Free Please Write for Details by John D. MacDonald Page A

insurance. She had put a little over three thousand in a savings account, and, right after the first of each month the two checks arrived, one for eighty-two fifty and one for thirty-one dollars. So long as she lived with her parents it was more than enough. And there was the car, Rob’s car, that she seldom used. Once, during the third month of her grief, she had taken the car out and driven it at high speed through the clarity of an autumn morning, knowing how simple it would be to wrench the wheel and die in violence as Rob had died, but could not bring herself to make that final fatal gesture.
    She was an only child and she knew that it saddened her parents to see her so withdrawn from life. But she could not help resenting the many ways, some subtle, some all too obvious, that they used to try to draw her back into involvement in life.
    She knew that so much brooding was not good for her, but she did not want to find a job that would involve her emotions in any way. She wanted something mechanical and tiring, so she could sleep. Her father was a dentist. Much to the consternation of her parents, in spite of their gladness that she was doing something, she found a job in an electronics plant where she sat each day at a long table and stapled printed circuits to amplifier chassis. The other women, a bawdy and talkative crew, spent the first few weeks riding her, calling her Princessand Lady Barbara, doing their work with little fingers crooked. But when she did not respond, they tired of the game and left her alone.
    On her twenty-fifth birthday, early in May, she could think only of her twenty-fourth birthday, with Rob. It had come on a Sunday and they had taken a huge picnic lunch and two bottles of chilled champagne into a remote Michigan meadow and he had toasted her as “this elderly party to whom I am married” and later on they had made love in the tall, fragrant spring grasses, and napped there, and stayed to watch a moon come up, and driven slowly home, his arm around her.
    But this birthday was stiff and strained, the three of them around the dinner table, the cake brought proudly from the kitchen. Forced laughter at forced jokes. And the presents to unwrap. A cashmere sweater, a scarf, a small bottle of good perfume. And finally, the envelope from her father containing the round-trip airline ticket, and the letter of acceptance from a Miles Drummond, stating that he was pleased to welcome her to the Cuernavaca Summer Workshop.
    In high school Barbara had shown some small talent for drawing and painting and design. She had been the art editor of the yearbook. In college she had taken a fine arts course, and she had dreamed of being a career woman, possibly in the art department of one of the large advertising agencies, or on one of the big magazines. But Rob had changed all that. A month after they had met she knew that all she wanted in her life was to be married to him, to be totally involved with him, emotionally and physically, and bear his children and raise them and love him all the days of her life.
    She knew what her father was trying to do, and she knew it could not work, but she was deeply touched. She left the table and went to her room and wept, and then came back and said that she would go, and did not tell them that it was of no use at all. Her mother had gone into the attic and found her old paintbox and the palette and the brushes.
    And now as the plane banked she fastened her seat belt and looked ahead to the southwest and saw the high buildings of the city, and once again she felt that queasy tremor of excitement.
    When John Kemp came out of customs room he heard himself paged by a great bearded brute of a man, a powerful andunkempt type who looked as though he could have ridden to the wars with Genghis Khan.
    After what seemed to be to John Kemp an utterly childish exchange of powerful handshakes, the man said reasonably, “I am Gambel Torrigan, Mr. Kemp. Usually called Gam. Mr. Drummond