Three Women at the Water's Edge by Nancy Thayer Read Free Book Online Page B

seniors at the high school, but she had come to the meeting to ask for funds to start a good regional film series. There was no movie theater in Rocheport and the closest one was twenty minutes away in Portland, and she loved movies; she didn’t want to face a long cold winter without them. Of course she thought the series would benefit the students and community as well. She had entered the cafeteria just at six-thirty, the time the meeting was scheduled to begin, and looked about the large room for someone she knew to sit with, and her eyes had caught on the figure of a dark-haired man standing across the room, leaning with both arms on a long narrow table, talking earnestly to a group of teachers. Her eyes had caught on his figure; her heart had leaped. She had not been able to take her eyes off him, she had stood there, foolishly entranced, unable to stop smiling, lost in the ferocious workings of her heart. She had never been so happy in her life.
    “Oh, there you are,” Carol Mellon said to her, coming in laden with notebooks and papers. “Let’s go sit down. What’s the matter? You look strange. Are you sick?”
    “No, no,” Dale had said. “I’m fine, just fine. Where do you want to sit?” And so she had managed to follow Carol across the room, to settle at a table with amiable colleagues; she had managed to appear natural.
    But she couldn’t take her eyes off the man. He was about her age, she thought, probably a few years older, twenty-seven or twenty-eight. He was perhaps only a few inches taller than she was: Dale was five seven, and guessed that he was around five ten or five eleven. Of course she couldn’t judge too accurately from so far away, but they would fit together quite nicely, she thought, and went warm throughout her body, and smiled, and could not get her breath.
    “Are you all right? Are you all right?” Carol kept saying to her, buzzing at her like a mosquito.
    His body was beautifully proportioned. He looked solid and lean and strong and powerful; he had to be some kind of athlete. His hair was dark brown, and slightly wavy; she could not tell what color his eyes were. But his eyebrows were exquisitely arched, and his cheekbones high. His movements were those of a man of greatly controlled energy.
    “Listen, did you get into my Preludin?” Carol asked. Carol was two years older than Dale. They had met at Williams when Dale was a freshman and Carol a junior, and had become close friends. It was Carol who had encouraged Dale to come back from Europe, to settle down to “real life,” to take the teaching position in Rocheport. She had even arranged for Dale to move into her apartment for the first year, until she got used to the long winters and the quietness of the small town. Carol was a good, smart, efficient woman who managed both to withstand all foolishness and to be generous and warm. She had short brown hair, rimless glasses, spreading hips. She was teaching history at the high school, but it was obvious that her talents were administrative, and because she was from the region and was so tactful yet so sharp, people were already saying that she would be the next principal of the high school when Loren Hansen, who was in his late fifties, retired.
    Dale did not know that Carol had any Preludin; she couldn’t imagine why Carol would ever need them. But the question caught her attention. She forced herself to take her eyes off the man across the room, to bring them to Carol’s face. “No,” she said, “of course I didn’t. To be honest with you, I’m just—well, that man over there. He’s really so—Who is he? Do you know him?” She had to look back at him, to be sure he was real, that he hadn’t vanished. “Is he a teacher? Where does he teach? Is he married?”
    Carol looked over at the man, who by now had sat down at the table with some other teachers. He was talking and smiling, totally at ease. He rubbed his ear.
    “That’s Hank Kennedy,” Carol said. “He