“Excuses,” I tease.
She ignores me, as always. “Sometimes, I would work at the desk all night and still have to go to class in the morning. It was all I could do not to fall asleep with my book open on the desk. It was not easy. By the time I finished my first year, I was very much looking forward to coming home for the summer, if only to go straight to bed.”
“But then I ruined your plans by showing up at the train station.”
“Yes.” She smiles. “My plan was ruined.”
“I hadn’t seen you in nine months,” I point out. “I wanted to surprise you.”
“And you did. On the train, I wondered whether you would be there, but I did not want to be disappointed. And then, when the train pulled into the station and I saw you from the window, my heart gave a little jump. You were very handsome.”
“My mother had made me a new suit.”
She emits a wistful laugh, still lost in the memory. “And you had brought my parents with you.”
I would shrug, but I am afraid to move. “I knew they’d want to see you, too, so I borrowed my father’s car.”
“That was gallant.”
“Or selfish. Otherwise, you might have gone straight home.”
“Yes, maybe,” she teases. “But of course, you had thought of that, too. You had asked my father if you could take me to dinner. He said that you had come to the factory while he was working to ask his permission.”
“I didn’t want to give you a reason to say no.”
“I would not have said no, even if you had not asked my father.”
“I know this now, but I didn’t know it then,” I say, echoing her earlier words. We are, and always have been, the same in so many ways. “When you stepped off the train that night, I remember thinking that the station should have been filled with photographers, waiting to snap your picture. You looked like a movie star.”
“I had been in the train for twelve hours. I looked terrible.”
This is a lie and we both know it. Ruth was beautiful, and even well into her fifties, men’s eyes would follow her when she walked into a room.
“It was all I could do not to kiss you.”
“That is not true,” she counters. “You would never have done such a thing in front of my parents.”
She’s right, of course. Instead, I stood back, allowing her parents to greet and visit with her first; only then, after a few minutes, did I approach her. Ruth reads my thoughts. “That night was the first time my father really understood what I saw in you. Later, he told me that he had observed that you were not only hardworking and kind, but a gentleman as well.”
“He still didn’t think I was good enough for you.”
“No father thinks any man is good enough for his daughter.”
“Except David Epstein.”
“Yes,” she teases. “Except for him.”
I smile, even though it sends up another electric flare inside me. “At dinner, I couldn’t stop staring at you. You were so much more beautiful than I remembered.”
“But we were strangers again,” she says. “It took some time for the conversation to be easy, like it was the summer before. Until the walk home, I think.”
“I was playing hard to get.”
“No, you were being you,” she says. “And yet, you were not you. You had become a man in the year we had been apart. You even took my hand as you walked me to the door, something you had never done before. I remember because it made my arm tingle, and then you stopped and looked at me and I knew then exactly what was going to happen.”
“I kissed you good night,” I say.
“No,” Ruth says to me, her voice dipping to a seductive register. “You kissed me, yes, but it was not just good night. Even then, I could feel the promise in it, the promise that you would kiss me just like that, forever.”
In the car, I can still recall that moment – the touch of her lips against my own, the sense of excitement and pure wonder as I hold her in my arms. But suddenly the world begins to spin. Hard spins, as if I’m on a runaway roller coaster, and all at once, Ruth vanishes from my arms. Instead, my head presses hard against the steering wheel and I blink rapidly, willing the world to stop spinning. I need water, sure that a single sip will be enough to stop it. But there is no water and I succumb to the dizziness before everything goes black.
When I wake, the world comes back slowly. I squint in the darkness, but Ruth is no longer in the passenger seat beside me. I am desperate to have her back. I concentrate, trying to conjure her image, but nothing comes and my throat seems to close in on itself.