Crossroads (12 page)

“I know the neighborhood, and it is good. Unless you’re someone who wants more. So what are you going to do about that?”

“Funny you should ask,” he said, but then he stopped himself.

Because now he really was going too far into private matters with a total stranger. “What about you?” he asked. “Where do you live?”

“In a dump of an apartment over a deli. But don’t change the subject. What are you going to do?”

He couldn’t, shouldn’t tell her. But then she smiled again. “I’m kind of at a crossroads,” he said. She leaned in closer; she understood about being in that place, he could tell. “There’s a business I’ve been thinking about getting into.”

“Could you make a lot of money doing it?”

“Yes.”

“Would you be rich as the Wrights?”

“Easily. But there’s risk involved. Nothing I can’t handle but still, it’s there . . . and it’s going to mean dealing with some tough players.”

“Can’t you be tough too?”

“Yes.” And in spite of himself, he added, “But I’m not sure I like that in myself.”

“Get over that,” she said. Her pretty face was so earnest that he couldn’t take offense at the abruptness of the command. “I mean it,” she told him. “Because you won’t be happy unless you try.”

“How do you know that?”

“Because I know about wanting.”

Across the lawn a woman was beckoning to her. She stood up. “My ride is waiting for me,” she said. She held out her hand. “I expect to see your picture in the paper when you make your first million.” She shook his hand and walked away. It wasn’t until after she was out of sight that he realized that they hadn’t exchanged names.

*                           *                           *         

As Jewel stood with Patsy waiting for the parking attendant to bring the car to them she thought about the nameless man in the navy blue jacket.
I’m kind of at a crossroads,
he’d said.
That’s the
exact word for where I am—a crossroads. But I don’t have a business
waiting for me that could make me as rich as the Wrights.

“Who was that man you were talking with?” Patsy asked.

“Nobody,” Jewel said, then she added, “I think he could be someone. A really big someone. If he doesn’t think too much and get in his own way.”

“Sounds like you got to know him pretty well in one little chat at a party.”

“Not really. I don’t even know his name.”

*                           *                           *         

The party was over. From her bedroom window, Gwen looked out at the back lawn where Stanley Girard’s lanterns were still twinkling. She’d checked the newspaper before coming upstairs to bed and read that the movie house in Tyler was playing a Czech film. She hoped Stanley wouldn’t feel that they needed to wait until there was a French or Italian one playing before they went to see it together.

Chapter Fifteen

U
ncounted millions of written pages in every possible language have described the discovery of mutual love. What was it, Stan was often to ask himself, that had led him to Gwen and led her to him?

She was not really very beautiful; he’d decided that early on—and had also known that it didn’t matter to him. She was too quiet, and as he’d told her—and where had he gotten the nerve?—she was the kind of person who is often called “quaint.” She was not easy to know—at least, at first. Yet there was something about her that led him to walk into a florist shop, the day after her grand party, and buy her a little bush filled with miniature pink roses.

He took it home to his apartment—he had recently moved to a new building in the center of Wrightstown—and put it on his kitchen table. The rosebush, he now realized, answered a question that had been worrying him. He and Gwen had agreed to go to a movie together, and he had been wondering if he should call her up and ask her in a formal way to go on a date with him, or if he should show up at her home on some pretext—perhaps he would say he wanted to make sure the lanterns were still working—and casually mention the movie as an afterthought. But if he were to bring her a present, there was nothing casual about that. He looked at the little plant he’d chosen so carefully; four delicate roses had already bloomed and two more were starting to open their pink petals. The truth was, the feelings he had about Gwen weren’t casual. He had never been this serious about a girl, and there had been enough of them for him to recognize the difference. So, it was no accident that he had bought the little rosebush for Gwen. Deep down, he’d wanted it to keep him honest.

“That movie house I told you about is playing a Czech film,”he said to Gwen on the phone.

“I know,” she blurted out. Then she added, stammering slightly, “I . . . just happened to see . . . the advertisement. . . .”

Obviously, she hadn’t meant to tell him she’d been so eager to go with him that she had checked the newspaper. She wasn’t sure she wanted him to know how she felt. She probably didn’t know herself. Well, hadn’t he been sifting through the same sort of thoughts and questions?

“I’d like to take you to see it tomorrow night,” he said. “And then would you let me take you out for a late supper afterward?” Because now he wanted to be as clear as possible.
I am
asking you out on a date, Gwen Wright. In the old-fashioned term,
I’m courting you. Do you understand?

