The Invitation (Montgomery/Taggert 19)

Curious, she climbed down the ladder to stand in front of him. She was considered a tall woman, but this man topped her by several inches, and now that she was closer to him, he seemed quite familiar. Taking the trinket from his hand, she saw that it was a school pin. CHS was embossed in gold on an enameled background of the school colors, blue and gold. At first the pin meant nothing to her, but then, looking into the tall man’s dark, serious eyes, she began to laugh. “You’re little Billy Montgomery, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve grown up.” Stepping back, she looked at him. “Why, you’ve become quite handsome. Do you have hundreds of girlfriends? How are your parents? What are you doing now? Oh, I have a thousand questions to ask you. Why haven’t you come to see me before now?”

There was only the smallest smile on his face that betrayed that he was pleased by her enthusiastic greeting. “I have no girlfriends. You were always the only girl I ever loved.”

She laughed again. “You haven’t changed much. You’re still too serious, still an old man.” Easily she slipped her arm into his. “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea and tell me all about yourself? I remember how awful I used to be to you.” As they started walking, she looked up at him. “It’s hard to believe that I used to change your diapers.”

Still smiling, arm in arm, they walked toward her house. Billy had never talked much when he was a child, and now his silence gave Jackie time to remember. He and his brothers and sisters were her first baby-sitting job. He had given her her first experience in child care and her first experience with dirty diapers. After that first day, she had gone home to tell her mother that she would never, never have any children, that children should be kept in a barn with lots of straw until they were housebroken.

She’d always liked Billy. He was so quiet and always ready to listen or to do whatever Jackie

wanted to do. If she suggested reading a book aloud to the other kids, they’d invariably want to play monkeys-in-the-grape-arbor. If Jackie wanted to play rolling-down-the-hill, then the kids would want to sit quietly in the house and play with their dolls or trains.

But Billy was different. He always wanted to do what Jackie wanted to do when she wanted to do it. At first she thought he was just being agreeable, but too many times over the years Billy’s mother had asked Jackie what she was going to do with the children that day. When Jackie told her, his mother would laugh and say, “That’s just what Billy was saying he wanted to do.”

Jackie was pleased with the quiet little boy, but she wasn’t so pleased when she wasn’t baby-sitting and he’d show up wherever she was. If he was downtown with his family and he saw Jackie, he’d leave his family and follow her. Never mind that sometimes he had to cross a wide street in front of rearing horses and motorists frantically slamming on their brakes. He just wanted to be with Jackie wherever she was. Jackie’s mother started to tease her daughter, saying that Billy had fallen in love with her. Jackie thought it was kind of cute until Billy began showing up on her doorstep in the evenings. Then he became a pest. He became the pesky little brother she never had—and had never wanted.

Her mother made an agreement with Billy’s mother that Jackie would look after Billy three afternoons a week. When Jackie heard, she was furious, but her mother wouldn’t listen, so Jackie decided to get rid of the kid. She planned to do that by scaring him to death. At fifteen she was a complete tomboy, and Billy, at five, was big for his age and quite sturdy. Jackie would climb a tree, leaving Billy alone at the bottom for hours. She hoped he’d complain to his mother, but he never did. His patience was endless, and he seemed to have a sixth sense about what he could and could not do. When he was five, he wouldn’t swing on the rope tied to the tree branch that overhung the river, nor would he when he was six, but when he was seven, he grabbed the rope and swung. Jackie could see that he was terrified, but he set his little mouth and did it, then dog-paddled over to her in the water. She was tempted to not say one word of congratulations, but then she grinned at him and winked. She was rewarded with one of Billy’s rare smiles.

They were better friends after that. Jackie taught him to swim and allowed him to help her around her house. Billy, who spoke only when he had something to say, said that Jackie’s house was more fun than his. In his house the servants got to do everything, but at hers the people got to do the good stuff themselves.

“That’s one way of looking at it,” she’d said.

