Free The Donzerly Light by Ryne Douglas Pearson Page B

from that day forward it was a given what Jay Grady wanted to do with his life. From an article in an encyclopedia perused in the school library that morning came his future. His dream.
    Not the typical career choice for a teenage boy hardly into the changing of his voice. Fireman, policeman it was not. Farmer it would never be. Neither the things she had heard him muse about prior to that day: pilot (he had told her how he had watched the crop dusters for hours on end lace back and forth across the fields) or truck driver (because they got to go everywhere, and they got to drive cab-overs or conventionals pulling single or doubles—none of this she had understood, but she had willingly listened). No, those choices had not made the cut. They had been swept aside by the dream, by the want, the determination to become a stock broker.
    He would have to go to college, he told her. Four years at least, but maybe two more after that. And he would have to move to New York, because that was where the real money...correction— green ... was made. That was where hot brokers had to be.
    New York. At first her heart had sunk at that thought, because she had always pictured her life as one not too unlike what she had grown up with. Maybe not in Wisconsin, but there would be a house, a pretty two story house, with a big window in the living room where a Christmas tree could be seen from the street, and a front yard where flowers would bloom in the spring, and a backyard where the children they would have some day would play, and where their dog—a collie named Snoopy—would romp and run, and a big porch where she and her husband (Jay, Jay, oh let it be Jay) would sit on warm summer evenings and listen to the crickets chirp and the leaves rustle in the trees. That was what she wanted, and from what she had learned in school about the world’s biggest cities, she sure knew that New York was not the kind of place where those houses were generally found.
    But then she had remembered something. From the movies. Lots of them talked about a place called Long Island, where families lived. A check of her father’s worn atlas that night confirmed that it wasn’t that far from New York City (or near Manhattan, as the atlas called the part of New York where Wall Street was located).
    So her trepidation had been for naught. Jay could be a stock broker, and could work in Manhattan, and they could still live in a house with a yard for the kids and the dog, and a porch for she and Jay, and a window for the Christmas tree.
    His dream, her dream. One dream.
    And toward that dream there had been four years at Notre Dame. A lot of work for her, a lot of study for him, and a happiness for them both, with some really good times mixed in. Parties on game day, beer and pizza with friends gathered to cheer on the Fighting Irish. And after Notre Dame there were two years at the University of Indiana, and apartment that was a little bigger (very little), more work and study, more beer and pizza, and many, many more perfect nights together.
    Then came the Big Apple.
    Carrie closed the closet door, the recollections mated now with the present. Here. She walked back into the kitchen and stopped and looked around. It wasn’t Manhasset, or Floral Park, or any quaint and cozy place on Long Island. But someday her home would be. Their home would be. And before that, once—as Jay put it—he was ‘solid’ on Wall Street (which she took to mean established as a broker, making his green, able to support the both of them—and any tiny surprises that might come along), they would be married. Her parents would come, or maybe she and Jay would zip back to West Porter for a hometown ceremony. But ‘where’ mattered nowhere near as much as the reality that they would be together, man and wife, bound as one forever. Forget the ‘til death do us part’ thing—their love would be eternal.
    Silly, maybe, and surely there were women who would say she was a fool to tie