Free The Celebrity by Laura Z. Hobson

And Fan was so concerned, so worried-looking. “Promise? Not a word to anybody?” Her own words startled her.
    “Promise. Oh, Deeny, come on. ”
    “Well, it’s just earned over a hundred thousand dollars.”
    “It what?” Fan almost screamed it.
    “It’s just been taken by Best Selling Books, that book club, you know, and they pay over a hundred thousand dollars down and maybe more later on.”
    “A hundred thousand—you’re fooling!”
    “Remember, you promised—”
    “A hundred thousand dollars ?”
    “To start with.”
    “Why, he’ll be rich for the rest of his life!”
    “Can you blame me for not sleeping?”
    “It’s just too marvelous—how proud and happy you must be! Oh, Deeny, I am too. Imagine having your own child—” She could not go on.
    The breathless admiration in Fan’s voice sent strong shivers of joy through Geraldine. Telling her couldn’t have been avoided, she decided firmly; somehow things had taken a turn which had led inevitably on, with no turning back, with no side path to duck into. It was, almost, like fate. Nobody could fight against fate.
    And since this was true, there was no reason to hold back any of the rest of it. She suggested going somewhere for coffee and then she told Fan the entire story, starting with their arrival at Thorn’s and ending with the way she and Gerald had watched the sun come up. It was wonderful to have somebody stare at you and hang on each separate word; your fatigue and chills vanished; you felt new, reborn. “Oh, let me, ” Geraldine cried when the counterman brought the punched tab-ticket; she wished it were for more than twenty cents. When she and Fan finally parted, they each said the same thing: “I’ll call you soon.”
    Geraldine went straight to the A. and P., marched up to the meat counter, and ordered briskly, as though she had never laid eyes on the butcher before. “Fine day, Mrs. Johns,” Bill said, “and you’re looking fine too.” Almost coldly she answered, “I was just told I was looking rather ill.” Bill stared at her but she ignored him. That was what had started it, she suddenly thought, that remark of Fan’s about her looking all worn out and ill. She had had to answer that, hadn’t she? And anyway, everybody had the right to one confidante, and Gerald need never know.
    Considerably cheered by these reasonable reflections, Geraldine paid for the chops and started toward the vegetable and fruit counters, but a few feet away, she halted. Edith Markham was there, in front of the oranges and grapefruit. Edith was almost as close a friend as Fan, but it might be wiser not to stop even to say hello. Casually, yet soundlessly, she moved backwards, away from the counters. Edith turned around.
    “You look so well, Deeny.”
    “Why shouldn’t I? I had the most marvelous news last night.”
    “What kind of news?”
    Geraldine thought, Oh, dear.
    The effect on Edith Markham was just as electric as it had been on Fanny Heston. Geraldine again felt her spirit expanding, filling with new sap and juice, like a tree in the spring sun, and as she talked, a delicious vision appeared to her mind’s eye, of other friends even now doing their marketing and destined by fate to cross her path on the way home.
    Shortly past noon of that same day, the cash register of the Johns Pharmacy at the corner of Main and Church had already rung up a larger daily total of dollars and cents than had ever been amassed in the entire history of the store, with the single exception of the day the deadly influenza epidemic of 1918 had hit the town. Such a purchasing of tooth paste and aspirin and shaving creams had never been known, of cold cream and cleansing tissues and soaps and nail polish, of baby talc and cough lozenges and bicarbonate of soda, and virtually everything else that could be had without a prescription.
    The heavy plate-glass door was scarcely still, and each separate customer, the moment her purchase had been made—her,