LITMIR.BIZ

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smiled, blushing a bit. “For two wild and crazy semesters, I went a little off the deep end and thought about becoming an accountant,” he told her.

      She nodded, but refrained from comment.

      “There, uh...” he added little sheepishly. “There was a girl involved.”

      Rosemary smiled inwardly. His announcement gave her the perfect opportunity to give as good as she was getting. “A girl?” she repeated, punctuating the question with what she hoped was a look of stunned disbelief. “You were actually involved with a girl? Don’t tell me—let me guess. She was an exchange student who couldn’t speak a word of English, from some unreachable little village in the Upper Volta where the average age of the local bachelors was seventy-two.”

      Willis eyed her venomously. “Oh, listen to you. You wouldn’t know the Upper Volta from Butternut, Wisconsin.”

      Rosemary eyed him back, just as malignantly. “Oh, wouldn’t I?”

      Before the argument could escalate, Janet March cut in again. “And here you dropped out of the community college and beauty school, Rosemary.” She punctuated her disappointment with a cluck of regret.

      Rosemary bit her lip and dropped her gaze to the floor. More like she’d flunked out of the community college, she recalled. But she’d never tell her mother that, let alone Willis. And beauty school just hadn’t been her thing—there had been too much chemistry involved. Besides, she loved her job as a travel agent. What was the big deal about college anyway?

      When she looked up again, Willis was smirking at her. Actually smirking. That pizza-faced little...

      Okay, so he was just a twerp now, she amended. His smirk told her that he knew exactly what was going through her head with her little self-evaluation of her failures. It also told her that he agreed more with her mother’s less-than-satisfactory assessment of her.

      Rosemary swallowed with some difficulty, reminded herself that she was a thirty-year-old woman with a good job and a full life, and that nobody, not her mother, not even Willis Random, was going to make her feel the way she’d always felt about herself when she was a teenager.

      Self-esteem was an insidious thing, very difficult to hold on to. It had taken Rosemary years to build hers up once she’d graduated from high school, and she wasn’t going to let Willis, with his five degrees and his own state-of-the-art engineering feat, tear her down again. She just wasn’t.

      “I have a good job, Mom,” she reminded her mother in as level a voice as she could manage.

      “You could have been a computer programmer,” her mother reminded her back, “if you’d stayed enrolled at the community college.”

      Willis barked out a laugh at that. “You?” he asked Rosemary incredulously. “You were studying computer programming? You’re joking, right? You couldn’t possibly fathom anything as mentally challenging as that.”

      Mrs.- March sighed again, this time with even more disappointment. “Yes, I suppose her father and I should have realized when Rosemary started that it wasn’t really the thing for her. But she seemed so intent on it at the time. It was almost as if she were trying to prove something. I just didn’t have the heart to try to talk her out of it.”

      Something cold and wet landed hard in the pit of Rosemary’s stomach, but she turned to face Willis fully. “Yeah, me,” she said. “I studied computer programming for a whole semester. Then I realized that you were right about me, Willis. I wasn’t cut out for college. And I certainly wasn’t cut out for science. So I found a job I like just fine. And I’m good at it, too, okay?”

      He was silent for a moment, and she wished more than anything in the world that she could understand what that intense expression on his face meant. “So what do you do for a living these days?” he finally asked her.

      She almost believed he cared. Almost. “I’m a travel agent,” she replied, telling herself there was no reason for her to feel so defensive.

      He nodded. “Then I guess you finally get to visit all those places you used to talk about visiting, hmm?”

      Her mother waved her hand airily and smiled. “Oh, Rosemary never goes anywhere, do you, darling? She has a terrible fear of flying, not to mention claustrophobia, and she suffers from violent motion sickness.”

      Willis threw Rosemary another odd look at that, but she couldn’t for the life of her figure out what it meant. Instead she cursed him for coming back to Endicott, and wondered at her mother’s assertion that he would be a guest in her house.

      “Why are you here?” she asked again.

      “I told you, dear,” her mother interjected. “He’s studying the comet.”

      Rosemary turned to face her mother. “No, I mean, what’s he doing here—in my house?”

      Janet March smiled that unsettling smile again. “He’s going to be staying here at the house with you dunng Bob’s visit.”

      Rosemary’s eyebrows shot up at that. “I beg your pardon?”

      Her mother opened her mouth to reply, but Willis raised a hand to stop her. “Allow me, Mrs. March.”

      He looked down at Rosemary, silently for a moment, as if he were trying to figure out just how to say what he had to say so that an imbecile would understand it. She felt her back go up. Fast.

      “Your house is situated perfectly for me to view Bobrzynyckolonycki,” he said. “The trajectory—” He stopped, as if he feared any word with more than two syllables might be too big a challenge for her.

      “I know what a trajectory is,” she told him crisply.

      He seemed genuinely surprised. “Do you?”

      She nodded, but suddenly felt less certain. “I think.”

      “Well, let me just put it this way,” he began again. “Your house is situated perfectly for me to observe both the comet’s approach and its departure.”

      “Why my house?”

      “It’s well outside the city limits and up here on a hill all by itself. There are no lights from downtown Endicott to interfere with my viewing of the night sky. And the chemical reaction from traffic and industry is minimal—thus they won’t interfere with atmospheric conditions. And it’s quiet and secluded, which will be enormously helpful while I’m collecting and analyzing my data. Best of all, your attic windows are almost perfectly aligned with the comet’s path—all we’ll have to do is take out the slats. And with your attic being the massive size that it is, I can set up my telescope with little difficulty.”

      “You see?” her mother concluded with a smile, taking each of Rosemary’s hands affectionately in her own. “This is the perfect place for Willis to perform his work. So he’ll be staying here in the house with you for the duration of his study.”

      Rosemary looked first at Willis, then at her mother, then back at Willis. “The hell he will,” she said.

      Her mother frowned at her. “Rosemary, don’t you dare swear in my presence.”

      She felt immediately and properly chastened, and blushed deeply. “I’m sorry, Mom.” However, she quickly recovered enough to add, “But he can’t stay here.”

      “Of course he can.”

      “No, he can’t.”

      “Why not?”

      “Because I don’t want him to.”

      Janet March’s smile returned, and it grated on Rosemary even more than usual. “Darling, that’s perfectly understandable,” her mother cooed, “given the history the two of you share.” She dropped one of her daughter’s hands and curled her fingers around Willis’s solid arm to include him in the discussion. “But you’re both adults now, and I know you’re above all that adolescent bickering you used to

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