Suzanne Carey - When Love Walks In

Now he was a man—nineteen going on twenty, lean and dark-haired, with the kind of smile that could melt all but the hardest of hearts, and eyes the deep-blue color of bachelor buttons. Not even Cate’s father could call him a slacker. Since graduating, he’d worked full-time, pumping gas and repairing cars at Miller’s Garage. In his off hours, he continued to make himself available for the kind of manual labor that was usually reserved for young teenagers, mowing lawns and shoveling snow, chopping and hauling firewood.

Though they’d never discussed the reason for his industry in so many words, Cate knew Danny was trying to amass enough money to bankroll their independence. Secure in his love, she’d become a woman. Or almost. She would graduate from high school seven months hence and turn eighteen a week later. Employed part-time in the hardware store by her father since she was in the eighth grade, she’d managed to save a modest nest egg of her own, in the process acquiring retail skills that would come in handy when she worked her way through college.

For most of her life, it seemed, she’d wanted to be an English teacher. Unable to count on her parents’ financial help if she married Danny, and unwilling to let him pay the freight for both of them while she continued her education, she was determined to come up with her own tuition money and contribute to their living expenses.

The previous week he’d formally asked her to be his wife. And she’d said yes. They’d agreed to leave Beckwith, the small town surrounded by farms where they’d both grown up, on her eighteenth birthday—head for Cincinnati or some other big city where she could attend college and he could find better paying employment. With the commitment, there didn’t seem to be any reason to postpone expressing their love.

At Cate’s suggestion, their first lovemaking would take place on Serpent Mound, a grassy, undulating, ceremonial earthwork that had been built on the crest of a bluff overlooking Brush Creek by a little-known Indian tribe nearly a thousand years earlier. Familiar with it since childhood, thanks to a series of school field trips and lectures about the indigenous residents of Adams County, she’d always considered the scenic promontory, crowned by the effigy of a partially uncoiled snake about to swallow a frog’s egg, to be a holy place.

Serene, enigmatic, a point of contact with the distant past, the mound wasn’t a burial site; archaeologists had long since determined otherwise. Aware the serpent’s head was aligned with the setting sun on the evening of the summer solstice, they’d speculated it had been built as a kind of earthwork calendar to keep track of the planting cycle. Or as a site for religious ceremonies.

Releasing her, he helped her up a steep, thickly wooded slope that offered a secluded, if somewhat more difficult to negotiate, approach to their destination. They caught sight of the park’s metal observation tower first. A moment later the mound itself came into view. Moonlight washed its verdant twists and coils like milk. The aroma of freshly mowed grass assailed their nostrils.

Lightly Danny rested his cheek against Cate’s hair. “Any special spot you’d prefer?’ he asked.

“Up by the serpent’s head,” she answered without hesitation, having pictured making love to him there a thousand times. “The depression in the middle of the egg can shelter us.”

It was his favorite spot, too—the most spiritually charged and welcoming, in his opinion. Thanks to the curve of the serpent’s body, it was also one of the most difficult to see from the gate.

“Suits me, darlin’,” he whispered.

If somebody caught them, it would be all over between them until her eighteenth birthday. Her parents would keep them apart if they had to follow her around with a shotgun. Or send her off to a religious boarding school. They’d probably try to have Danny arrested for contributing to the delinquency of a minor.

Shivers of excitement and anticipation prickled Cate’s skin as they reached the serpent’s jaw and the frog’s egg, a much smaller, circular mound with a depression at its center, almost like a hole in a doughnut. Inside it, two sapling trees had sprung up. Despite them, there would be more than enough room for them to lie down and get comfortable together. The lights of scattered farmhouses and outbuildings in the valley below glittered like diamonds against a swath of velvet as Danny led her into its embrace.

They lay down together on the sweet-smelling grass. Though she might have been deluding herself, she thought she could feel the earth turning as she came into his arms. A deep sense of connectedness to all of creation swelled in her imagination.

For a moment the only sounds that disturbed the night’s insect chorus and the rustling of leaves overhead were the rasp of Danny’s zipper and their hushed breathing as he helped her take off her panties. I wish we could take off all our clothes instead of remaining partly dressed, Cate thought. That we could share a bed and covers. Fall asleep afterward and wake with the morning light. I wish we didn’t have to worry about somebody catching us.

His touch gentle in its suggestiveness, Danny unbuttoned the bodice of her dress and reached inside it to stroke her nipples with his calloused fingertips. As they rose to meet his caress, stabs of arousal sped to her deepest places.

They’d agreed they couldn’t afford to linger. “Come into me, Danny,” she begged, her words blunted against the warmth of his neck as she pressed against him. “I want to feel you there…”

He didn’t need a second invitation. Cradling him with her knees as he assumed protection, she marveled at how beautifully made he was.

With a flash of pain that was quickly over, Cate’s virginity was lost. Joined to Danny and in a way she couldn’t have put into words, to all the lovers who’d gone before them in the history of the world, she abandoned rational thought. Like a leaf caught up in a stream that was approaching full flood, she immersed herself in the moment as they made fumbling, imperfect, ultimately satisfying love.

As they lay together afterward, deep in each other’s arms, she vowed he’d be her only lover, her only husband.

Life and unloving parents had conspired to arrange a different outcome.

It was approaching the dinner hour on a Friday evening in October as thirty-four-year-old Cate Anderson, now an English teacher at Beckwith Consolidated High School, ran off a stack of fliers on the school’s balky, outdated copy machine. A widow since the death of her husband, Larry, from complications of leukemia three years earlier, she wore a charcoal-gray sweater set, a Pendleton plain wool shirt she’d bought in a Minneapolis thrift shop when her teenage son, Brian, was still a toddler, and recently resoled penny loafers. The second pair she’d managed to ruin that week, her panty hose had a run in them.

Designed and produced with the principal’s blessing on behalf of a recently organized Save Our Jobs, Save Our Town committee, the fliers represented an effort to boost attendance at a rally that would take place in the town library on Monday evening. According to recent news stories, Mercator, the new corporate parent of Beckwith’s only industry, Beckwith Tool and Die, was in the process of deciding whether to expand the plant or close it.

Without it, this town will dry up and blow away, Cate thought. She was trying to imagine what her father, her mother-in-law, Beverly Anderson, and her best friend, Brenda Lawler, all of whom worked at Beckwith Tool and Die, would do for a living if the plant closed when Brenda abruptly knocked on the media room’s glass door.

Cate motioned for her to enter. “What are you doing here?” she asked. “Come to think of it, how’d you get into the building? By now the outside doors are usually locked.”