Paradise (Second Opportunities 1)

Their first real confrontation ended with a truce that was declared that same night over a milk shake at Paulson's Ice Cream Shoppe.

Meredith thought about that night as she looked through the photographs, but her reminiscences came to an abrupt halt as Lynn McLaughlin poked her head into the room and said, "Nick Tierney called on the pay phone out in the hall early this morning. He said your phone in here is already disconnected, and that he's going to stop by in a little while."

"Which one of us did he call to talk to?" Lisa said. Lynn replied that he'd called for Meredith, and when she left, Lisa plunked her hands on her hips and turned to Meredith with a mock glower. "I knew it! He couldn't take his eyes off you last night even though I practically stood on my head to make him notice me. I should never have taught you how to wear makeup and pick out your clothes!"

"There you go again," Meredith shot back, grinning, "taking all the credit for my meager popularity with a few boys." Nick Tierney was a junior at Yale who'd dutifully come here to watch his sister graduate yesterday, and had dazzled all the girls with his handsome face and great build. Within minutes of setting eyes on Meredith, he'd become the one who was dazzled, and he made no secret of it.

"Meager popularity with a few boys?" Lisa repeated, looking fantastic even with her red hair pinned into a haphazard knot atop her head. "If you went out with half the guys who've asked you in the last two years, you'd break my own record for dedicated dating!"

She was about to say more, when Nick Tierney's sister tapped on the open door. "Meredith," she said with a helpless smile, "Nick is downstairs with a couple of his friends who drove up from New Haven this morning. He says he's determined to help you pack, proposition you, or propose to you—whichever you prefer."

"Send the poor, lovesick man and his friends up here," Lisa said, laughing. When Irish Tierney left, Lisa and Meredith regarded each other in silent amusement, opposites in every way. Completely in accord.

The past four years had wrought many changes in them, but it was in Meredith that those changes had been the most dramatic. Lisa had always been striking; she'd never been hampered with the need for eyeglasses or cursed with baby fat. The contact lenses Meredith bought with her allowance two years before had eliminated her need for glasses and allowed her eyes to come into prominence. Nature and time had taken care of all the rest by giving an emphasis to her delicately carved features, thickening her pale blond hair, and rounding and narrowing her figure in all the right places.

Lisa, with her flaming curly hair and flamboyant attitude, was earthy and glamorous at eighteen. Meredith, in contrast, was quietly poised and serenely beautiful. Lisa's vivaciousness beckoned to men; Meredith's smiling reserve challenged them. Whenever the two girls went places together, males turned to stare. Lisa enjoyed the attention; she loved the thrill of dating and the excitement of a new romance. Meredith found her recent popularity with the opposite sex curiously flat. Although she enjoyed being with the boys who took her skiing and dancing and to their parties, once the newness of being sought after wore off, dating boys for whom she felt no more than friendship was pleasant, but not as wildly exciting as she'd expected it to be. She felt that way about being kissed too. Lisa attributed all that to the fact that Meredith had wrongly idealized Parker and now continued to compare every male she met to him. That undoubtedly accounted for part of Meredith's lack of enthusiasm, but the majority of it was probably caused by the simple fact that she had been raised in an adult household which was, moreover, dominated by a forceful, dynamic businessman. And although the boys she dated from Litchfield Prep were nice to be with, she invariably felt much older than they.

Meredith had known since childhood that she wanted to get her college degree and take her rightful place at Bancroft & Company someday. The Litchfield boys, and even their older college-age brothers whom she'd met, didn't seem to have any goals or interests other than sex, sports, and drinking. To Meredith, the idea of surrendering her virginity to some boy whose primary aim was to add her name to the list of Bensonhurst virgins deflowered by Litchfield men—a list that purportedly hung in Crown Hall at Litchfield—was not only nonsensical, it was humiliating and sordid.

When she did become intimate with someone, she wanted it to be someone she admired and trusted; she wanted tenderness and understanding, and she wanted romance too. Whenever she thought of having a sexual relationship, she envisioned more than making love; she envisioned long walks on the beach, holding hands and talking; long nights in front of a fireplace, watching the flames—and talking. After trying unsuccessfully for years to truly communicate with, and be close to, her father, Meredith was determined that her eventual lover would be someone she could talk to and who would share his thoughts with her. And whenever she envisioned that ideal lover, he was always Parker.

During the years she'd been at Bensonhurst, Meredith had managed to see Parker fairly often when she was home on vacations—an endeavor that was made easier by the fact that both Parker's family and hers belonged to the Glenmoor Country Club. At Glenmoor, it was traditional for the membership to appear en masse at the club's major dances and sports events. Until a few months before, when she'd turned eighteen, Meredith had been prohibited from attending the club's adult functions, but she'd managed to avail herself of those opportunities Glenmoor did offer. Each summer she'd invited Parker to be her partner in the junior-senior tennis matches. His acceptance had always been gracious; their matches had always been dismal defeats, owing mostly to Meredith's extreme nervousness at playing with him.

She'd used other ruses, too, over the years, like convincing her father to give several dinner parties each summer, one of which always included Parker and his family. Since Parker's family owned the bank in which all of Bancroft & Company's funds were deposited, and since Parker was already an officer of that bank, he was practically obliged to come to dinner both for business reasons and to act as Meredith's dinner partner.

At Christmas time, Meredith had twice managed to be standing under the mistletoe, which she'd hung in the foyer, when Parker and his family came to pay their annual holiday call on the Bancrofts, and she always went with her father when it was time to return the visit to the Reynoldses.

As a result of the mistletoe trick during her freshman year, Parker was the one who gave Meredith her first kiss; she'd lived on the memory of that until the next Christmas, dreamed about the way he felt and smelled and smiled at her before he kissed her.