Four Seasons of Romance Read Free Page A

had dropped. “Go back
inside,” she said through gritted teeth. “I don’t need your help, and I
certainly don’t want it.” She whirled around and left him standing there.
    Leo felt rotten for the rest of the day; he did get her
attention but it wasn’t the kind he wanted and embarrassed her in front of the
class in the process. So, he did the only thing he knew how to do—make a clay
sculpture.
    After school let out and all evidence of the mouse had been
cleared away and after Leo’d fessed up to his crime and volunteered to clean the teacher’s chalkboard erasers for
the rest of the month as punishment, he ran after Catherine as she headed for
the door and handed her a clay sculpture he’d been working on.
    “I want you to have it.”
    She stared at him, then at the sculpture, then back at him,
not attempting to take it.
    “Please,” he said. “At least look at it.”
    Catherine was more stubborn than she was curious. She turned
around to leave.
    Desperate, Leo tossed the sculpture, and it fell with a soft
thump on the green grass at her feet when, to Leo’s surprise, she bent and
picked it up. For a moment, she stared at it in silence.
    “It’s ugly.” She finally said, her
voice devoid of emotion.
    Of course, it wasn’t ugly. But Catherine recognized herself
immediately in the dark clay, despite Leo’s avant-garde style—the long, brown
hair, the wide eyes, the pronounced nape. She meant that she felt the sculpture
made her look ugly. Leo’s art was impressionistic, even at that young
age, but she was unimpressed.
    “I don’t want it,” she said, and those words crushed Leo
worse than her judgment of his art. Yet, instead of throwing the sculpture, she
set it gently down on the ground, and he retrieved it moments later.
    In a last-ditch attempt, he leaped forward and tucked it in
her satchel in one swift movement. She bristled, her shoulders tensing but
didn’t stop to remove it, walking toward her home on the bluff instead.
    Leo stayed to bang erasers into each other, so angry with
himself for what he’d done that the violent banging suited him just fine.
    Once she was safe in her lavish bedroom, Catherine pulled
out the sculpture and examined it more closely. Even if she didn’t like the
style, she couldn’t deny that the likeness was remarkable. He had captured her
lips, eyes, and cheekbones startlingly well—a remarkable feat, considering he
was working with a fist-sized lump of hard clay from the creek bed. But the
sculpture’s resemblance to Catherine only made her hate it more. Is this how
she looked? She felt like an ugly dark blob.
    Still, something inside her wouldn’t let her throw it away,
so, she stuffed it in the back of the drawer and heaped piles of clothes on top
of it. The sting of the mouse prank was still sharp, the sculpture did little
to diminish it, and Catherine swore to herself she would never look at it
again.
     
    *
     
    By the end of the fourth-grade school year, Catherine’s
dislike of Leo had grown into contempt. She was not one to hate people; her
mother had taught her never to use that word and Catherine was a sensible girl.
She had known Leo Taylor for only two months, and most of that time, she hadn’t
said a word to him, yet, she had an inkling that this
was what it felt like to loathe someone.
    On the last day of school in June of 1935, Leo made one last
attempt to win Catherine’s affections. This time, he would do nothing that
might scare her; he would commit a gesture that could only be interpreted as a
token of his true feelings, at least, this is what he hoped.
    He rose early and took the long path to school, stopping to
pick a bouquet of black-eyed Susans along the way. He
arrived at the schoolhouse before his other classmates, giving him enough time
to work on his invention. He pulled the ball of twine from his back pocket and
the ruler from his school desk and began to fashion a kind of bouquet. He tied
the stems to the ruler so the flowers