Tara Quinn - The Night We Met

www.millsandboon.co.uk

For Agnes Mary and Walter Wright Gumser—

together forever. Thank you.

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

January, 1968

San Francisco, California

Life started the night we met. Everything before this was merely preparation for what was yet to come. It was a Saturday evening and I’d gone to a local pub just down the street from St. Catherine’s Convent. I’d been living in a private dormitory at the convent for a couple of years, studying education at the small elite women’s college a block away—and was just two weeks from becoming a St. Catherine’s postulant and beginning my life of poverty, chastity and obedience. The San Francisco pub wasn’t a place I frequented often, but that January night I needed the noise, the distraction, as much as I wanted the beer that I would drink only until it got me past the unexpected tension I felt that night.

After all, I had prayers and then Mass with the sisters early the next morning, followed by religious study.

At a little table some distance from the shiny mahogany wood bar, I sipped my beer, watched merrymakers and pool-players, and contemplated the fact that I didn’t belong anywhere.

Not on a date. Or at home watching television with my family. Not out with friends, not in a library studying and certainly not on the completely empty dance floor in front of me.

I was an in-between, having left behind the person my parents, siblings and friends, knew me to be. And yet I hadn’t arrived at who I was going to become. The friends I’d known were getting married, having babies, exploring the world and its opportunities while I was living on the outskirts of a society I was on the verge of joining. I had three years of religious study ahead of me before I’d be allowed to take my final vows and become one of the sisters with whom I’d soon be living.

Don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t sitting there feeling sorry for myself. I’m far too practical and stubborn and determined to waste my time on such a defeatist emotion. I was simply taking my life into my own hands even as I gave it to God. Trying to understand the reasons for my decisions. Testing them. Making sure. Soul-searching, some folks might call it.

For that hour or two, I’d left my dormitory room at the convent and all that was now familiar to me, left the sisters and their gentle care, to enter a harsher world of sin and merriment and ordinary social living to seek the truth about me.

Was my choice to wed myself to God, to serve him for the rest of my days, the right one for me, Eliza Crowley, nineteen-year-old youngest child of James and Viola Crowley?

A woman’s laugh distracted me from my thoughts. A young blond beauty settled at the recently vacated table next to me with a man good-looking enough to star in cigarette commercials. They held hands as they sat, leaning in to kiss each other, not once but twice. Open-mouthed kisses. The girl wasn’t much older than me, but she had a diamond on her finger whose karat weight was probably triple that in my mother’s thirtieth-anniversary band.

I couldn’t imagine any of that for myself. Not the hand-holding. The kissing. And certainly not the diamond. They were all fine and good and valid for some lives. Just too far removed from me to seem real.

As I drank my beer, I saw an older woman sitting at the bar. I had no idea when she’d come in. The place was crowded, the seats at my table the only free ones on the floor, but I’d pretty much noticed everyone coming and going. Except for this woman.

Had she appeared from the back room? Was she working there? Maybe a cook? She held her cigarette with her left hand. There was no ring.

Judging by the wrinkles and spots on that hand, I figured she had to be at least sixty.

Had she always lived alone?

Could I?

I pictured the house I might have—a single woman by myself. It would be white with aluminum siding, and a picket fence and flowers. I was inside, having dinner, I thought. A salad, maybe. I’d worked that day. I’m not sure where, but I assumed I’d be a teacher. I was patient enough. And I liked kids.

And the whole vision felt as flat as the tile floor beneath my feet. There was nothing wrong with that life. It just wasn’t mine.

I imagined being my sister, my mother. I loved them, admired them—and experienced no excitement, no sense of connection, when I considered their choices for myself. I pictured myself as Gloria Steinem. I had courage and determination. Perhaps there was some contribution I was supposed to make to the world, some discovery or mission.

But I didn’t think so. There was no fire, no zeal at the thought. Rather than change the world, I felt compelled to care for those who lived in it.

What about that woman over there at the bar, surrounded by people yet talking to no one, lighting up another cigarette. Was there something I could do to help her? Comfort her?

I didn’t know, but if she asked for help I’d give it. Regardless of any discomfort. I was here to serve.

I wanted to be God’s servant, ready for Him to send where He needed, when He needed.

Joan of Arc wasn’t my heroine. Mother Theresa was.

I’d made the right choice.

Satisfied, relaxed, I reveled in my quieted mind and a few minutes later I was ready to leave the half mug of beer on the table and head back to St. Catherine’s. I planned to write about tonight in my journal, chronicling for later years these moments of reflection and self-revelation. I was mentally titling the page The night I knew for sure.

I just had to find the waitress so I could pay my bill. Good luck doing that, since the bar was so crowded. I couldn’t even catch a glimpse of her. How much did a beer cost in this place? Surely fifty cents would do it, plus tip. I’d shoved a few bills in the front pocket of my blue jeans.

“Hey, don’t I know you?”

I started to tell the blond guy standing at my table that the line was wasted on me, but then I recognized him.

“You’re Patricia Ingalls’s older brother, Arnold.” My reply was pretty friendly to make up for thinking he was hitting on me.

“Right,” he said, smiling. “And you’re that friend of hers who decided to become a nun.”

Not quite how I would’ve said it, but…okay. He was, after all, correct. “Yep.”

“My friends and I just drove in from skiing at Tahoe—and this is the only table left with seats. Mind if we join you?”

I fully intended to tell him he could have the table. I was leaving, anyway. And then I noticed the guy who’d joined the group, pocketing a set of keys. Arnold was older than Patricia and me by four years. This guy was even older.

It wasn’t his age that froze my tongue, though. I’m not really sure what it was. He looked at me and I couldn’t move.

And somehow, five minutes later, I found myself sitting at a table sipping beer with five athletic-looking older men.

And buzzing with nervousness because of the man right next to me—Nate Grady, Arnold had said, adding that Nate was staying sober so he could drive, which explained the keys.

Was I drawn toward him as a woman is to a man? I didn’t think so. Not that I knew much about such things. It was just that he was so…vital.