The phone was quiet after Eunice’s long discussion with Donna. It had been good to talk with her; Donna had been through losing a long-time husband and could share some things with the perspective of one who knew what it was like. As hectic as the next few days were likely to be, Eunice realized that she had probably just spent more personal time talking with Donna on the phone than they’d get face to face later with all the relatives around.

Donna had followed a rocky road indeed through the first blissful years of Eunice and Jeff’s marriage, and, like Eunice had told her, there hadn’t been much they could have done to help her through those troubled days.

Eunice’s coffee was long cold now; she took the cup to the kitchen and poured the contents in the sink before filling the cup again. She went back to her chair in the living room and started thinking about some of those days, how blissful it had been for Jeff and her, and how troubled it had been for her friend.

Fall 1960 – Summer 1961

They didn’t see Donna again until October, when she and Frank came down for a weekend mostly to show off Donna’s new engagement ring. Of course, Donna and Frank spent most of that time in Meridian with her parents. Her mother was reportedly a little disappointed that her attempts to put Donna together with Jerry Peters had come to nothing, but Donna was just as glad to have that issue behind her once and for all.

The couple also stopped by Blue Lake to see Jeff and Eunice’s new house, and to ask Eunice if she would be willing to serve as Matron of Honor at the wedding tentatively planned for the next spring. Eunice accepted on the spot, of course.

They had only been in the house for a couple weeks at the time, and their belongings were still finding out where they really wanted to be. They were just enough into the heating season to tell that they were going to be warmer this winter than the previous year. “Are you planning on doing some water skiing out of here?” Frank asked.

“Hadn’t really thought about it,” Jeff told them. “We weren’t living here in the summer, of course, but our neighbor tells us that the lake is a little too small for water skiing. We managed to spend a little time out here over the summer, mostly with our new neighbor, and we never saw anyone doing any.”

“That’s a shame,” Frank said. “If the place were a little bigger you could have a really nice boat with one of those big 65-horse Mercurys. A guy I know has one on Black Lake, and it really flies.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Jeff told him. “We didn’t buy this place for water skiing. We bought it to have a place to live. I’m going to keep my eyes open for a rowboat and a small outboard just in case I want to use it. My dad likes to fish, and it ought to be nice for us to go out and spend a few quiet hours. We wouldn’t get that with a bunch of people water skiing, especially on a lake this small.”

“If that’s what you want, I guess it’s all right, but I’d just as soon have something a little more active.”

Although Donna and Frank were at the Blue Lake house only for a couple hours, when the two finally left both Jeff and Eunice admitted they were glad to see them go. Frank had seemed a lot more overbearing than he had on the trip in the spring; his way seemed to be the only way, and anything else was just not up to his standards. Plus, he was pretty loud and obnoxious about it. “I don’t know,” Jeff opined, “but it looks to me like Donna is letting herself in for more trouble than she’s bargaining for.”

“I think you’re right,” Eunice agreed. “But she has to know more about him than we do.”

“True, but you have to wonder if she’s just seeing him as available, and overlooking his faults,” he replied.

“You could be right about that, but I guess it’s her decision. I guess all I can say is that I hope it works out all right for them.”

Within a month or so of their move to the new house, Ray Upshaw, who ran the Amherst office for Harrington Oil, decided to retire so he could spend the winter in warmer climates where heating oil wasn’t as much of a necessity. It was no surprise; both Jeff and his father had known it was coming, and it had been part of the reason Jeff and Eunice had bought the Blue Lake house in the first place. Upshaw had been at the Amherst office even before Jeff’s father bought the business, so knew his way through it backwards and forwards.

Both Jeff and his father had more or less been hoping that Upshaw would stay on for another year or two, but now his announced intention was to leave at the first of the year. That meant Jeff was only going to have a couple of months to pick up the reins in Amherst, and he knew he was going to have to hustle to do it in order to get all the useful knowledge from Upshaw that he could. Worse, he still had things in Wychbold that needed doing, so almost every day he had to drive from one town to the other, sometimes more than once.

It was a tough period, and things would have gone much worse if it weren’t for Agnes Flint, the bookkeeper and secretary at Amherst. Agnes had been at the office for twenty years – longer than Upshaw – and knew just about everything there was to know about the operation. It was clear right from the beginning that Jeff was going to have to lean on her heavily to keep things going normally, and he was glad she was there.

By the time Christmas rolled around things were going fairly smoothly at the Amherst office, although there were still a lot of details for Jeff to pick up. By then they’d been in the Blue Lake house long enough to learn a few things about it. It was proving to be a lot easier to heat than the Icebox had been; in spite of the house being nearly three times the size, it was costing only about half as much to heat.

Christmas – their first one at the Blue Lake house – was memorable, since Jeff and Eunice had both sets of parents over for the holiday dinner. It was a lot of work, more than she had anticipated, but she managed it and they had a good holiday. It was a time for sitting around and talking casually with the parents, something they sometimes had trouble finding the time for.

