Free The Donzerly Light by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page A

dated other boys and Jay other girls. Those tenth and eleventh grade dalliances during a cool period of their relationship only served to make their feelings more honest. More true. ‘ Love’s best comparison is not a mirror, but a window ’ her mother had told her when suggesting that seeing other boys might not be a bad thing, and she had been so right.
    Their love changed. Became not only the moment, but want of the next moment as well. A future lay before them, and together was how it would be.
    And that was how it was, Carrie thought warmly as she took her man’s coat to the hall closet and hung it. That done, she stood there before the dark space, sweet memories coming forth once more.
    It was hardly bigger than this closet, she thought, recalling their first apartment. A room, really, above a toy store in West Bend, Indiana. The Catholic Church in West Porter, where Jay and his parents had worshiped, had put up what money he could not raise through scholarships, and he was off to the University of Notre Dame. And Carrie had followed.
    Of course it would have been frowned upon had the good parishioners of St. Paul’s known, but they did not, and apparently never found out that the boy they had sent off to college was shacking up with his girlfriend, who had tagged along despite her parents’ vociferous pleas not to. Pleas that hit a crescendo when she’d informed them that she wasn’t going to be going to school (Gasp!). That she was going with him to work and help him make it through school (Double Gasp!).
    And that she had. Waitressing, working during the Christmas rush in the toy store beneath their humble hovel. Jobs that were just jobs. Two jobs, sometimes three jobs at a time, so that he would not have to work more than part time. So that he could focus, and study, and work toward his dream.
    His dream. When had she first heard him talk of it? Long before he realized it was his dream, she figured. Last year of junior high, if her memory was on target. Walking home together, just out of the blue one day he had asked, ‘Do you know who owns General Motors?’ To which she had shrugged, which was a fortunate ignorance because he seemed all fired up to explain to her that thousands, maybe millions of people owned General Motors, the company that built the El Camino her father drove. She’d scrunched her nose at that bit of fact, confused, and he had gone on to say that there was this place called ‘Wall Street’, and that there there was a thing called the ‘stock exchange’, and at the stock exchange men called ‘stock brokers’ bought and sold stock for other people called ‘investors’, and that stocks were little pieces of companies like General Motors; pieces called ‘shares’. Big companies, middle sized companies, even some small companies. And anyone could buy stock in a company—if they had enough money. They could buy shares of General Motors, or Coca Cola, or Sears Roebuck, or Chase Manhattan Bank, or even shares of Madison Merchants Bank. The last example he had delivered with a bit of faintly sinister glee, something she had not understood then, but had come to as the years passed. Millions of people owned stock, which were actually pretty fancy looking pieces of paper, decorative like some award certificate you could get at the end of the school year for doing good in a subject—only more so. And all of this stock, every bit of it, was handled by the stock brokers. And for every share they traded, the broker made money. A ‘commission’, it was called.
    Some brokers were really rich, he had said, and the ones that weren’t were still doing all right. Really all right. Which meant that if you were a stock broker you wouldn’t be poor, you would make a whole lot of green, as he had started calling money right around then. She had never figured out why, and it had never mattered enough to ask, but from that time forward just about anything over a twenty was ‘green’ to him.
    And