The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

“Would you mind staying out of my drawers?” she snapped angrily.

He was buttoning her shirt. “Is that drawers as in knickers?”

“Most certainly not!” she said, sounding like a shocked schoolmarm in a bad novel. “Would you behave yourself?”

“That depends on what one defines as correct behavior. From my point of view I am behaving myself.”

“Then behave yourself from my point of view.”

Bending over, he picked up a picnic basket, slipped the handle over his arm, then took her arm with his other hand. “Just as soon as you decide what your point of view is.” He didn’t give her a chance to reply to that nonsense. “Are you sure you’re up to this?”

She knew that he was referring to her injury, but for some reason the question annoyed her. Did he think she was too old to go hiking? Was he hinting that she’d be better off in a rocking chair by the fire? “I can outclimb you, city boy, any day of the week. While you’ve been pushing a pencil, I’ve been crawling all over airplanes, pulling engines from—” She stopped because William was laughing at her. She narrowed her eyes threateningly, which just made him laugh harder.

“Come on, Tarzan, let’s go,” he said as he slipped his arm through hers and led her toward the door.

Who would have believed, she wondered, that little Billy Montgomery would turn out to be so much fun? Just plain old-fashioned fun. So maybe he didn’t like to ride upside down in an airplane, but there were lots of people who wouldn’t consider that activity fun. But William did enjoy other things.

For one thing, his sense of humor was childlike and physical. Jackie enjoyed the kind of humor where people sat in a bar and exchanged bons mots, but she also enjoyed the slip-on-a-banana-peel type of humor. William all too clearly understood her outburst when he’d asked her if she felt well enough to go hiking, so he pretended to be old and tired and ill, thereby forcing her to help pull him up the hills. The pulling, then William’s collapsing against her in mock fatigue, made for a great deal of physical contact. Every few minutes he seemed to have his arms around her, his head on her shoulder, his face pressed into her neck. She told him to stop what he was doing, but there was about as much strength in her words and her gestures as there was in wet seaweed.

When Jackie allowed herself to be honest, she enjoyed this play with William. She’d missed play as a child and as a young woman. For all that William was right when he said she did what she wanted when she was growing up, what she had really wanted was to be an adult, to be independent. When she was ten years old she wanted to be an old woman. One time her mother had said in exasperation, “Jackie, are you ever going to be a child?”

Could a person age in reverse? Could a person get younger as she got older? When she was in high school all the kids wanted to do was play and have a good time. Jackie had been completely disdainful of them; all she thought of was her future and what she was going to do, how she was going to get out of this one-horse town and do something with her life. Other girls her age were saying they wanted to “Marry Bobby and be the best wife in the world.” Jackie’s arrogant laugh was now an embarrassment to her.

She had missed play. She had missed a time of courtship with Charley. What honeymoon they’d had was spent inside an airplane. He was her teacher as well as her husband. She had loved it then and she was glad for it, but now she wanted to relax, to…to smell the roses.

William made her laugh. He teased her and chased her around a tree, and in the late afternoon he spread a cloth in the sunlight, on sun-warmed rocks near the edge of a cliff, so t

hey could sit and look out at a spectacular view. From the basket he removed a banquet: wine, cheese, bread, olives, mustard, cold fried chicken, tiny portions of pâté in the shape of flowers, sliced tomatoes, cold lemonade—a feast.

Jackie leaned against a warm rock and again allowed William to wait on her.

“You’ve been thinking very hard all day,” he said as he poured her a glass of red wine.

“I hate it when you know what’s going on in my head.”

After waiting a moment in silence, he said, “You want to tell me what’s been occupying your thoughts?”

She didn’t want to tell him anything. Always in her head was the knowledge that soon what was between them would have to end and that it wasn’t a good idea to get any closer than they were. But the truth was that she did feel close to him. “I was thinking about all the things you said yesterday.”

“Jackie,” he began, and she sensed that he was going to follow with an apology, but she waved her hand to stop him.

“No, don’t say anything. I deserved everything you said. When I was a kid, I felt that I had to be the best, that I had to succeed. What no one ever seemed to understand was that I wished I could be like the other kids. I tried. I wanted to be part of the groups that went to the drugstore after school and sipped sodas and flirted with boys. But for some reason I couldn’t seem to do the right things.”

She drank her wine and looked off into the glow of the sun, low in the sky. “You know my friend Terri Pelman? Well, back then I only knew her slightly, but I used to envy her so much. In school she was so popular, always surrounded by boys. She always knew what the latest fashion was and always wore it correctly. No mistakes, nothing out of place or wrong, as I always seemed to get things. I wanted a life like hers, wanted the captain of the football team to be crazy about me, but it just didn’t happen. Can you imagine how that was?”

“Yes,” he answered simply, and she knew that he understood. She remembered how many times she’d heard the other children teasing William because he followed Jackie around. She remembered that one of his older brothers had beaten up a couple of boys because of something they’d said to William. Although William had not reported what was said, his sister had heard it and repeated it, so his brother fought for him.

Jackie doubted if she would have found out what was said except that she didn’t see Billy for a few days, so she wandered over to his house—not to see him, of course, but maybe to run an errand for her mother.

William, using a rake nearly twice as tall as he was, was tackling the leaves on the entire vast lawn of the Montgomery house while his older brother, sporting a remarkable black eye, slept under a tree. Billy wouldn’t tell her what was going on, so she woke his brother and made him tell. No one, no matter what size or age, could intimidate Billy, but her age and size quickly intimidated his brother, so he told her. It seemed that some kids who were about four years older than Billy had been hanging around near the bridge with absolutely nothing to do, when one of them said, “We could always have a rock race. William against that boulder over there. My money’s on the rock.”

When Jackie heard this, it was all she could do not to laugh; she had to wait until that afternoon when she was alone, and then she howled. Billy’s brother’s punishment for beating up the boys had been the job of raking all the leaves off the front lawn. Billy had taken on his brother’s punishment.

Now, many years later, she looked at Billy the man and said, “Participate in any rock races lately?”

She could almost see his mind working as he tried to understand what she was talking about. When he remembered, his face lit up, and he smiled before he turned toward her, his eyes twinkling. “You know, my brother took offense at that remark, but I never did. I thought the other kids were stupid for jumping from one thing to another. They couldn’t understand that life needs planning. Half the fun is in the planning. Maybe I didn’t say much and maybe because of that they thought I was a dullard, but I was always planning tomorrow and the next day and the next.”

He paused a moment. “Something I’ve discovered in life that others don’t seem to know is that if you plan hard enough you can make things happen.”