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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
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Wes Boyd’s Spearfish Lake Tales Contemporary Mainstream Books and Serials Online |
Their first time that afternoon was not their last time. Although they took some breaks, they spent a lot of time doing what seemed to come naturally, exploring the new dimension to their lives, and both of them liked it. They stopped a while for dinner – something from a can – but soon were back at their new favorite pastime. Eventually they fell asleep, holding onto each other tightly.
Like the weekend before, it was wonderful to wake up in bed with each other. After some morning loving, they got up and put on robes – the most they got dressed all weekend – and had breakfast, which consisted of boiled hot dogs and instant coffee, the pantry in the guys’ apartment being on the limited side. Afterwards, they spent some time together in the rather crummy shower, but had little question about what to do next.
It was toward the middle of Saturday afternoon as they were cuddled together after yet another wonderful bout when he asked her softly. “You’ve had enough experience to know, now. Does it fit?”
“It fits wonderfully,” she whispered back to him. “I never believed it could be so good. I think I’m starting to get a little sore, but I don’t want to quit now.”
“I don’t either,” he said. “But that means I have a question to ask. Eunice, will you marry me?”
“Of course,” she replied instantly. “I almost wish we were married right now.”
“I do, too,” he told her. “But I think it would be best if we put it off until after we graduate. Let’s not wait too long, though.”
“Pretty soon after,” she said. “It’s nice that we’ve had this time to be together by ourselves this weekend, but it’s going to end all too soon.”
“Yeah, it is. We ought to be able to get together again now and then, but it’s going to be harder to work around Eric and Donna. But now, my future wife, that leads to something we really need to talk about.”
“What’s that?”
“I’m thinking that for a while we need to keep it quiet that we’ve gotten engaged, especially around Eric and Donna. The big reason is that I think our folks deserve to be the first to know. Don’t get me wrong, Eric and Donna are our friends, but I don’t want them letting the cat out of the bag.”
“That’s not a bad idea,” she smiled. “I don’t know what’s going on with them. I mean, I can make a pretty good guess about what they’re doing this weekend and it involves at least some of the same things we’ve been doing, but I really doubt they’re talking about getting married.”
“I’d be willing to bet good money you’re right. I don’t know exactly how I want to say this, but it’s obvious that things are delicate between them, and I don’t exactly want to rub their noses in the fact we will be getting married. Anyway, I know I’ve got enough money to get you a ring, so long as we don’t go overboard on it. We don’t have to rush to get one.”
“When do you think we ought to tell our folks?”
“Good question. Not for a few weeks, anyway. That’ll give Eric and Donna a chance to work things out. In a month or so they ought to have settled things one way or the other. It might not be the worst idea to hold it off until Thanksgiving.”
“That seems so far away.”
“It is. It’s two and a half months or so. Now, I could be wrong, but I’ll bet that as soon as our mothers hear about it things are going to go crazy. I think we need to have a few things pinned down as well as we can before they get a chance to work on us.”
“I think you’re right about that,” she grinned. “Mom has already made some hints that she’s thinking about a wedding. I don’t want a big one, at least not one as big as I’ll bet she wants. I’d be happy with a quiet little service in the Amherst First Methodist Church, but we’re going to have to work to keep her from inviting everyone she’s ever heard of. That’s about what happened with my sister Rebecca. In fact, that’s a good reason to hold off telling our folks. She’s going to have long enough to go crazy over it as it is.”
“My mother won’t be far behind,” Jeff sighed. “I’m a little afraid of what’s going to happen if we let them get their heads together.”
Eunice was sitting at her desk in her dorm room after dark on Sunday evening when Donna arrived. It would have been nice to stretch her long weekend with Jeff into Monday, which was Labor Day to the rest of the country but not at Meriwether College, which seemed to detest the concept of organized labor in the first place. Donna seemed sunburned and windblown from riding over to Waterford Hills and back in the roadster. “So how did your weekend go?” Eunice asked.
“Everything considered, not very badly,” Donna replied. “The racing was all right, I guess. It’s not really my cup of tea, but Eric seems to enjoy it. We went to sort of a party Saturday night, and I guess I drank a little more than I should. That wasn’t a lot of fun when the engines got roaring this morning. That was probably the worst part of it.”
“But you had a good time with Eric?”
“Yeah,” Donna blushed a little in spite of the sunburn. “That part of it, well, I don’t have anything to complain about. So how did your weekend go?”
“Fairly well,” Eunice grinned. “Jeff and I got to spend a lot of time together, and we had some good times. So are you going racing with Eric again sometime?”
“I don’t know yet. There’s a race down in Ohio in a couple weeks that he wants to go to. It’s a long trip down there, and I won’t be able to take off as early. It may come down to the weather. If it’s nice, we’ll probably go. If it looks lousy, probably not. Either way, it would be the last one of the season. You wouldn’t mind if we went, would you?”
