Beyond Nostalgia by Tom Winton Read Free Book Online Page A

I was eyeing in the jewelry store window the night we met. One could only imagine how much it meant to me. 
     
    My arm around Theresa's waist, the ID resting on the heel of my hand, it was just about midnight when we turned up her street. We'd had a super time at a small get-together at her friend’s house and were now cracking up as we relived some of the night's funny events. I remember our laughter echoing loudly in the night-time quiet and Theresa putting a hand over her mouth, and then one over mine, as we traversed the row of sleeping households on her block. 
     
    But a moment later, two doors from her place, all our light-hearted merriment came to an abrupt end. As if someone had thrown a mood-switch, Theresa’s smile vanished and her face slackened. 
     
    "Shhhhh," she said. "Listen."
     
    For a moment there was only the sound of our slowed steps. But as we got closer to her stoop, we both heard what Theresa had dreaded; that sad bluesy music. The volume was lower this time, but it was the same sad sax that was playing the first night I took Theresa home after the dance.
     
    I was more than surprised when her voice suddenly became contemptuous. After seeing her for three weekends now, I didn't think she was capable of such ill feelings. "Well Dean, she's home. I guess you're going to meet her this time." Drumming the door with her fingernails, her other hand on the knob, she turned to me then and said, "Thank God, her man of the evening must have left by now.  She's turned down the stereo, the fireworks must be over." Then she unlocked the door. "We might as well get it over with Dean. You might as well meet her." 
     
    We stepped into the blackness of the common hallway, and I fired up a nervous smoke. I kept the blue flame of the Zippo alive so Theresa could see the keyhole. The dim light it cast danced eerily on the door. 
     
    Theresa sighed as she unlocked it, and I followed her into the dusky living-room. The only pale light came from a cheap plastic lamp, a sorry Tiffany knock-off standing forlornly on a tiny end table. The walls were bare except for one that cordoned off the kitchen. On it was a tarnished star-burst clock and, to the left by the doorway into the kitchen, an eight-by-eleven black and white photograph. From where we stood, I couldn't quite make out who was in the picture, but I did take in the rest of the room's shabby appointments. The sparse furnishings were old, mismatched furniture that my friends and I would call "early depression era." Even the room's focal point, the sofa, was years overdue for the trash heap, a hulking old celery-green monstrosity with a frazzled fringe skirt and permanent ass-impressions on the two end cushions. The coffee table, one of those cheap pecan colonial jobs, was covered with tattered old issues of Silver Screen, Modern Romance, and True Confessions, most with coffee rings on their covers. There was also a Ronson table lighter, a glass ashtray with a cigarette butt mountain rising out of it, and two, near-empty wine glasses, one with cherry-red lipstick on the rim. I figured Theresa's mother and her date had probably abandoned the latter during a soulless romantic moment. Against the opposite wall, a vinyl-covered portable stereo sat uncertainly atop a metal snack tray, still playing that God-awful, depressing music. The rug felt paper-thin beneath my feet. In the swarthy light, I could only tell that it was brown. 
     
    The place looked like it was moved into yesterday after a ten minute, fifty-dollar shopping spree at the Salvation Army. Nevertheless, except for the mess on the coffee table and all the furnishings being so shoddy, the place was actually clean. I knew without being told it had to be Theresa, not her mother, who kept it that way.      
     
    Hearing the muffled growl of a flushing toilet from behind a door somewhere off the kitchen, Theresa and I just looked at each other. She asked me to sit on the sofa. Before I did, I