Both Jeff’s and Eunice’s fathers asked about Eric, who had been part of their lives for so long. “To tell the truth,” Jeff said, “we don’t know very much. We get a letter from him about every other month, and the letters never say a great deal. We know he’s still at that same place in Germany and he’s apparently having a good time.”

“It strikes me he always was pretty good at that,” Eunice’s father smiled.

“That he was, if you ignore the fact that his idea of a good time was always a little different than anyone else’s,” Jeff shook his head. “Of course, you know about how he got involved with rock climbing a year ago last summer. Where he’s at in Germany it’s not rocks but real mountains, and apparently he and a few other guys from the post he’s at spend all the time they can getting out in them. He’s mentioned a few climbs that he apparently thought were big deals, although the names mean nothing to me.”

“He doesn’t appear to be very good at writing letters,” Eunice agreed. “We’re just hoping he’ll spend some time with us when he comes back next summer so we can hear the stories he has to tell.”

“Have you heard anything about what he plans to do when he gets out of the service?” Eunice’s father asked.

“Not a word,” Jeff told him. “If you want the truth, I don’t think he knows, either. We don’t even know for sure if he’s going to come back to this area to stay or what, but if I had to guess, it’ll be that he’ll wind up somewhere else, someplace near mountains or the ocean or something. At this point we’re just hoping we’ll see him again at all.”

By the time Christmas rolled around, Jeff and Eunice had reached the point in their lives when they were getting asked pointed questions about starting a family. These questions often came from their mothers and aunts as well as from others, but the last time they’d seen Donna the question had come from her too. Up till now their response had been a non-committal, “We’re not quite ready yet,” which included an unspoken request for the questioner to mind their own business.

But when it came up around the Christmas dinner table, Eunice admitted, “Not quite yet, but soon.” She avoided giving a more-detailed answer to further direct questions.

Eunice and Jeff had agreed right from the beginning that a baby would be at best inconvenient early on, and they wanted to have some time together and get a few things in their lives settled before they got started on expanding their family. Now that they were living in the Blue Lake house and there were no real problems on the horizon, the time was indeed getting closer. The only thing holding them back was Eunice’s desire not to be heavily pregnant during the hot months of summer, a reasonable issue in days when home air conditioning wasn’t common. That meant they were planning on getting started come late spring.

They had been careful about that issue right from the beginning over two years before, a decision that involved condoms, diaphragms, a careful eye on the phase of the moon and crossed fingers, which of course sometimes took some of the spontaneity out of things. They had learned to live with it but looked forward to the day when they wouldn’t have to bother with it, either. A pregnancy prior to that Christmas would have been an inconvenience, not a crisis; now, assuming they got the timing right, they were looking forward to it.

Around the first of April they dropped all their precautions and were willing to let nature take its course. Up until this time they’d enjoyed an active and enjoyable sex life and they let it continue, except for the fact that during the periods of the month they guessed were her fertile periods they were even more active. That gave them even more reason to do something they liked doing very much, anyway.

They’d come to like the Blue Lake house after having lived there for several months. They’d found a few things that needed fixing, but nothing terribly out of line. One thing had become clear to them, though: the house was a little on the small side. It was plenty big enough for them as it was, but it was clear that by the time they had a couple or more growing kids it would get a little close. But they’d already lived there long enough to know that they liked it and didn’t want to have to move to a different place unless absolutely necessary.

After some discussion, and a consultation with Wilt Aldrich, Jeff sketched out a tentative plan for an addition on the south side of the house, which would add two more rooms and allow for some expansion of the living area. While it wasn’t needed right now, they could see the time coming when the expansion would be useful. “I think we’ve found our place,” Jeff said one time. “I don’t see any great need to move again unless something really unexpected happens.”

Once the heating season died down in the late spring, they decided to take the Triumph on another trip, since they didn’t want to be gone over the summer when they could take full advantage of the lake house. The way things worked around they could only take a few days in late May so couldn’t go very far. But a run down to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky made enough of an excuse for them to get out with the roadster for a few days and got them back to Blue Lake in time for a weekend visit from Eunice’s considerably older sister, Rebecca.

The early summer of 1961 was notable for Donna’s marriage to Frank Newton. It had long been agreed that Eunice was going to be Donna’s Matron of Honor, but it took some months for the details to be worked out. Since Frank was from Hancock, well west in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, Hughesville was reasonably placed around halfway in between, and many of both Donna’s and Frank’s current friends lived around there. But Donna’s mother was always a person who had to have things her own way, and according to her there was no other place possible to have the wedding but the Methodist Church in Meridian. She even held out for having Jerry Peters as the Best Man! That especially irked Donna since she didn’t ever want to see him again.

It all worked out in the end but it took some negotiation and compromise, along with quite a bit of sulking on both mother’s and daughter’s parts. On the second weekend in June Jeff and Eunice got into the Rambler and headed to Hughesville for the wedding.

It was a pretty good wedding so long as they overlooked the occasional snippy comment from Donna’s mother, who was still clearly unhappy about not being able to dictate everything about the wedding to her daughter, not that she didn’t try.

