Don't Speak to Strange Girls Read Free

one.”
    He shook his head. “You know, that was the idea I had about myself? Until — you see, until your mother died. I’ve done a lot of thinking. Ruth was everything I needed, Sharon… . I began to realize it when she was in the hospital … I know it now.”
    “She wanted to take care of you. She treated you just about the way she treated me — wanted you always washed behind your ears, shaved, looking your best, most successful, with everything you wanted. That’s the way she’s treated me all these years.”
    “Have you been happy, Sharon? Not lonely … I mean, not needing anything?”
    “Oh no.” She came to him, sat on the lounge chair beside him. “I’ve had a wonderful life. You’ll never know the thrill to sit in a theatre at the college and see you on the screen, and hear the girls sigh and whisper that Big Daddy Sex is
my father.
Sharon Stuart’s father … I’m not the prettiest girl at school, not nearly the most brilliant — but what I am is the most envied girl on campus. Because of you.”
    “I’d — like to keep you around here if I could,” he said. “What if you did miss the rest of the year? You could make it up.”
    She averted her face, spoke quickly. “I’m too much my mother’s daughter to believe that … I’m about to get — my degree … I can’t stop now.”
    His voice was self-deprecating. “Maybe it’s just that I don’t hold much with degrees for women.”
    “Your cowboy background,” she teased. “Now I sound like mother.”
    “There are worse things.” He got up, walked to the windows. “I hoped maybe we could get away … You and I. We could go — I don’t care … Mexico, Europe … I wouldn’t drag you fishing or anything like that. We’d go where you wanted to go, Sharon. Wouldn’t you like that?”
    “I’d love it. But — ”
    He heeled around. “Then let’s do it. Just you and I.”
    “Daddy, you don’t have to disrupt your life to drag me around on a trip you’d hate in a week.”
    “But — I wouldn’t — ”
    “You’re a much better actor on the screen. I’m not depressed. Mother was ill so long — I’ve been learning to accept it all this time. I’ll be all right. Don’t worry about me.” She could not bring herself to tell him yet about Amory. This wasn’t the right time, yet she had to do it before she returned East to school. She thought emptily maybe she’d talk to Kay Ringling about it. Wasn’t this what everybody did who wanted to reach Clay Stuart? Didn’t they talk to Kay Ringling first?
    Clay felt his shoulders sag and he stared at Sharon. He could not tell her he was worried about himself, he needed her. He needed the smooth flow of life he’d had with Ruth. He was lost and lonely and he needed her, but he saw he could not say this to Sharon.
    And she wouldn’t have believed him even if he’d said it.

chapter two
    C LAY S TUART lay back in a lounge chair beside his swimming pool. He watched a eucalyptus leaf float on the wind-rifled water. He made a bet with himself as to how long the leaf would float, and when it continued to ride the surface after the time limit he’d set, he removed a fifty-cent piece from his right pocket and put it in his left. Otherwise he did not move.
    An empty highball tumbler sweated on the glass table-top at his elbow. His feet hung over the end of the chair. He wore unlaced sneakers and had kicked loose his headache.
    He was not really thinking anything; there was nothing he wanted to think about, and when any thought intruded in on his conscious mind, he shoved it aside with the memories of his father which had been roused to life again at Ruth’s graveside in Forest Lawn. He’d run away in his thoughts that day to a less complicated time, and he found himself doing it again in the days since Ruth’s funeral. The present offered nothing but accumulated griefs, and his thoughts returned to Colonel Ben because, after forty years, they were less urgent, less painful.
    At