“Of course not,” Eunice grinned. “I’m sure Jeff and I can find something to do if you and Eric are gone.”
The next couple months both dragged by and flew by. Jeff and Eunice got to spend another weekend together when Eric and Donna went to the race in Ohio; the weather was marginal but Eric and Donna didn’t seem to mind.
Very soon they were past wearing light summer clothes, and the heavier, dowdier clothes the college more or less mandated didn’t seem quite so bad. The leaves turned color, then fell, leaving naked trees and all too often gray and dreary skies. Classes were both interesting and boring; all of them had to spend a lot of time reading and studying. Jeff struggled with his classes less than he usually did, and there was only one that required serious coaching for midterms.
Other than the racing weekend when Eric and Donna were in Ohio, Jeff and Eunice didn’t get to spend the time alone together they would have liked to, but they realized that the restriction was only going to be temporary. Every day that passed led them closer to the day when they would be together permanently.
After some discussion, Jeff and Eunice agreed they didn’t want to mess up the family holiday at Thanksgiving, but quietly laid plans to have the families get together for a light meal at the Harrington house on the Saturday following the holiday. Eric and Donna were to be invited, of course. It was hard to put together without tipping their hands, especially since everyone was pretty aware of the fact that the two of them were getting close.
But they mostly brought it off. Jeff and Eunice had driven down separately from Eric and Donna, who were in the Triumph, as usual – but now with the top up and the inadequate heater doing its best to ward off the November chill. Earlier in the day Eric had driven the Nash – to take advantage of the better heater – over to Meridian to bring Donna to the gathering, and she was as curious as the rest about what was going on.
It was coffee and light snacks in the Harrington living room. Once everyone had been served, Jeff and Eunice stood side by side while Jeff said, “You’re probably wondering why we called you all together today. Well, now you find out.”
There was silence in the room as he dropped to one knee, pulled out the small box with the engagement ring they’d bought months before, and said to his love, “Eunice, will you marry me?”
“Of course,” she smiled. “I’d like nothing better.”
Jeff took the ring from the box and slid it onto her finger, then stood up to so they could both share a kiss.
“I have to say this doesn’t come as a real big surprise,” Jeff’s father said, “I’m more surprised it took you two this long. Jeff, I’ve really come to like Eunice, and I hope you’ll be happy together.”
Of course, the women had to check out the ring while Jeff stood back and watched. “So are you planning on getting married soon?” Eunice’s mother asked.
“We both would like to,” Eunice told her. “But we realize that it won’t be wise until after we graduate next spring. But we’d like to do it as soon as we can schedule the church after that.”
“Do you have any plans for the wedding?”
“We’ve talked about it. We’d like to keep it fairly small. Donna, I’d like you to be my maid of honor, and as far as I know Jeff is planning on asking Eric to be the best man.”
“For obvious reasons, I haven’t asked him yet,” Jeff said. “Eric?”
“Sure, I’d be glad to.”
“And I’d be happy to be your maid of honor,” Donna agreed.
Eunice’s mother looked unhappy. “I would have thought you’d ask your sister,” she sniffed.
“I thought about it,” Eunice said, having realized from the beginning that this was going to be a bone of contention from now until the ceremony was over with, and very likely for years afterward. “I haven’t seen Rebecca in a couple years, and we were never very close. Donna is my best friend, and she was involved in getting Jeff and I together in the first place. It wasn’t a hard decision to make.”
“You should still give Rebecca some respect in the matter,” her mother charged.
“If Donna should break a leg or something, I might have to consider it,” Eunice grinned. “So Donna, watch where you step.”
“I will,” she smiled. “How long have you been planning this?”
“Long enough,” Eunice told her. “I realize this will change things considerably for me, but they were going to be changing when we graduated, anyway.”
Since Eric was not on good terms with his brother, his only living relative, the last couple years he’d come home for Christmas break and stayed with the Harrington family. He’d done that the summer before, at least for the little time that he’d actually been in Wychbold and not off adventuring on the east coast.
Jeff and Eunice were able to get a lot of arrangements made for their wedding and what would come after, while they were on the Christmas break. Of course, about every other day Eunice’s mother tried to get Eunice to reconsider having Donna as her maid of honor; the fact that Eunice turned her down flatly each time didn’t seem to matter much. Fortunately that was about the worst disagreement the two had, and by the time the break was partway over the date had been pinned down and at least an outline of the arrangements made.