She agreed to the movie and the late supper.

*                           *                           *         

“Roses need sun,” Stanley said the next evening when he presented himself at the imposing white house with the hill behind it. Gwen had opened the door on the second ring of the bell. She must have been waiting for him, because he was pretty sure that there were servants in this mansion who usually did that kind of thing. But Gwen hadn’t played the usual game and let him cool his heels in the foyer until she made her entrance. Possibly she didn’t know that was how the game was played.

“You can plant this bush outdoors or keep it near a sunny window in your room,” he went on, and to his amazement, he realized he was embarrassed by the words “your room.” He almost laughed. Because wasn’t it funny in these times, in this fast-moving century, to know that he still had a faintly puritan streak buried somewhere inside him? As he handed her the rosebush, he had a vague vision of her room, adorned with ruffles, all in pink. He had never had such a vision with any other girl!

“I’ll put it on the windowsill across from my bed,” she told him. “It will be the first thing I see when I wake up in the morning.”

She didn’t seem even slightly embarrassed to be mentioning such intimate things to him. She really was different from other girls. Or was she just so very young for her age?

*                           *                           *                           

Tyler, the town where the movie house was, was a perfect place to take a girl for a night out. Once, it had been just another of the hundreds of small New England towns that were dying because the industries that had sustained them had relocated overseas, leaving the citizens with the choice of starving or moving. But the people of Tyler were fighters. Their little community had been prosperous in its heyday, and therefore it had a remarkable number of lovely public buildings and gracious private homes built on an exceptionally pretty stretch of the river. Tyler’s citizens had chosen to trade on these assets and become a tourist attraction. The old homes were refurbished as charming bed-and-breakfasts, the nineteenth-century opera house, the town hall, and the library were all brought up to code and listed with the National Registry for Historic Landmarks, and a newly built river walk became a magnet for dozens of delightful little shops and food stalls.

So it was that after the movie and a very good supper in a little bistro near the docks, Stan and Gwen, having opted not to have dessert, found themselves strolling by the river, eating ice cream in handmade cones—peppermint ice cream because the girl behind the counter said it was their most popular flavor. In the sky above, the clouds framed clusters of stars, and the river spread silent and silver underneath it. Stan knew he would remember for the rest of his life the sharp sweet taste of peppermint and the faraway expression Gwen wore when she was thinking about something that mattered to her. As she was at that moment.

“I liked that movie,” she said. “Especially the ending—it must have been a big temptation for the screenwriter to just wrap up all the loose ends in a nice big bow, but he didn’t do that.”

“You don’t like happy endings?” he asked.

“Not when I can tell that they’ve just been tacked on to a story to sell tickets,” she said firmly. The firmness was a surprise; most of the time she was tentative when he asked her opinion about something. She was quick to say that she didn’t know about this topic, or that she hadn’t read enough about that one. But now she was very sure of herself. “Sometimes, if it’s light entertainment—and I do think there’s a place for that—it’s all right to work the plot around until you have a happy ending, even if it isn’t totally believable,” she went on eagerly. “But with a movie like the one we saw tonight, where all the characters are so real and the situation is so true, you have to stay honest. Even if your audience feels a little sad at the end. Although I must say I didn’t feel sad—it was more like being uplifted because you knew the characters had done the right thing even though it didn’t make them blissfully happy.”

“Do you always analyze movies like this?” he asked. He loved this new intensity in her.

“Actually, now that I think about it, it’s storytelling in general that interests me,” she said slowly. “Although I never realized it before this minute. I’ve always wondered why one book touches your heart and another one with a similar plot leaves you cold. It must be in the way it’s written—you know?”

“I’m afraid that’s something I haven’t thought about very much.”

“I guess when you read all the time the way I do you can’t help wondering what makes it all come together. Do you like to read?”

“Yes. But not a lot of fiction. Mostly biographies.”

“Of people like Benjamin Franklin? I ordered a biography of him the other day after you mentioned him.”

He told himself it was ridiculous to be so pleased that she was following up on a name he had dropped.

*                           *                           *         

Over the weeks as he continued his careful courtship, he discovered that she hadn’t been exaggerating when she said she read all the time—one book seemed to lead her to another. After finishing the Franklin biography, she moved on to
Poor Richard’s
Almanac,
and from that to biographies of Washington, Adams, and Jefferson. Then for a change of pace she returned to her beloved Tolstoy to reread
Anna Karenina
.