While the wedding went well, the same couldn’t be said about the reception. It was organized well enough for everyone except Donna’s mother, but Frank and some of his buddies were drinking heavily, and got quite loud and raucous. While Jeff still liked to have two or three each day, and Eunice usually shared at least one with him, neither of them ever got drunk and obnoxious. That seemed to be expected for Frank and his friends, and it took a lot of fun out of the reception for Jeff and Eunice as well as for a lot of others. Finally they decided to leave earlier than they’d intended, and let the drunks have their friends.

On their way back to the motel, Eunice commented, “It looks to me like Donna isn’t going to get the usual tender wedding night lovemaking tonight. In fact, I’d be willing to bet she doesn’t get any at all, or if she does she’s not going to enjoy it.”

“No bet,” Jeff shook his head. “She’s going to wind up having to pour him into bed, and have to deal with his hangover in the morning.”

“That’s going to be quite a hangover, too, the way he was knocking it back. She didn’t seem very happy about it, either.”

“I know this is a trite thing to say, but she’s made her bed, now she’s going to have to lie in it. I hope she can handle it, but if I was her, I’d sure be having second thoughts. I keep thinking that she had to have been able to do better than that clown.”

“I guess the pickings were on the slim side up here,” Eunice replied thoughtfully. “When you get right down to it, Frank is not the kind of guy I would have thought she’d wind up marrying.”

“It was her choice.” He let out a sigh. “I mean, I doubt that she and Eric could have ever gotten together, but Eric, well, he may have his problems but he’d never be the jerk that Frank appears to be.”

“That’s assuming the two would have ever gotten married in the first place. Eric was a nice guy all right, but I’m coming to believe that he’s not the marrying kind, just like he claimed. You know, the thought crosses my mind that he ought to be getting out of the Army sometime around now.”

“Actually, a couple weeks ago, if I read the calendar right,” Jeff agreed. “But I don’t know the actual dates, or how him getting out actually works. I wouldn’t be surprised to see him showing up on our doorstep any time now.”

“You could be right. I wonder how he’ll feel about Donna getting married?”

“I wouldn’t be surprised if he’d be relieved to know that she won’t still be after him,” he laughed. “Although if he ever meets Frank, he may change his mind. But what’s done is done, and it’s all in the past, now. I just want to see Eric again, and get the whole story on what’s happened the last couple of years.”

“I’ll have to admit I’m curious about it, too.”

Toward the middle of the next week a letter showed up in their mailbox from Eric; they wasted no time in opening it.

Jeff and Eunice:

I know this may come as something of a surprise, but I’m going to stay in Europe for a while. The Army has a deal where if I take my discharge in Europe, they’ll still bring me back to the states for free if I do it within a year, and I decided I’d be stupid to not take advantage of it.

I think I told you in another letter about Chip Jeffords, who has been my most regular climbing buddy for the last year and a half. We had some great climbs in the Alps, especially last summer, and we even got out in the winter when we could. We’ve been talking it over for a while, and we’ve decided that it would be foolish of us to bypass the chance to spend a summer climbing in the Alps and not have to worry about leaving a good climb to go back to the Army.

We’re planning on just backpacking and hitchhiking around the Alps the best we can, staying in youth hostels and climbing huts. Chip has a copy of this book, Europe On $5 A Day, and what with everything we think we’ve got enough money saved to make it through until next fall. If we run short, I know I can still get the money from the Triumph from you, so that ought to help in an emergency or if we can’t make it through the season on what we have.

I don’t have any guesses about when we’re going to be back, but it probably won’t be before cold weather sets in.

Have a good summer, and if you see her tell Donna I wish her my best.

Eric

“You know,” Jeff smiled, “doesn’t that sound just exactly like Eric?”

“I agree. That’s Eric all over. It sounds almost like an extension of what he did with the Triumph back while we were in college. He’s really going to have some stories to tell now. I’m not looking for the day when he decides he’s going to have to settle down and get a job.”

“You’re right, that’s going to be a big heartbreak for him. I’ll bet he holds off as long as he can. In a way I sort of envy him that. He’s living a life that you and I will never know.”

“Sometimes it sounds like fun,” she agreed. “But much of the time it sounds pretty uncomfortable to me. But I guess we’re different people and we missed our chance for that kind of thing, if we ever had one in the first place.”

“Oh, we could have had that kind of life, but it would mean that we wouldn’t have jobs, or this house, or a comfortable future. Missing out on that kind of life is the price we pay for what we have.”

“He may be enjoying himself, but I like the life I have. I think I’m going to go get out of these work clothes and get on a playsuit before I start on dinner.”

“I have to admit, there are advantages to our being married,” he grinned. “I like seeing you wearing some of your playsuits, but I like taking them off you even more.”

“Why don’t we just skip the extra undressing?” she laughed. “I mean, if you don’t mind having dinner a little late. I can still put on a playsuit and you can take it off me later.”

“I always knew you had some good ideas.”

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