Laura tried hard to charm the woman and win her sympathy. She could not recall ever having spoken more eloquently or with such feeling; usually she was not as good at vocalizing her feelings as she was at putting them down in print. Genuine tears sprang to her assistance, surprising her even more than they did Eugenia Farvor.
From the MasterCard charge slip, she obtained his name— Daniel Packard — and his telephone number. She went directly from the gift shop to a public telephone in the mall and looked him up. There were two Daniel Packards in the book, but the one with that number lived on Newport Avenue in Tustin.
When she returned to the mall parking lot, a cold drizzle was falling. She turned up her coat collar, but she had neither a hat nor an umbrella. By the time she got to her car, her hair was wet, and she was chilled. She shivered all the way from Costa Mesa to North Tustin.
She figured there was a good chance he would be at home. If he was a student, he would not be in class on Saturday. If he worked an ordinary nine-to-five job, he would probably not be at the office, either. And the weather ruled out many of the usual weekend pastimes for outdoor-oriented southern Californians.
His address was an apartment complex of two-story, Spanish-style buildings, eight of them, in a garden setting. For a few minutes she hurried from building to building on winding walkways under dripping palms and coral trees, looking for his apartment. By the time she found it — a first-floor, end unit in the building farthest from the street — her hair was soaked. Her chill had deepened. Discomfort dulled her fear and sharpened her anger, so she rang his bell without hesitation.
He evidently did not peek through the fisheye security lens, for when he opened the door and saw her, he looked stunned. He was maybe five years older than she, and he was a big man indeed, fully six feet five, two hundred and forty pounds, all muscle. He was wearing jeans and a pale-blue T-shirt smeared with grease and spotted with another oily substance; his well-developed arms were formidable. His face was shadowed by beard stubble and smudged with more grease, and his hands were black.
Carefully staying back from the door, beyond his reach, Laura simply said, 'Why?'
'Because…' He shifted from one foot to the other, almost too big for the doorway in which he stood. 'Because…'
'I'm waiting.'
He wiped one grease-covered hand through his close-cropped hair and seemed oblivious of the resultant mess. His eyes shifted away from her; he looked out at the rain-lashed courtyard as he spoke. 'How… how'd you find out it was me?'
'That's not important. What's important is that I don't know you, I've never seen you before, and yet I've got a toad menagerie that you've sent me, you come around in the middle of the night to leave them on my doorstep, you break into my car to leave them on the dashboard, and it's been going on for
Still not looking at her, he flushed and said, 'Well, sure, but I didn't… wasn't ready… didn't think the time was right.'
'The time was right a week ago!'
'Ummmm.'
'So tell me.
Looking down at his greasy hands, he said quietly, 'Well, see…'
'Yes?'
'I love you.'
She stared at him, incredulous. He finally looked at her. She said, 'You
He looked away from her, rubbed his filthy hand through his hair again, and shrugged. 'I don't know, but there it is, and I… uh… well, ummmm, I have this feeling, see, this feeling that I've got to spend the rest of my life with you.'
With cold rainwater trickling from her wet hair down the nape of her neck and along the curve of her spine, with her day at the library shot — how could she concentrate on research after this insane scene? — and with more than a little disappointment that her secret admirer had turned out to be this dirty, sweaty, inarticulate lummox, Laura said, 'Listen, Mr. Packard, I don't want you sending me any more toads.'
'Well, see, I really want to send them.'
'But I don't want to receive them. And tomorrow I'll mail back the ones you've sent me. No, today. I'll mail them back today.'
He met her eyes again, blinked in surprise, and said, 'I thought you liked toads.'
With growing anger, she said, 'I
'Ummmm.'
'Don't harass me, Packard. Maybe some women surrender to your weird mix of heavy-handed romance and sweaty macho charm, but I'm not one of them, and I can protect myself, don't think I can't. I'm a lot tougher than I look, and I've dealt with worse than you.'
She turned away from him, walked out from under the veranda into the rain, returned to her car, and drove back to Irvine. She shook all the way home, not only because she was wet and chilled but because she was in the grip of anger. The nerve of him!
At her apartment she undressed, bundled up in a quilted robe, and brewed a pot of coffee with which to ward off the chills.
She had just taken her first sip of coffee when the phone rang. She answered it in the kitchen. It was Packard.
Speaking so rapidly that he ran his sentences together in long gushes, he said, 'Please don't hang up on me, you're right, I'm stupid about these things, an idiot, but give me just one minute to explain myself, I was fixing the dishwasher when you came, that's why I was such a mess, greasy and sweaty, had to pull it from under the counter myself, the landlord would have fixed it, but going through management takes a week, and I'm good with my hands, I can fix anything, it was a rainy day, nothing else to do, so why not fix it myself, I never figured you to show up. My name's Daniel Packard, but you know that already, I'm twenty-eight, I was in the army until '73, graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in business just three years ago, work as a stockbroker now, but I take a couple night courses at the university, which is how I came across your story about the toad in the campus literary magazine, it was terrific, I loved it, a great story, really, so I went to the library and searched through back issues to find everything else you'd written, and I read it all, and a
He stopped at last, exhausted.
She said, 'Well.'
He said, 'So will you go out with me?'
Surprised by her own response, she said, 'Yes.'