“You put me to shame,” he told her.

“I don’t have anything else to do with my days,” she said. “I don’t work the way you do. I’m the one who should be ashamed.”

Finally, after several weeks, he felt the time was right to show her his electrician’s shop between the stationer’s store and the pizza parlor in Wrightstown’s commercial district. The shop was his pride and joy; he’d only been in business for a few months, but he was already turning a profit—a profit that had been big enough to allow him to leave his cramped studio apartment and move into one with two bedrooms and an eat-in kitchen in a shiny new building that had all the amenities.

Still, he had hesitated about letting Gwen see the little place he called Stan’s Electronics. A girl who’d grown up around a multimillion-dollar enterprise like the glassworks might not understand what an accomplishment his fledgling business represented. It was not that he was worried about disappointing her, he realized; rather, if she didn’t appreciate what he’d been able to achieve, he would be disappointed in her.

But he had to risk it. He brought her to the shop, showed her around, offered her some iced tea from the small refrigerator in his small office, and braced himself for her response.

He need not have worried. “You do everything!” Gwen exclaimed. “You can install a new electrical system for a business complex, and you can maintain it too! And you also create your own advertising and you keep your own books. At the glassworks, there are separate departments for all of those things.”

“With a small operation like this, I have to be a one-man band,” he’d protested. But he’d been foolishly, childishly pleased. “I’m not in the same league as the Wright Glassworks. I’m not even close.”

“But I think if your company was as big as Mother’s, you’d still want to be hands-on. Mother is. She may have all those departments and the vice presidents who run them, but she makes sure she’s on top of all of it. She learned her lesson, you see, because she almost lost everything when she didn’t do that, when she turned it all over to my—” But she stopped short. Stan knew she’d been about to say something more and it upset him that she had changed her mind.
You can trust me,
he wanted to tell her.
Whatever it was that you were about to say, it will be safe
with me.

*                           *                           *         

Gwen felt her face get red. She’d almost spilled the secret of her birth parents! That was what was so dangerous about Stan; she felt so comfortable with him that it seemed like the most natural thing in the world to tell him her most intimate secret. The secret that could not be told because that would be disloyal to Cassie. And yet, it was Gwen’s secret too. Should it always be off-limits? With everyone? Gwen looked at Stan. He had brought her here to his little shop and he’d had faith that she would understand what it meant to him. His pride was tied up in this business of his, along with his hard work, his talent, and his dreams. And he had shared it with her. Because he wanted her to know him better. Wasn’t it time to return the favor?

She sat down on a workbench—he’d told her he’d built it with his own two hands—and motioned to him to sit next to her. She said, “I have something I’d like you to know about me.”And she told him about her father and the woman who had been her birth mother. The telling didn’t take long, as she really didn’t know that much about those two figures in her life, but when it was over she felt as if she’d done something very strenuous, like running a marathon, or climbing a mountain. It took her a second to catch her breath and then she turned to Stan. And she realized that without meaning to, she’d just given him a test. There were so many things he could say that would be wrong. If he said, “Cassandra Wright was a good woman to take you in,” that would be the worst. “How lucky you were that she didn’t turn away from you,” wouldn’t be much better. Suddenly she was afraid. She didn’t want him to fail the test but she wasn’t sure herself what the right response would be.

He looked at her for what seemed like an eternity, and then he said. “I’m sorry your mother didn’t tell you the truth years ago. It’s something you should have known.”

He was perfect! She threw her arms around him and she hugged him. And for a second he hugged her back, but then she felt something in him change and he was pulling her to him as if he couldn’t let her go. When he took her face in his hands and brushed her hair aside with his fingertips she knew what was coming and she thought perhaps she should warn him that she’d never been kissed before—not in the way he was about to kiss her. But then something inside her began to change, too, and she didn’t have time to think or talk because her body was melting into his as if that was what it was meant to do, and her mouth was joining his and she could taste the iced tea on his tongue, and if he had wanted to, she would have kissed him all night.

*                           *                           *         

Stan pulled back from the kiss. He told himself it was because she was so young and he didn’t want to go too fast. But he knew it wasn’t just for her that he did it. For weeks she’d been filling his thoughts. Tonight he’d been moved by her in ways he’d never been moved before. This was too serious to rush.