LITMIR.BIZ

      I was married two days after my nineteenth birthday, at the end of my freshman year of college. During that year I had fallen in love with a senior, who now was graduating and joining the Air Force. I was frightened that being apart might mean the end of our relationship, so when he proposed, I said yes.

      It was an unwise marriage and lasted only nine years.

      I wrote this story one year after our wedding, at a time when I still was telling myself I was happy.

      When writing it, I drew upon fragments of past experiences: my gentle romance with a sweet, shy boy in high school; a story my mother had told me about her first fiancé who was killed in a train wreck; an experience one of my friends had had when she and her high school boyfriend attended different colleges.

      That was all this story was supposed to be.

      When I read it now, however, I find something in it that I do not think I meant to put there. Was it possible that already I was starting to question, without allowing myself to realize it, the rightness of that step I had taken so hastily? If I had waited until I was wiser, more experienced, more mature, might I have chosen differently?

      Was this handsome young man, with whom I was starting to discover I had little in common, truly The One who was written for me in the stars?

Return

      The curtains were crisp and ruffled at the windows. Outside it was still not quite dark, still just on the edge of twilight when fireflies were beginning to twinkle in the hedge by the walk.

      Inside, the kitchen was warm and bright, and the biscuits were baked a little too long, and the woman was smiling across the table while the little boy was feeding a chicken wing to the cat.

      Bill looked at them and thought, Well, I’m here.

      He thought it in an odd, detached way, as though he were not really there at all.

      Last night on the train he had buried his face in the hard Pullman pillow and thought, Just seventeen more hours! Just seventeen more hours and I’ll be home! He had seen himself crossing the yard, opening the front door, going into the hall; he had smelled the cedar wood chest and heard the tick of the hall clock. Then he had gone through the living room into the kitchen, and they had all been there—the woman and the little boy and a serious man with graying hair—and they had hugged each other and laughed and eaten supper together in the kitchen with the twilight outside.

      Last night he had been terribly excited.

      Now he was here, and he was not excited at all.

      “What’s the matter, dear?” asked his mother anxiously. “Are the biscuits too brown for you?”

      “No,” Bill said quickly. “Of course not. They’re just the way I like them.”

      “You’re not eating very much, dear.”

      “Yes, I am,” Bill said. “You just haven’t been noticing.”

      He helped himself to another biscuit and buttered it industriously.

      “Do they feed you biscuits in the army, Billy?” the little boy asked with interest.

      “Sure, Jerry, but not like these.”

      “I remembered how you always liked biscuits,” said his mother, “so the first thing I thought when we got your telegram was how we could have biscuits for supper when you got home. Remember how you and your father used to eat two whole plates of biscuits at one meal?”

      “Yes,” said Bill, and then he said, “It seems odd without Dad.”

      “Yes,” said his mother. “It does.”

      The light went out of her eyes, but she still smiled, a determined smile.

      “I—I didn’t get your letter about the accident until six weeks after it happened,” Bill went on awkwardly. “We were behind enemy lines and weren’t getting any mail. I wrote as soon as I heard.”

      “Yes, dear. I’m sure you did.”

      “I guess maybe I didn’t sound like I wanted to. I don’t write very good letters.”

      “It was all right, Bill,” his mother said. “I understood.”

      Bill nodded gratefully, but he knew she had not understood, because he had not fully understood himself. There had been a stack of letters at one time, ten from his mother and sixteen from Mary. He had read Mary’s first—Dearest Bill—chitchat about college, the last football game, Arden and Mike going steady—I miss you so much. All my love, Mary. He had read slowly and pictured her as she wrote, her face flushed and pretty, her pen racing along the page as she spilled out her thoughts helter-skelter before they had time to get away. When he had finished, he started his mother’s letters—accounts of the Garden Club, Jerry’s toothache, a new paint job on the car—and finally, the accident.

      The letter about the accident had been heart-breaking and brief.

      Bill had read it carefully and laid it aside. He had thought, My father is dead, but he had not felt any great sorrow, only numbed disbelief.

      That night he had dreamed about rows and rows of men, all dead, but none of them was like his father. They were young men with drawn yellow faces; and suddenly they weren’t dead at all, but twisting and turning and screaming in horrible fits of agony. The dream was so real that he awoke with a scream ringing in his ears.

      He had lain very still in his blankets and thought, My father is dead. But he could not believe it was true. Death was something close and horrible and frantic, something his gentle, easygoing father could know nothing about.

      He had groped for his flashlight and, when he had found it, he had read Mary’s letters again. I miss you so much. All my love, Mary.

      When he had gone to sleep that time, he had not dreamed again.

      Bill jumped as the cat wound itself around his leg.

      “New cat, isn’t it?” he asked.

      His mother said, “A female cat came along, and Tuffy went away with her. This is Pepper.”

      Jerry leaned forward in his seat, a small, pale boy with glasses.

      “Billy,” he said eagerly,

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