good!” She ran around the front of the truck, yanked the door open before he could reach over to open it for her, climbed in and slammed it shut, an old hand at battered trucks.
“I’m so glad.” She sank down in the broken springs and skinned her hair back. “I didn’t know whatever I was going to do.”
“Where do you want to go?” He knew he sounded churlish, but he couldn’t help it.
“Westminster. About ten miles. Where are you going?”
“New Jersey.”
“Oh, good. It’s right on your road, this way.”
She glanced at his earth-stained paratrooper boots and back at the plants.
“Those are azaleas, aren’t they?”
“Right,” he said, trying to start the damned engine again, with another hill to climb. She was waiting, taut till it started, and when she didn’t relax, then he knew it was something else she was waiting for, as the truck made the grade around a steep bank of honeysuckle, dogwood above it. She turned her head painfully, looking across in front of him.
“Our house is up there, that’s our lane. Oh, watch it, the frost boils are awful.”
“Sorry.” Finlay steadied the truck. It wasn’t the frost boils. It was the green and white mailbox at the mouth of the lane. White with green stenciled block letters. Dawn Hill Farm. But it couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. There must be another house up the Dawn Hill lane.
She was silent for a while, lost in her own unhappiness again, before she roused herself.
“Are you a gardener?” she asked. “I don’t mean that. Gardeners are all so old. But do you work for one?”
“Like a dog,” Fish said.
She glanced at him again. “Or maybe you’re like my grandfather. He was a . . . a horticulturalist. But probably not, he was supposed to be crazy. My mother says so. He just disappeared one day.”
Finlay kept the truck steady. There might be another house on the Dawn Hill Road. There couldn’t be another girl living on it who had a crazy disappearing horticulturalist grandfather. Snap out of it, brother. It never was, it could never be. It was just an error in the golden dusk.
“My stepmother doesn’t think so.” Her voice was unsteady for a moment. “She thinks he just got sick of everything. But she loves gardens. My mother hates them. She says old men plant trees, young men dream dreams. But you plant trees, don’t you, or shrubs, anyway?”
“Or don’t I dream dreams? Is that what you mean?”
“Sort of, I guess.”
The maimed shadow of an old smile limped across Fish Finlay’s homely face, rekindling the memory of far-off unhappy things that for one enchanted moment back there on the empty road he’d forgotten, and that the shock of her being Jennifer Linton had brought painfully back to him. That there’d been a time when dreams were his to dream, back when he didn’t know an azalea from a privet hedge, and the brightest of them all had been another girl, a golden girl with amber eyes. And what he’d never told anybody, that it wasn’t because he’d been an Ivy League end that he couldn’t take his leg in his stride and had holed in, an old man planting trees. It was what the dream girl had said, as kindly as she could, about a golden girl tied to a junk heap: I’m a pig, darling. I’ve tried to be noble but I’m really not. We’re just wrong for each other now. We couldn’t ever have any fun any more. Not our kind of fun. Somebody’ll come along, darling, somebody who loves to sacrifice. . . .
“No,” Fish Finlay said. “I banished dreams.”
To hell with dreams. To hell with sacrifice. His jaw tightened. The angel reaching sadly down picked up the golden feather in the dust.
Jennifer Linton was silent. He brought himself abruptly back to the job in hand and glanced sideways at her . . . the recalcitrant daughter of a lovely mother, granddaughter of old James V. Maloney, supposed to flower, if possible, scrabbling what nutriment was left in the shade of the lush luxuriant weed. Assistant Trust Officer Finlay’s problem. He saw her again, simple and lovely, the aura of springtime in April about her.
The pale half-moon of her face was grave.
“You don’t banish dreams,” she said, her voice as grave. “They blow up, when you’re not looking. They blow to pieces, right in your face.” She laughed unexpectedly then and rubbed her nose quickly, like a child. “I know. It’s what happened to me, just now.”
“A dream blew up?”
“With a bang. I live with my stepmother, because my parents were divorced. My father was killed in a car accident, two years ago. And my mother . . . well, she can be. . . . Anyway, she said I had to come to Newport this summer. But I hate it, and she’s so . . . so hard to get along with, anyway. So I wasn’t going to Newport no matter how much of a row my mother made. I was going to stay with my stepmother. Then today I got a cable. I didn’t have to go to Newport. My mother’d changed her mind from the other day when she called me up . . . right when I was 6-2 in the match set for the school cup, so I had to lose by default. And she said, ‘Go back to your silly game.’ ”
She laughed a little. “I guess it’s funny, anyway.”
“It wouldn’t be to me,” Fish Finlay said.
“Me either. Anyway, she changed her mind, and I didn’t have to come to Newport. It was wonderful. That’s why I’m in these clothes, I didn’t take time to change. One of the girls’ mothers was there with a car, coming down this way, so I dashed home. I thought Anne—that’s my stepmother—would be as glad as I was.”
“Wasn’t she?”
Jennifer Linton didn’t answer for so long that he glanced over at her and saw her still shaking her head, her lashes moist.
“I’m sorry,” he said, disappointed some way.
“I didn’t tell her,” she said then. “There was a . . . a man there. An old friend of all of us. I sneaked in—kid stuff, I guess. You know . . . Big Surprise. He was there, talking to her . . . telling her how much he loved her, and how tired he was of waiting and . . . seeing her struggle, trying to hang on to the farm for . . . for somebody else’s spoiled brat—that’s me—when she ought to have a life and children of her own. I . . . I was just stunned, I guess.”
She took a deep breath.
“I was so stunned I couldn’t get out, and so I heard her say she loved him too but she wasn’t going to break up the only home I had till . . . till I got myself a job and got squared away, just when I’d got myself together and had some confidence in myself and the fact that somebody really wanted me around.” She paused a moment. “I just never thought about Anne getting married. I guess my mother’s been married so many times I thought it was enough for everybody. And this man’s terribly nice and has money enough to . . . I was just stupid. But it was a shock. You bear right at the next corner.”
She was silent for a moment.
“So I’m going to Newport,” she said, calm again. “It’s funny. I get some money some day, and I’ve been planning all the things I’d do for
