Free The Truth of the Matter by Robb Forman Dew Page B

me. But not . . . He wasn’t being sarcastic. Not unkind, I mean. I think he was just curious.” Will paused for a moment, musing over Dwight Claytor’s peculiar detachment.
    “And you made me feel so much better. I’d gotten myself into a real fix, and I was homesick before I even left. But you told me I would be fine, that everyone admired me for what I was doing. Your brothers . . . Lord! I was relieved more than I can say. It’s the thing that made it possible for me to get on the bus that night. But that’s the sort of person you are, Agnes. I wouldn’t have taken the liberty of saying good-bye to you without asking permission.”
    She looked at him for a minute, thoroughly astonished. She didn’t remember a single thing about any of this.
    “For goodness sake! I’m almost forty-six years old, Will! I’ve had a husband! I have children! What you’re remembering . . . It wasn’t ever like that . . .”
    “Oh, it was. You were sitting out by the croquet court. You were sitting in the swing. I thought you looked so pretty.” He paused for a moment. “Of course, I hadn’t even gotten to know Sally yet. I don’t want you to think that I would ever . . . But it was through you that I did get to know her eventually. She just seemed out of reach to all the boys in Washburn. We were afraid of her, she was so pretty. We didn’t know anything about her, since we never dreamed we’d have a chance,” he said.
    Agnes had been uneasy the moment Will began to relate this tale, but at least for a few minutes it had been flattering. Now she was simply annoyed, and yet, she wasn’t any good at letting someone else realize he’d made a mistake. Had put a foot wrong. Said something remarkably stupid, given the point he was trying to make. She followed her inclination to save him embarrassment.
    “
Wasn’t
Sally so pretty! And she was smart, too. She was funny. You were a hero to her when you went off to Canada.” In fact, it surprised Agnes as she spoke to remember that Sally had thought of Will as a hero. Sally Trenholm had been a good friend of Agnes’s, and the prettiest girl in their class at Linus Gilchrest, but she had died only five years after she and Will were married, before she was even thirty years old.
    “But, Agnes, you’d been there all my life! Right there next door. I knew you so well. I really believed you were the most serious love of my life. I so much wanted to have someone waiting for me. Not just my family. My mother. I wanted someone to talk about. I didn’t want to seem so young, and I wanted to believe I had someone to make plans about.” He ran his hand over his hair, pushing it off his forehead, which was a gesture he often made when he was perplexed.
    “But it was Sally who wrote to tell me you got married,” he went on. “I was surprised. You’d married Warren Scofield! He seemed to me to be one of those men already . . . oh, out of our lives. In the same category as my father. As
your
father. Established, I mean. Someone who was all done. Who wasn’t still becoming something. He was already doing what he had grown up to do. It seemed to me that you’d married into another life. Well . . . But to get that letter from Sally . . . that was a surprise. It was a sweet letter. She didn’t want me to feel bad. That was something. That did set me up for a while. I didn’t even know she remembered who I was.”
    Will was looking at her, and she realized he was expecting her to say something. “I’m sorry, what —”
    “You must have known how I felt about you, though? Back then? When I joined up early, it was you I was hoping to impress. You’d always been right there, and then you’d grown up. . . . I think you’ve been in my mind one way or another all my life. If a disaster happened, for instance. Say, a tornado . . . Well, or this war. I always think, Is Agnes all right? So, you see what I mean?”
    “I didn’t have a single notion of how you felt, Will. I think