'Don't probe. I don't like it. And furthermore, it's not healthy at this late date.'
'Would it be better two years after you marry him? Or four years afterward, when you have two kids, maybe?'
She stiffened and her facial expression grew hard. 'I have to go now. I'm really beat.'
She turned toward the car. He watched the outline of her loose sweat suit grow indistinct as she moved away. He considered the countless complications this night might yet bring about for both of them. They'd begun already. She walked with her head down, hands in the warmer pocket across her belly. Her footsteps were tired, despondent. She opened the door of the Haynes and dragged herself up into the seat, then slammed the door.
He looked at the stars, at the blacktop, at the car, at his choices. It seemed there was only one.
When he sat beside her on the high seat, he laced his hands loosely over the steering wheel and stared straight out the two-piece windshield. 'I'm sorry I've been ragging you about your relationship with Paul. I had no right. I'm a virtual stranger to you, and I've been drawing conclusions and making judgments ever since I met you. I just want you to know, though, that if you weren't… encumbered, I'd be pushing you full force from this day on, okay?' He turned to find her with a sad expression on her face, staring at the break in the windshield. 'You're a dynamite lady, Winn Gardner. I hope he knows that.'
She turned, lifted her eyes to his hair and dropped them to his lips. Then she looked him steadily in the eye and said in a very soft voice, 'Please don't misconstrue this in any way. But there's been something I've wanted to do ever since I first met you. I want to do it just once to see what it feels like.' She lifted a hand to his head, lightly touching the curls above his left ear. 'Why, it's soft!' she exclaimed in a winsome voice.
'And what did you expect?'
'I don't know. I've just never known a man with natural curls before.'
It took a great effort for Joseph to keep his hands on the wheel; they clenched it now, no longer relaxed as they'd been a minute ago. Her touch was brief, innocent, but terribly sensual, and he thought if she didn't get her hands away, he'd lay her flat on the blacktop parking lot beside the car and see if he couldn't change her mind about cheating on old Silicon Chip.
'Don't!' He pulled back, not jerking, not even forcefully. He simply retreated, and she understood: what she'd done was raising as much havoc with his libido as it was with her own. She tucked her hands between her knees and apologized. 'I'm sorry. Let's go.'
They remained quiet and solitary all the way back to her house. When they pulled up in her driveway, the car engine remained running, and they looked at each other. Neither of them was willing to call an end to their brief time together yet.
'Would you buy me breakfast?' she asked, feeling foolish and as if she were goading him, when actually it was herself she seemed unable to stop punishing.
'I think I'd do almost near anything for you.'
'Then buy me breakfast and afterward wish me goodbye sensibly, without walking me to the door, and if we run into each other at the gift opening tomorrow, don't say more than hello.'
'You sure that's how you want it?'
'No. I'm sure that's how it's got to be.'
They ate apple pannekoekens at the Pannekoeken Huis, which was only a stone's throw from her town house. As they left the restaurant, the sun split the eastern sky with a bright wink of orange that spread and grew and tinted the rim of the world a brilliant combination of purple, heliotrope and lemon. He pulled up at the curb, and as she opened her door by herself, as she got out, he didn't look at her. When she stood on the street, holding onto the handle of the car door, she still waited.
'Goodbye, Joseph Duggan.'
'Goodbye, Winn Gardner.'
Both of them felt faintly ill as she watched the car drive up the street. He resolutely refrained from looking at her in the rearview mirror as long as he could stand it. But at last he lifted his eyes to see if she still stood in the street watching him drive away. But then he remembered. The Haynes was built before there were rearview mirrors.
Chapter 6
W innifred awakened with a violent headache shortly past noon.
She called him five minutes later and came as close to begging as she ever had with him, but he said Sandy and Mick were actually her friends, and he'd prefer to stay home and finish the work he'd begun the day before. Then he added, 'But have a good time, darling.'
She considered calling Ann Schaeffer and offering her apologies, then going out for a long hard run to work off her frustration but felt it her duty as maid of honor to attend the gathering. She wore faded string-bean blue jeans and a white cotton-knit 'Wallace Beery' shirt, the most unglamorous getup she could produce from her closet. She washed the hair spray from her hair and fluffed it with a blow dryer but left it free and uncurled, totally unspecial. She disdained all makeup except a pale application of lip gloss, chiefly because her lips were chapped from Joseph's rough chin, and the lanolin relieved them.
She was fifteen minutes late and expected to confront Joseph as she jogged down the steps to the Schaeffers' lower-level family room. But to her relief he wasn't there. Twenty or more people had arrived, and all the chairs were filled, so she took a seat on the floor near Sandy's feet. Sandy and Mick were just about to begin opening gifts, and Winnie was given the job of recording them in the wedding book.
She had written the eighth name and listed the gift when she looked up to find Joseph had just come in. Her heart went into overdrive, and her mouth watered. He was dressed much as he'd been the night of the rehearsal, in faded Levi's, the same new tennis shoes and same ivory jacket. His thumbs were hooked in his back pockets as he stood for a minute, saying hello, smiling at the group in general as his eyes passed from one person to another. When they came to her, they scarcely paused, and he gave a silent nod, then picked his way through the limited walking space and sat on the floor at the opposite end of the room from Winnie.
He followed her orders of the night before-to the max. He never again looked at her or spoke to her but visited most of the time with a pretty young woman named Connie, near whose chair he sat. There were times when Winnie thought she felt his eyes on her, especially when her attention was given to the book on her lap. But the two times she glanced his way, he was talking and laughing with Connie, who seemed more taken with him as the afternoon progressed.
The two of them walked out of the house together, and Winnifred followed, wondering at the deep sense of abandonment she felt while studying Joseph's back as he walked in front of her beside another woman. He laughed and Winnie's heart lurched. She felt empty and cast aside, wondering what the woman said that had amused him.
The two of them stood on the street beside a strange vehicle, and when Joseph's hand rested on the handle of the door, he looked over the woman's shoulder and saw Winnie, heading for her own car.
'Winn!' he called.
She came up short. Her heart lifted with hope. She hadn't time to ask herself for what.
'I found something of yours in the Haynes. Just a minute.' He opened the door to the strange vehicle, and his head disappeared. When he turned, he held one of her pink high heels in his hand, its tiny pearl button winking a reminder in the waning Sunday afternoon. He lifted the shoe above his head and wagged it, walking toward her. They met in the center of the street; Connie remained where he'd left her, waiting.
Up close he looked and smelled wonderful. But he only handed her the shoe and said, 'One's not much good, is it?'
'Thank you.'
His back was already turning as he said, 'It's okay,' and waved with a negligent lifting of his knuckles.
He returned to Connie, and that's where he was when Winnie drove away. When she got home, she changed into her running clothes and ran until her body felt tortured.