Billy’s mother was the one who suggested that he ask Jackie to go to the movies with him. Jackie, who had no money for such frivolities, was thrilled—until she saw the most handsome boy in her class outside the theater. She stopped to say hello to him, but Billy put his little body between them and told the six-foot-tall teenager that Jackie was his date and he should get lost—if he knew what was good for him. It was six months before the ribbing at school stopped. The other kids were merciless in teasing her about her three-foot-tall bodyguard who was going to bruise their kneecaps with his fists. “Do you pick him up to kiss him good night, Jackie?” they taunted.

By the time Billy was seven the townspeople referred to him as Jackie’s Shadow. He was with her whenever possible, and no matter what she did she couldn’t make him stop following her. She yelled at him, told him what she thought of him, even tried telling him she hated him, but he was still always there.

One day when she was seventeen, a boy walked her home from school. They stopped by the mailbox for a moment, and as the boy reached out to remove a leaf from Jackie’s hair, out of the bushes sprang little seven-year-old Billy, as wild as a wet cat, launching himself at the unsuspecting boy. Jackie, of course, wanted to die. She pulled Billy off the boy and tried to apologize, but the boy was embarrassed because Billy had knocked him flat into the dirt road. The next day at school everyone gleefully renewed taunting Jackie about her midget lover whom she kept hidden in the bushes.

Billy’s mother, a sweet woman, heard of the fracas and came to apologize to Jackie, justifying her youngest son’s actions by saying, “He loves you so much, Jackie.” That was not what she wanted to hear at seventeen. She wanted to hear that the captain of the football team loved her, not some kid half size.

She wouldn’t speak to Billy for three weeks after that episode, but she relented when she woke up one morning and found him asleep on the porch swing. He’d climbed out of his bedroom window sometime during the night and waited for the milk truck to arrive. After hiding himself among the milk cans, he got out when the driver stopped at Jackie’s house, where he curled up into a ball on the hard slats of the swing and fell asleep. When Jackie saw him, she said that he was a curse of the magnitude of the plagues of Egypt, but her mother thought Billy was cute.

Billy had been tagging along behind her the day she met Charley and fell in love with the airplanes.

Billy had said, “Do you love airplanes more than you love me?”

“I love mosquito bites better than I love you,” she’d answered.

Billy, as usual, said nothing, which always made her feel worse than if he’d yelled or screamed or cried like other kids. But Billy was an odd little boy, more like an old man in a kid’s body than an actual child.

When she ran away from home with Charley, she was too cowardly to face her mother, so she left her a note. But she was halfway to the airfield when, impulsively, she ran back. She caught a ride with a man she knew, and he dropped her off at Billy’s house, where a birthday party was going on. Most of Billy’s eleven brothers and sisters, along with most of the children of Chandler, were terrorizing each other and making enough noise to cause an earthquake, but there was no sign of Billy. His mother, calm in the midst of chaos, saw Jackie and pointed to the side of the porch.

She found Billy there, sitting alone, reading a book about airplanes, and as Jackie looked at him she thought that maybe she did love him just a little bit. When solemn little Billy, who rarely smiled, saw her coming toward him, his face lit up with joy. “You never come to see me,” he said, and the way he said it made her feel guilty. Maybe she’d been too hard on him. After all, they’d had some laughs together.

He looked at her suitcase. “You’re going away with them, aren’t you?” There were tears in his voice.

“Yes, I am. And you’re the only one I’m telling. I left my mother a note.”

Billy nodded in an adult way. “She wouldn’t want you to go.”

“She might make me stay.”

“Yes, she might.”

She was used to his old man ways, but she could see his sadness. Reaching out her hand, she ruffled his dark hair. “I’ll see you around, kid,” she said and started to turn away, but Billy flung his arms around her waist and held her tight.

“I love you, Jackie. I will love you forever and ever.”

Dropping down on her knees, she hugged him back. Then, holding him away from her, she smoothed back his hair. “Well, maybe I love you a little bit, too.”