The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

“Will you marry me?”

Jackie laughed. “I’m going to marry some fat old man and go see the world.”

“You can’t,” he whispered. “I saw you first.”

Standing up, Jackie looked down at him, at the tear streaks down his cherub cheeks. “I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you again someday, kid. I’m sure of it.” Even Jackie didn’t believe those words; she planned to leave this one-horse town and never return. She was going to see the world! On impulse, the way she did most things, she pulled her blue and gold school pin from her blouse and handed it to him. What did she need with a pin from a nowhere school in a nowhere town?

Billy was staring so hard at the pin in his palm that he didn’t realize Jackie had started to walk away, walk at her normal pace, which was closer to a run. “Will you write to me?” he called, racing after her, trying to keep up but failing.

“Sure, kid,” she called over her sh

oulder. “Sure I’ll write.”

But of course she never did. In fact, she hadn’t thought of Billy more than half a dozen times over the following years, and then only when she was with a group that was laughing and comparing small towns. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter, she’d tell the story of little Billy Montgomery who had plagued her from the time she was twelve until she’d escaped at eighteen. A couple of times she’d wondered what had happened to him, but she knew he had the Montgomery money and connections, so he could do anything he liked.

“Probably married now and has half a dozen kids,” some guy said once.

“Not possible,” Jackie said. “Billy’s just a kid. I used to change his diapers.”

“Jackie, I think you ought to do a little arithmetic.”

To her horror she had realized that “little” Billy Montgomery was about twenty-five years old. “You’re making me feel old,” she’d laughed. “It couldn’t have been more than three years since I left Chandler.” She groaned when Charley reminded her that they had been married for seventeen years.

So now, many years after she’d left Chandler, she was standing face to face with the little boy who had flung himself on her and sworn that he’d love her forever. Only he didn’t look too much like the little boy she remembered. Six feet one if he was an inch, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, very handsome. “You must come in and have some hot chocolate,” she said, “and some cookies.” She wanted to remind herself that, compared to her, Billy was just a child. Looking at him, it wasn’t easy to remember that he was a boy.

“I’d prefer coffee,” he said, motioning to her to lead the way.

Once inside the house she felt awkward and had to force herself to move. “How is your family?”

“All of them are well. And your mother?”

“Died a couple of years ago,” she said over her shoulder as she moved into the kitchen.

Billy was right behind her. “I’m sorry. Here, let me help you,” he said, reaching above her head for a canister of fresh coffee beans.

Jackie started to turn around and found herself looking straight into Billy’s sun-browned throat, then, as her eyes lifted, at his chin, a chin so square it could have been sculpted with a carpenter’s hand plane. For a moment she found her breath catching in her throat. Then she stopped herself and stepped from under his encircling stance. “My goodness, but you do look like your father. How is he, by the way?”

“The same as he was when you saw him four days ago.”

“Yes, of course. I…”

Billy smiled at her, at some joke that only he knew, then pulled out a chair at the table in the corner of the pretty kitchen and motioned for her to sit down. “I will make the coffee,” he said.

“You can do that?” Jackie was of the school that believed that men could do nothing except what they were paid for or received awards for. They could fight wars, run huge businesses, but they couldn’t feed themselves or choose their own clothes without a woman beside them.

Billy poured the right number of beans into the grinder, then began to turn the crank, all the while watching her with a slight smile.

“So tell me all about your life,” she said, smiling up at him, trying her best to remember that she had once changed this man’s diapers.

“I went to school, graduated, and now I help my father do whatever needs to be done.”

“Managing the Montgomery millions, right?”

“More or less.”

“No wife or children?” It seemed impossible to think that a kid she used to baby-sit could possibly be old enough to have a wife, let alone children.

“I told you that you were the only woman I would ever love. I told you that on the day you left.”