Souvenir. Therese Fowler

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       THIRTEEN

      Meg took one of the notebook diaries with her to work Monday, reading it in her office during her lunch break.

       December 5, 1987

      Carolyn and I were talking about the kids today, over at the co-op. Carson’s thinking of buying Meggie a ring for Christmas. He hasn’t told Meggie. Nothing could be more natural than the two of them married. Caro thinks he means to have an April wedding, since Meggie loves springtime. To be purely honest, the timing couldn’t be better for her moving in with Carson, because if things keep up like they are, we’ll lose the whole farm by May.

      But of course it hadn’t gone like that. It was Brian who proposed – in a sense – two weeks before Christmas, a time when she couldn’t fail to see the romance in his gesture.

      He hadn’t been her supervisor for several months, but she saw him often. Back in early fall he’d told her that the reason he’d moved himself out of front-end management and into Investments was because he hoped to date her. He wasn’t pushy about it, and he assured her that her job was in no way affected by her firm refusals to do anything more than have a platonic lunch with him now and then. She never let him pay.

      This lunch, though, was unlike any that had come before.

      They went to Margot’s, a café she couldn’t afford to eat at on her own, by way, he said, of a ‘Christmas bonus – my treat’. The place was done up for the holidays, with swags of fresh holly and twinkling white lights and deep red velvet ribbon hanging above every doorway. Brian sat across from her at an intimate, white-draped table and told her he had an outrageous proposition. Would she just listen and promise to give it some thought?

      ‘Meg,’ he said, ‘I heard something impressive a while back, one Friday when you weren’t at the Trough. I usually don’t listen much to gossip, but – well, here’s what I heard: Vicki was telling Mark how you give your whole paycheck to your parents to help pay their bills, that you’ve been doing it since you started with us.’

      Her cheeks burned; Vicky wasn’t supposed to tell anyone about that – and especially not when someone like Brian could overhear. Her family’s difficulties embarrassed her, made her look bad by association. She said, ‘Yeah, well, they’ve had some money problems. One of the stallions fractured a leg, and—’

      ‘Oh, don’t get me wrong – I think you’re amazing. That’s so generous. So loyal. What kid is willing to sacrifice their own agenda to help their parents these days?’

      Meg shrugged. ‘I have to help if I can.’ The choice was simple to her, automatic as breathing.

      ‘And, you’ve been loyal to the bank, working here, what? – over two years now? Then there’s your loyalty to your boyfriend – which I’m not so crazy about.’ He laughed.

      She shrugged again, embarrassed but flattered, too, which she feared was disloyal, and her face grew even hotter.

      He reached over and took her hand in his cool, smooth ones, white-collar hands. ‘I admire you, and you know I really like you, Meg. You work hard, you take care of your family – and Jesus, you’re so pretty. We’ve known each other for a while, right? We worked well together, we get along – and, I know this sounds crazy, but, I … I want to help you out. You have to give me a shot, Meg; you owe it to yourself to see if you think we’re as compatible as I already know we are. And if you do, I want you to consider marrying me.’

      She was sure she heard him wrong. ‘You want what?’

      ‘If you agreed to marry me, well, Dad and I would be in a position to help your parents with their mortgage.’ He held up one hand to stop her protest. ‘I know, it sounds like a bribe, but think of it as an incentive. A bonus.’

      ‘How do you know about their mortgage?’ Even she knew little about the details of her parents’ finances.

      ‘We hold it,’ Brian said. ‘They refinanced with us a couple years ago. I’ve had Dad delay the foreclosure proceedings until after I talked to you today.’ He leaned closer, looked into her eyes. ‘Look, Meg, I’m not a crazy person; I’m just a man who knows his mind. We could be really good together, I’m sure of it. Maybe you think you love Carson, and maybe you do love him, in a way. But what is that? Adolescent love, which never lasts. He’s been your escape from a stressful, crazy life, but you won’t need that – him – anymore; you’ll be able to solve your family’s problems. You’ll be the hero.’

      Then he kissed her, and she was too astonished to object. ‘Say you’ll think about it.’

      She hated to, but how could she not?

      She couldn’t tell Carson, Brian said; no one could know, because of the ‘creative financing’ that would take place if things worked out. She didn’t exactly want to tell Carson anyway; the whole situation felt outrageous, unseemly – and yet, it could be a lightning strike of good fortune for her family. Maybe even fate.

      She had to save her family if she could. It was the right choice. The moral choice. By choosing Brian, she could save her sisters from a family reputation even lower than it was already. She could lift them up to a higher social plateau, where they’d have a chance to be popular at school and never have to give up their free time just to keep the family in bread and milk. Without the overwhelming debt, her parents would have money for extras: Kara wanted to go with the high school’s Spanish Club to Mexico City; Beth wanted to take piano lessons; Julianne wanted riding boots and an English saddle and regulation jump bars to practice with so that she might compete. The girls could dress better.

      As much as any of those things, Meg wanted her mother to be able to sleep nights instead of wandering the house like a restless spirit. So how could she selfishly hold on to Carson and watch the rest of them spiral into misery, deprived of the land that gave them, if nothing else, room to own a piece of sky, a shaggy oak, a footpath to a shallow pond where beautiful, if mostly barren, horses stood in the morning to drink?

      So she’d gone along with it, meaning to give Brian a fair try. There was truth in what he said about adolescent love, she couldn’t argue with this even now, on its theoretical basis. But in her nontheoretical life, the answer that had seemed so clean and obvious to her at the time of СКАЧАТЬ