Free The Road Taken by Rona Jaffe

house,” she said. “Still living. He needs you.”
    “I’m sure he does.”
    “No, I mean he needs your love and support. He’s very vulnerable. Very sensitive.”
    “Oh, he is that,” Celia said.
    “I don’t know why you don’t like him.”
    Celia said nothing.
    “And you yourself are in excellent health and will have a long life,” Madame Pauline said.
    The session was over. Rose took Celia’s place. Celia sat in the waiting room, amazed. How could this woman know so many things? On the other hand, everyone had several children, and it would be a good guess that some were girls and others were boys, that one of them might have died, and that there was another one who didn’t fit in. Certainly she had given away enough clues about how she felt about all of them, if not actual information. And Madame Pauline had been wrong about Rose. Nothing would ever happen to Rose. I could be a fortune-teller myself, Celia thought, sorry she had spent the money. She tapped her foot, waiting impatiently for Rose to be finished.
    “Oh, what fun!” Rose said cheerfully, stepping through the curtain. “Thank you for taking me.”
    “You’re welcome. What did she tell you?”
    “She did the cards and my horoscope!” Rose said. “Because she said I was interesting.” She read from a little piece of paper where she had taken notes. “I’m a Capricorn with the moon in Libra and Aquarius rising, and I’m well-balanced and thoughtful and extraordinarily adaptable. I have a dignified, humane, law-abiding nature, and a good disposition, and my combination of signs is favorable for marriage, partnership, and friendship.”
    “That’s what I keep trying to tell you,” Celia said. She was a little jealous that Madame Pauline hadn’t found her interesting enough to do her horoscope too. “And what else?”
    “That I would be rich and have a surprising life,” Rose said.
    “Well then,” Celia said, “you’d better get on with it.”
    Rose laughed. “Not that I believed it, but it’s nice to hear,” she said. “What did she tell you?”
    “Don’t I get to keep some secrets?” Celia said coyly. She supposed their adventure had not been such a waste after all. She smiled at Rose. It was nice to see her cheerful again; it had been a long time.

Chapter Seven
    It was 1925. People gossiped and speculated about Rose Smith and Ben Carson, although it was old news by now. He came around faithfully to see her on all his vacations back home. She was twenty-five, no longer considered young and dewy enough to be so picky as to turn him down, if in fact he had even asked. The town consensus was that her engagement to her poor dead soldier had counted for her as enough connection to love and romance for her lifetime, and that she would wear her memories instead of a wedding ring to her grave; and so for this she had become a kind of symbol, a casualty of the Great War, even though Tom had not died in battle, or even in Europe.
    Rose seemed resigned to whatever life would bring her. In place of babies of her own she had the first-graders she taught so contentedly. She had her close and affectionate family, her lifelong friends (who were all married by now), and her friends’ children to play with. She went to the motion pictures every week, and she read novels voraciously. Hugh had given her the two books by the new young author F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose world, so foreign to her own, she found romantic and glamorous, and after that she had begun to go to the library and bring books home. She listened to music, and in the early evenings if you passed the Smith house and the windows were open you could hear her phonograph.
    Her early grief had given way to a center of calm; she had a look about her that was surprisingly arresting. She seemed self-confident, self-sufficient, self-contained, and this in a woman who should have been pitiful was mysterious and admirable, if not actually provocative. People were a little jealous of