored stain and English primrose hand-painted on either side, with delicate lines.

“That’s thoughtful.” She’s sincere when she calls her mother, but masks distaste with polite words and subjects that avoid saying much about anything. The weather, taxes, Christmas. “But I can’t accept it.”

“Of course you can.” Jonathan straightens his tie, as he walks down the stairs, and finds a sparrow in his downstairs living room, perched on the lower shelf of an open cabinet filled with ceramic figurines and wax candlesticks. It flies in through a window and he chases it out through the front door. Eliza holds the door open and closes it as soon as he gets back inside. He has a broom in one hand and a fish net in the other.

“But honestly, Jonathan, I can’t accept this.” She presses the Austrian music box back into his hands and brushes spider webs away as she walks down to the lake. The air is warm and smells of dirt, moss and flowering black locust. Sweet William lines the roadside, beside violets and white trillium, leeks in patches among them. Two phoebes call out from somewhere behind her. A pheasant rustles in the bushes.

In the dream, she’s constantly trying to find him. But Jonathan leaves too early, and Eliza makes up her mind too late.

III Ash Wednesday

On Ash Wednesday, Jonathan buys a dozen yellow roses from a flower shop on a side street with a conventional Irish name…O’what’s-his-name lived there once upon a time. On the way out, he recognizes a girl from his class on Romanticism, but waves off her eager greetings with a hurried excuse. He pauses under the eaves and opens his umbrella, as the clouds thicken and the sky darkens.

Eliza’s counting cards but doesn’t care to win.

“That’s contradictory.” Crab grass and dandelions grow up between small, smooth pebbles. Adèle, the little French girl, is on a swing with rusted chains with a vanilla ice cream cone clutched tightly in her left fist.

“Not really,” Eliza answers. Jonathan doesn’t know what her middle name is, but he’s never asked. He assumes it’s Jane or Mary, something sensible. “It’s consistency. I play the same in any circumstance.”

“But it’s ridiculous.”

Eliza has nothing else to say, and Jonathan stands silent on a bridge outside the city, watching murky green water fall down the gorge. She’ll join him later, but he’s restless and can’t stand lingering.

She mows the lawn in the afternoon, while her grandfather listens to the radio upstairs. When she feels ambitious, she’ll go next door and trim her neighbor’s rosebushes. He’s never home and doesn’t care for flowers. Her grandfather’s house, stately, ivy-covered red brick, casts long shadows.

“Jonathan, should I be grateful?” She rises, brushes dirt off her skirt and wanders a row of books in the library, her hand open, her fingers tracing the bindings and raised print of obscure titles.

“Of course, look at everything I’ve done for you.” He waits for her, outside by the hydrangea bushes. She takes the jacket he offers, but only after a moment’s hesitation. She can’t decide between the two invitations. She doesn’t understand weddings anyway. Too much satin, too little lace.

“Please, be serious. I don’t know what’s wrong with me—”

“Nothing’s wrong with you, Eliza.” He lights a cigarette with a match, cups his hands around the flame, takes a long drag and flicks the ashes to the cobblestones. Eliza frowns but won’t be distracted. “Not in the way you think, anyway.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” Eliza moves around her kitchen, rummaging. Her spice rack is missing a jar of chives. She looks through upper cupboards. When she can’t find it, she pulls a tablet from the drawer nearest the doorway, beneath the telephone. There’s a pen on the counter and she writes in a careful, unadorned script.

“Subtle, even confident. But you lack ambition.” Jonathan’s reading over her shoulder without a sense of propriety. She turns to him and he states plainly, “You’re unsure and passive by nature.”

Well, she never expected him to say that. Eliza doesn’t answer for a moment, not necessarily because she’s timid, but because he says it only two weeks after they first meet and she’s caught unaware.

“I’m not unsure.” She leaves the mountains and moves to the city. Jonathan grows up in Maine, near the coast, but it’s Eliza who stands on black rocks, smoothed by sand and salt, fixated by an incoming tide. The rush of water, foam-edged and murky, reaches like grasping fingers.

“Never mind, let’s move on to something else.” Jonathan sighs in his office, leaning back in a straight-backed mahogany chair. The window’s open and a warm breeze rustles the papers on his desk, flips the pages of a paperback copy of Daisy Miller, flutters the corners of the New York Times.

“Don’t be so patronizing.” She reads magazine covers while she waits in line at the grocery store. She wonders whether she should have done something radical when she was younger like stage a protest or join the Peace Corps. Eliza runs her fingers through her hair when she’s angry and only cries when she’s frustrated.

