Harry & Ruth Read Free

declined.
    They moved into the shadows again. A few other couples had slipped out, but Harry and Ruth were unseen. They talked quietly, about the war and weather, and his eyes never left her.
    At one point, she frowned.
    â€œYou’re making me nervous,” she said. “You’re looking at me like you want to have me for dinner.”
    â€œI have X-ray vision,” he told her, taking a last drag and dropping the cigarette to the concrete porch.
    He had used that particular line often, back home. It tended to pleasantly discombobulate women, if they liked him to start with. Ruth Crowder, though, stared him down, looking him over from top to bottom, and said, “So do I.”
    This time, Harry blushed, and laughed.
    He began asking her questions, about herself and her rough-edged little town, stalling for time, trying to drink in as much of her as he could. They stayed right there, Harry leaning against the pillar, Ruth standing two feet away. When she wasn’t rubbing her neck, she kept her hands folded in front of her, the way, he supposed at the time, her mother had taught her, but she answered straight, with none of the country backwardness of the other girls.
    He asked her what she was doing in a place like Saraw, and she told him that she considered Saraw, North Carolina, plenty good enough for her. He doubted that, but he kept his doubts to himself.
    Far too soon for Harry’s liking, it was 9:30, and the deacons were walking around the grounds, rousting everyone and trying to prevent sacrilege.
    He asked Ruth if he could see her again, and she said yes. She said it casually, as if it didn’t mean that much. They agreed to meet at White Oak Beach, on the boardwalk by the dance hall, the next Friday night.
    Harry shook her hand, and then, unable to restrain himself from touching her somewhere with his lips, he leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. It was warm and a little damp. She had brought the scent of the ocean back with her.
    He forced himself to step back, afraid of doing anything that might scare her away. She looked up, surprised but not angry, not skittish. She blew him a kiss.
    That’s when Harry took out a piece of paper and a pen and wrote down his address at camp, then handed it to her. “Write me,” he said, and it sounded like a plea.
    â€œI’m going to see you Friday night,” she said, smiling and shaking her head.
    â€œWrite me,” he said again. “Tell me everything you can think of about yourself. I want to know everything.”
    â€œI don’t have that much time.… OK, Harry Stein. I’ll write you, then. I just hope it gets there before I see you again.”
    And she turned and left, jingling as she disappeared into the darkness.
    By the time Harry got back to the car, the girl with bad teeth was leaving. She seemed offended.
    Olkewicz had a reddish mark on the side of his face.
    â€œCan’t we give you a ride?” he asked, undiscouraged.
    The girl did not look back.
    â€œJeez,” Olkewicz whined, “I wish you coulda waited a little longer, Stein. I almost had her going.”
    Harry Stein said nothing, and they departed in what he thought was silence. About halfway back to camp, his traveling companion thought to ask him how his evening had gone.
    Pretty well, Harry said, all things considered.
    â€œI thought so,” Olkewicz said. “You’ve been whistling ever since we left that damn church.”

THREE
    On a warm fall night, the sixth of October, Harry Stein and Ruth Crowder went to White Oak Beach, where they’d had their first actual date. They parked a hundred yards past the last inhabited houses and went over the dunes to the water.
    Ruth preferred to stay along the boardwalk, where the ocean was only background noise and a cool, salty breeze. But there might not be a night this perfect again until spring, and she did want to please Harry Stein, so she wore her bathing suit