Free Girl on the Best Seller List by Vin Packer Page A

you’d be over at the high school, Mr. Wealdon.”
    “Oh, I’m going there,” Milo said. “Mrs. Wealdon ought to be along any minute.”
    Stanley sank into the folds of the couch. “Tempus fugit,” he smiled.
    Milo was about to say something compulsive and idiotic like “It certainly does fugit,” but both of them were saved from the preposterous conversation by Gloria’s sudden appearance.
    To Milo she said, “Well, I hear you’ve won the Fultons over to your side! Playing the part of the great all-suffering husband, ready to forgive me anything!” She punctuated her sentence with that little
Psssss
noise she made whenever she wanted to ridicule something.
    She said to Stanley, “It must be mental telepathy, Stanley. I was just noticing that our car could use a good bath.”
    “Stanley is here to discuss writing with you,” Milo told her.
    “Don’t get that supercilious tone in your voice, J.C.,” she answered sarcastically, standing legs spread and arms akimbo, with her head cocked to one side. “You’re
such
a martyr, aren’t you,
dear
good Milo?”
    Stanley was squirming in his seat, his fat hands twisting the manuscript box flap in an anguished manner.
    Milo realized something had gone wrong at the Fultons.
    Again, he felt the tentacles of pity reach out from him, felt his anger and embarrassment fade. He wanted to say: how sorry I am, Glo; at the same time he pictured the benign face of Freddy Fulton, and thought how quiet and subtle their friendship had always been. Only a few days ago, when Milo had felt an almost overwhelming urge to talk to someone about his plot for revenge, he had gone through the shortcut in the fields to visit with Freddy. He had stood beside him before the lycium halimifoliums, and they
had
talked, but not a word about his plot. Freddy’s unshakable dignity had sustained Milo in that moment of weakness, had saved Milo from the vulgar experience of unburdening himself to another person.
    He had never stopped admiring Freddy for the way he had handled himself in his affair with Edwina Dare. Even Gloria had never gotten wind of that chapter in the Fultons’ life; so few in Cayuta had. There were rumors among some of the town’s businessmen at the time, but the girl’s name was not known. Sometimes Milo wondered whether it was a fluke, or an act of faith on Freddy’s part, that Freddy did something that told Milo who she was.
    He had done it one evening back in 1953. He had taken Milo aside at one of the country club buffets, and had said that he wanted his advice about something. He had a friend, he said, who was a Catholic. He wanted to give this friend a medal of some kind, as a gift. A sort of going-away present.
    “You know about the saints and all that, Milo,” said he. “What could you give someone who was around books all the time?”
    “St. Catharine is the saint of learned men,” Milo had told him.
    “Isn’t there a saint for someone who sells books?”
    Edwina Dare, the girl who worked at The Book Mart … plain, quiet, nice Edwina Dare. Milo had often been waited on by her in the Mart, when he ordered the Peterson field guide series, or the texts for his classes in skin and scuba diving. Memory is an uncanny confederate. He could remember then an afternoon out near Hubbard’s nursery, on the outskirts of Cayuta, when he had come across Freddy’s Buick, parked and empty. Milo had pulled up and parked beside it, and as he was getting out to see if he could find Freddy, he found him, sitting on a log just at the entrance to the woods, with Edwina Dare. They had exchanged pleasantries. Freddy had made no attempt to explain what he was doing there in mid-afternoon with Edwina, and Milo somehow had not thought that peculiar. He had been only slightly surprised at seeing Edwina with Freddy, yet not surprised enough to dwell on it. Perhaps the most peculiar part about the whole incident was that later in the day, when Milo and Gloria had a drink in the