The Dreeson Incident(201)

"Where was there to go in Grantville those days?" Missy asked.



"Hardly anywhere. That first evening they ended up in a booth in the pizza place, Joe catching a half dozen of his own friends up on army life. Until she reminded him that her curfew hadn't been extended indefinitely and he had to take her home. The rest of the time . . . I did ask her once during those two weeks if she had taken up kissing frogs. She gave me a look and said, 'Joe's not a frog. He just looks sort of like one to people who don't have enough sense to tell the difference.' "



"I can almost hear her," Missy said.



"We could have tried keeping her on a shorter leash those couple of weeks, I suppose. But nobody can be in two places at once. He sat with her in church. The first Sunday, Vera and I had a political reception in Fairmont in the afternoon. When we got home, Debbie was playing with Anne down by the run—she'd stayed home to babysit because Anne was always grumpy if a person waked her up from a nap—and informed us that Joe and Aura Lee were in the back yard, not particularly in a mood to have a two-year-old jumping up and down on them, so we should honk the horn, whistle loudly, sing off-key, rattle a few chains, or otherwise make noise before rounding the corner. Talk about simplicity in pursuit of privacy. I'm sure the last spot any of their friends would have thought to look for them was at our place.



"He always got her home by curfew. Telling her not to see him would have gone nowhere. We'd already had your mother marry before she finished high school." Willie Ray smiled ironically. "I was clinging to a certain glimmer of hope that Aura Lee and Joe had more common sense than Debbie and Don had at the same age. Which, in the long run, they did."



"You mean that she stayed home, finished high school, and went to the university?"



"Basically. She'd been very partial to Joe since the first day she noticed that people came in two genders," Willie Ray said philosophically. "In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if she was looking at him when she noticed it. Even though no one would be likely to describe him as a good-looking boy or a handsome man. She never so much as went out on a date with anyone else. Not even to a church party or school dance. But I have to say that they managed to keep everyone guessing about exactly where things stood between them for the next two years, which was hard to do in a town this size. Which meant that Vera didn't have anything substantial to complain about. After Aura Lee started WVU, they didn't even try to pretend. They stayed reasonably discreet. Those are two different things."



"How?"



"That first year she and Debbie were sharing that apartment in Morgantown, your dad dropped your mom off here one Friday evening in the spring. Vera complained that she'd been trying to call the apartment all day and wasn't getting an answer. Debbie said that Aura Lee had caught a ride over to Baltimore at noon to meet Joe there. Spend the weekend. Go to a preseason game; they were a lot cheaper than the regular Orioles games. Tour the harbor. Just relax a bit before she started cramming for finals. Vera got all upset. Debbie answered that it wasn't hurting her a bit. And it wasn't. If Vera hadn't pushed, she'd never even have known that's where Aura Lee was that weekend. Much less any of her friends at First Methodist knowing about it."



Willie Ray leaned back. "One more thing for you to think about, girl."



"What?" Missy asked.



"It's a little hard to tell, since Joe was around. Maybe he was blocking Aura Lee's view, so to speak. On the other hand, he was a thousand miles away for months at a time those first few years they were more or less a couple. Years when she was very young. She had plenty of time to look around. No matter what Eleanor Jenkins was implying about the Hudson women, I think that if Joe didn't exist, Aura Lee would have ended up as uninterested in men as Chad's cousin Marietta Fielder at the library. Not hostile to them. Not a man-hater, or anything like that. Just . . . not personally concerned with the topic. For her, all the rest were frogs—the ones she grew up with here in Grantville, the other students in Morgantown while she was at the university, all the men she met while she was working in Charleston. There are some women who will look at a half-dozen or so men with reasonable interest while they're growing up, and depending on circumstances could be happy in a different way married to any of those possibilities. Not your aunt. Single minded."



"I see," Missy said.



"Do you? You might want to give a thought to whether you're enough like her that Ron Stone is the only man you're ever going to be interested in that way. If he is, that maybe ought to affect your calculations. Whatever you're trying to figure out at the moment, if it's so, it had better affect your calculations. Weigh them."