Mr. Right Next Door. Arlene James

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СКАЧАТЬ well, it wouldn’t aid the illusion, so to speak.”

      “The illusion?”

      “Of a woman in love,” he said, leaning forward slightly. “You have a boyfriend, remember, not just a racquetball buddy—speaking of which, I think I deserve a rematch. I gave you a dam good game, if you’ll recall.” She smiled, glad to have a “friendly” topic to discuss. “So you did. Give me another one tonight, and you’re on.”

      “It’s a done deal,” he assured her as she gathered up her tiny, red velvet handbag. Stepping aside, he allowed her to move past him and out into the cool night. While she adjusted her wrap, covering her head and looping the ends just so about her shoulders, he locked the door and pushed it closed. Smithson jumped up into the window as they walked past, yowling as if he thought it was expected of him, then settling down to groom himself with leisurely strokes of his tongue. Likewise, Reiver woofed from his station on the porch.

      “That’s his protective post,” Morgan informed her. “He always stations himself there when I’m gone.”

      “I’ve noticed that,” Denise told him, and then wondered if she should have, but he seemed to find nothing remarkable about her taking note of his comings and goings. He talked on about the dog.

      “It’s part of his nature,” Morgan said. “He’ll stay right there until I get home and let him into the house for the night.”

      “He sleeps in your house?”

      “Right in front of my son’s bedroom door. It’s as if he knows instinctively what means most to me and seeks to protect that.”

      “I’ve never seen your son. Does he get to visit often.”

      “Radley’s up here all the time. You just probably didn’t realize who he was.”

      “He lives close then?”

      “He’s a sophomore at the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Still.”

      “Still?”

      Morgan chuckled. “Rad’s not real serious about his course work. He’s twenty already, and his mother thinks he’s studying to be a burn just because he doesn’t know yet what he wants to do. Hell, I didn’t know what I wanted to do until I was thirty-eight.”

      They had reached the polished black automobile sitting in front of the old carriage house at the edge of the property. “And just what is it exactly that you are doing?” she asked as he opened the passenger door for her.

      He laughed again, easily, lightly. “Whatever I damned well please. Currently that means remodeling an old house up on Hanson Creek for resale.”

      “Ah.”

      

      He handed her into the car, then bent over her, hands braced on the door frame and the door itself. “It doesn’t compute for you, does it? I’ll bet you made a five-year plan and stuck to it every step of the way.”

      She didn’t quite know what to say to that, for he was right, of course. Finally she asked, “Is that bad?”

      He shook his head. “Nope. Unless you think it’s the only way to live and expect everyone else to think so, too.”

      She digested that while he came around and got in behind the steering wheel. Okay, maybe she had been pretty sure that it was the only way she could get what she wanted, and it had worked, so far as it went. So maybe she didn’t quite understand why everyone else didn’t do it, and maybe she had assumed that everyone just naturally wanted what she did. Was something wrong with that? Had she closed her mind to everything else? Her sister surely thought so. And perhaps her parents, now that she thought about it. But she was well into the second five-year plan, and everything was going along according to schedule, so why should she abandon her goals now? Of course she shouldn’t.

      On the other hand, when was the last time she’d really enjoyed herself? When had she last been happy? The answer to that lay buried back home in Kansas City, which meant, she reminded herself, that real happiness was forever out of her reach. What, after all, did she have left but her career? The answer was obvious, and yet it did not seem to have quite the bleakness about it that it usually did.

      She didn’t know whether to be alarmed or encouraged by that. She could never, would never, forget her son or the loss of him. So how could the knowledge that he was gone be any less shocking or sharp today than it had been yesterday? With that worrisome enigma on her mind, she almost missed the sight of Fayetteville spread like a swatch of stars in the Ozark foothills, down one eastern slope and into the flat valley below then north in a milky flow to Springdale and Rogers and the cuts and gullies beyond. Thankfully, Morgan didn’t let her miss it.

      “This is one of my favorite sights,” he said, jolting her from her reverie. “When I was a kid, I used to lie on my belly and look out the window of my attic room at the valley below and imagine what everyone in town was up to. It seemed another world even though we bused down every day to school.”

      “We?”

      “My sister and I.”

      “I have a sister.”

      “Older or younger?”

      “Younger.”

      “Me, too.”

      Something else they had in common. “I have a brother, too,” she said, and felt a spurt of relief when he shook his head.

      “I always wanted one, though.”

      Denise sighed as they turned back into the foothills and left Fayetteville behind. “So you lived up here, hmm?”

      He nodded. “My dad’s still up there. Delia—that’s my sister—thinks he ought to move down to Little Rock with her, but he says he’ll never leave my mom. She’s buried up there near the house.”

      “Is it safe for him, so far from everything?”

      He shrugged. “He says it is. Personally, I lived without indoor plumbing and electricity until I walked out of high school and into the University of Arkansas, and I didn’t find anything particularly ennobling about it. But Dad says that life is best at its simplest, and frankly I see no reason for him to change his life now just because he’s into his mid-seventies. He wouldn’t be happy anywhere else.”

      “You must worry about him, though.”

      He inclined his head at that, saying, “I don’t worry about much, frankly. If I see a problem and I can fix it, I do, but worrying never solved anything so far as I can tell. Actually, as far as Dad goes, I admire him, and I always did, even when I was lost and so miserably unhappy I didn’t know which way to turn.”

      “And when was that?” she heard herself asking.

      He considered a moment. “Oh, about ten years ago. That was the worst of it, anyway, though it had been building for a long, long time.”

      “And now?”

      “Now I love my life,” he said, grinning broadly. “I have everything I’ve ever wanted except...”

      “Except,” СКАЧАТЬ