“Let’s catch a movie,” Jonathan says. He’s left his office, is leaning against the doorframe of Mr. Wilharm’s dining room. Eliza’s on her knees by the window, gathering pieces of shattered chinaware. She looks up.

“Give me half an hour?” she asks. Jonathan mumbles something and walks back across the hall. He closes the window and sits down at his desk. Eddie Gardner comes in, smiling, looking for paper clips and Jonathan’s T.A., the pretty one, a brunette with wide-set eyes in a symmetrical face. She’s too pretty, too smart and too cynical for her own good. Jonathan thinks she’s a miserable woman.

Eddie Gardner’s a tall man, mild-mannered, bachelor, older than Jonathan by half a dozen years, teaches psychology, raises chickens and restores old sports cars on the weekends. They’ve been best friends for over a decade.

“If you can’t wait…go without me.” She turns her attention back to the chinaware, the remains of her mother’s Italian vase. Light and delicate, like Paris in the summertime. Mr. Wilharm walks up the banks of the Seine, hat in hand, waving off heat and biting flies.

“No, I won’t go without you,” he states flatly.

“Well, it’s not like you haven’t before,” she replies. His conviction and resolve on this point are newly minted, sharp and bright as a copper penny and just as worthless. Can’t even buy a pack of bubblegum for that anymore.

“Alouetté…” Adèle’s playing hopscotch on a side street.

“I won’t listen to this.” Jonathan buys a house outside the city. It has an eastward facing porch and a gabled roof with asbestos shingles. Two white oak trees are in the front yard, on either side of the porch. Bridget planted rose bushes around the steps, resilient flowers that grow back even after he digs them out.

“Jonathan, I don’t think you have a choice.” Eliza’s waiting just off stage, rubbing her wrist. Recitals make her nervous, and she stops giving them at twelve. Her status seeking father is disappointed, but Eliza doesn’t care. Don’t cast your pearls before swine…

“At least try to be original, Eliza.” He turns on the radio during the latter part of his morning drive, but keeps the volume low. He doesn’t know the song, and someone rings the bell at Eliza’s front door.

“‘Blues in the Night’.” She answers his unasked question and then opens an old box full of old books, once famous titles reduced to vague curiosities, Keys to the Kingdom, Quo Vadis, The House of Seven Gables. She hands them to Jonathan one by one, a small smile playing at the sides of her mouth.

“Why do you like old things?” He asks, not comprehending her, still. She could be beautiful if she didn’t...

“What?” She closes envelopes by running a damp finger over the seal. She worries she’ll slice her tongue on the edge. She shuts off lights in empty classrooms as she walks down the university’s hallways, a habit she picked up from Jonathan.

“It was just a question.” He shrugs, wanders the downstairs of her house, while she hangs his jacket in the front closet.

“No, it wasn’t.” Questions have answers…

In the hall between the room with the piano and the room with glass doors, there’s a vanity wardrobe. It’s old, like the house itself, and stands against the wall in relative solitude. One of the drawers on the left side sticks in humid weather and the mahogany was scratched on the far side by a little boy years and years ago. Missing in action or buried at sea.

But there are three foreign looking music boxes, arranged in a careful pattern, reflected in the mirror. Jonathan reaches toward the one nearest to where he stands but Eliza pushes his hands away.

“I don’t understand how you can just assume I wouldn’t mind.” Her hair is fair-colored, like wheat fields, a golden russet color, brightens in sunlight. She wears her hair in two long braids, or back in a barrette, or down around her shoulders, in natural waves, like spun gold. This is how Jonathan would prefer she wore it all the time. But he’d probably prefer her without clothes on too, so she takes his preference with a grain of salt.

“Do you mind?”

“No.” She sighs and moves to New York. She moves into her grandfather’s house on a Wednesday. Hangs summer dresses on wire hangers, dusts the piano, and finds sheet music in an upstairs closet, under a pile of shoes in the attic and a box of Jewish dreidels.

“You can change your mind, Eliza.” He stresses punctuality in class but doesn’t take attendance. Jayne, the pretty T.A., is always early, brings him black coffee in one of Eddie Gardner’s mugs. He’s impatient with self-important thesis proposals and melodramatic term papers, can’t be bothered to read most of them.

“I know.” She’s a terrible liar, can’t mask the faraway look that overcomes her features and draws her attention elsewhere, at her hands or across the room.

“But you won’t?” He lifts her chin with his thumb and forefinger, forces her to meet his gaze directly. She wishes he wouldn’t stand so near, she wishes she didn’t care that he did. Thunder rolls in the distance, storms approach from the east.

“I won’t.” And trembling, she pulls his hand down from her face.

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