In one respect, being at home for the break had one inconvenience over being at Meriwether. At least at college, Eunice and Jeff could get together by themselves once in a while. There was no chance of that in either Amherst or Wychbold, at least for the intimate times they’d come to enjoy, but even the chance to talk privately with no one butting in was missing, too. They’d each agreed they’d had a good Christmas – Jeff had come over to Eunice’s for a couple hours in the afternoon, and she’d been to his place in Wychbold on Christmas Eve, but neither occasion had been appropriate for a private talk. The best they could manage was to find some quiet little restaurant somewhere, find a booth in back, and talk quietly, which is what they were doing in Kay’s Restaurant in nearby Bradford the day after Christmas.
“Dad and I had a chance to talk about me coming into the business,” Jeff reported once the waitress had left their coffee. “What he said was that for a year or two he wanted me working in the main office in Wychbold as the assistant manager so I can get a little more oriented to the business side of things. But sometime in the next couple years Ray Upshaw in the Amherst office is going to be retiring, and Dad thinks when that happens he’s going to move me over there. He just doesn’t want Upshaw to feel like he’s being pushed.”
“I can understand that. Sometimes you have to walk a little lightly around people.”
“Right,” Jeff agreed. “Dad says he doesn’t want to make a change just for the sake of change. If he sends me to Amherst, I’ll probably be there until he retires, which is still several years off. It’s not like there are many other places to send me in the company, anyway.”
“It’s good to know you have that pinned down.”
“It is,” he agreed. “But he also said that he told me that because it was going to affect where you and I are going to live.”
“Yeah, it would be a little silly to buy a house and get all dug in at one place, and then have to move to another right away,” she agreed. “I suppose he has some ideas about that.”
“Of course, and generally I agree with him. What he thinks we ought to do is to rent a small house in Wychbold, but understand right from the start that we’re going to be moving in the next couple years. It wouldn’t have to be a big house, so we can start saving our money for a down payment on a more permanent place.”
“If you’re eventually going to be moving back to the Wychbold office, maybe it would be worthwhile to look for a place somewhere in between, at least when we look for something permanent. For now, a small house there would be fine, and one in Wychbold would keep my mother from dropping in too often.”
“That’s pretty much what I told him,” Jeff said, taking a sip of his coffee. “Since we’re not going to be in town much between now and when we get married, he’s going to start keeping his eyes open for us. We may have to come down some weekend to check a place out, but that doesn’t strike me as a problem.”
“It’s a good idea, Jeff. That’s one of the things I’ve been worried about. It’s a very short time between graduation and the wedding, and having to set up a house in the middle of that will make it even more hectic. I’d like to have it pretty well ready to move in before then.”
“I would, too, but it had better be a small house, and we’re still probably going to have our parents involved.”
“I guess there’s no avoiding it,” she sighed. “But I suppose we’ll have to make it work.”
“I think so, and there’s no reason we can’t do the detail stuff when we get back from the honeymoon. Which makes me ask, have you had any more thoughts about it?”
“Not really. Everyone keeps pointing us at Niagara Falls, but I don’t see what the big deal is about that place.”
“I think it’s just tradition. But look, Eric and I were talking yesterday after I got back home, and he had an idea for us. He said, ‘Why don’t you just go to Niagara Falls long enough to say you’ve been there, and then just keep going?’”
“Going where?”
“He says it doesn’t matter. New England is pretty in the spring. He said to just go where the wind blows us, so to speak, and then find a motel when we’re ready to stop for the night.”
“That strikes me as a better idea than staying in an expensive tourist trap for several days, and we do like driving and seeing the sights.”
“I think so too. But then, he really shocked me by saying it would be really fun if we took the Triumph.”
“What? On a honeymoon?”
“That was kind of my reaction when I first heard about it, but the more I think about it, it strikes me as being pretty romantic, just the two of us. The Triumph is really a fun car, especially on twisty, hilly roads, and he says there are tons of them between here and New England, especially once you get into eastern Ohio. On top of that, the car is small enough that we wouldn’t have the room to pack a lot of stuff. It’d be just you and me and the open road.”
“It does sound like fun when you put it that way, but what’s he going to do without a car?”
“He’s willing to drive the Nash for a couple weeks while we’re gone. He’s not planning on racing the TR-2 this year, and maybe not again anytime soon. The car is in good shape, and maybe we could have your dad give it a once-over before we get started.”
“He’d probably be willing,” Eunice said. “But I’d want to talk to him before we committed to doing it that way. But if he’d go along with it, the idea has some potential. It would be an adventurous and memorable honeymoon.
“I agree. It would be more fun than making that trip in the Nash. I mean, it’s good transportation, but it’s getting old and it was never intended to be a fun car in the first place.”
“It won’t be the kind of adventure Eric would have, but maybe it would give us a taste of what he does. That sounds like a fun way to celebrate our graduation and getting married. I agree, we’d better have Dad go through it first, just to be on the safe side. Let’s not make up our minds for sure right away.”
The holidays passed quickly, at least for Jeff and Eunice: they had a lot to do, but they did manage to get much of it done. Not long after New Year’s Eric drove the Nash over to Meridian to pick up Donna for the trip back to college; while he was gone, Eunice’s parents dropped her off at the Harrington house. “I’m glad to be heading back,” she told Jeff while they waited for Eric and Donna to return. “The sooner it’s over with, the sooner we’re done with it. It may be a long four months, but when it’s over it’ll be over and done for good, and we’ll be getting on with our lives.”
“Can’t happen soon enough for me,” Jeff agreed. “I don’t know how much time we’re going to get alone in the next four months, but it won’t be enough.”
“True, but we’ll have plenty of time afterwards to be by ourselves.”
The four of them had the Nash pretty well packed on the trip back, even though they’d only brought a minimum of stuff home with them for the holidays – there was heavy winter clothing, Christmas gifts, and the like. “It’s just as well that we’re probably going to have to make several trips home this spring,” Jeff said. “If we take some stuff each trip we might not have to rent a truck when we move out.”
Classes soon got under way. The winter was cold, gray and snowy, and the days seemed to drag; for a while it seemed like a long time until spring. Jeff and Eunice got together every chance they could, of course, and sometimes even managed to do it alone, but they still had studying to do. They were aware that Eric and Donna were also seeing each other, perhaps a little less frequently. However, Eunice got the idea from Donna that things weren’t going very well, although Donna said little about it. Much the same thing was happening with Eric; he didn’t tell Jeff a lot. But Jeff got the impression that things could be going better with Donna, but neither of them knew much about the details.
Like a runner with the finish line in sight, the last few weeks of their college careers went by quickly. It went especially quickly for Jeff and Eunice, since they had plenty of other things on their minds besides college. In their last six weeks of school, they only had one weekend, the one before finals, when they didn’t drive down to Wychbold to take care of some detail or another.
More than once they’d admitted to each other that it would have been a lot more convenient if they’d just put the wedding off for another month or so, just to give them time for some of the things they needed to do. However, the decision had been made, so all they could do was to follow through the best they could.
Jeff’s parents found a suitable house for rent on the north side of Wychbold. It was very small, only about twenty by twenty-four feet, and featured only one bedroom. It did, however, have a reasonably large living room with a fireplace. It seemed like it would be a cozy little place that would serve the couple well for a few years until their family outgrew it. It was unfurnished, of course, but the attics and basements of both Jeff’s and Eunice’s parents went a long way toward solving that problem, along with a couple of new pieces here and there. Even some of the things from the guys’ apartment would go toward getting them set up.
The house needed a good cleaning before they could move in; Jeff and Eunice worked at it at least some of the time when they were in town, although both sets of their parents put a lot of work into it, too. Even with their help the list of things to be done seemed almost endless, but at least the couple was assured of a place to live once they were married.
Since Jeff and Eunice were making the drive down to Wychbold most weekends, they started moving out of her dorm room and his apartment almost at once, so by the time finals week rolled around they had very little left in either place, and were largely living out of suitcases. Even most of Eric’s things had been moved back to the Harrington attic in Wychbold, and at that he didn’t tend to accumulate things the way Jeff did.
From what Jeff and Eunice could tell, the situation with Eric and Donna was going along more or less normally, although Jeff could at least tell that Eric was a little less happy and more distracted than he might have been. By then Jeff was getting pretty distracted himself, what with all the preparations to get married, setting up a household, and a myriad other things on top of classes and studying for finals.
Finally the college careers came to an end for the four of them. The last finals for Jeff and Eunice were on Thursday; they already had the Nash loaded before they took them, and as soon as the tests were completed they were on the road, this time with the last of their things from college. All the restrictions of the stiff way the college dictated the student’s demeanor, the housemasters and housemothers, and the petty restrictions were in the past.
The final trip home from college first took Jeff and Eunice to Amherst, with Eric following along in the Triumph, so he could leave it with Eunice’s father for the promised thorough going-over so Jeff and Eunice could take it on their honeymoon. Once Jeff and Eunice said goodbye – it wouldn’t be for long since they had things to do in Wychbold the next day – Jeff and Eric went on their way. The only one of the four left at college was Donna, who had accumulated quite a carload in the girl’s dorm room, so she had to wait for her parents to come help her move out on Saturday.
They were all back at Meriwether College one last time on Sunday for the graduation ceremonies. It turned out to be a beautiful early May day, warm with a nice sun showing in a cloud-dotted sky. The ceremony was held in the classic old college chapel, which was filled to capacity with graduates and parents. One by one they were called up to receive the diplomas that they’d worked toward for four years. For all four of the friends, it was the last of their education, the last of their college careers, and a huge watershed in their lives: things would be very different for them after that day.
Finally they were done with the caps, the gowns, and the formalities. A chapter in their lives had ended, and it was time to move on.
