Just Over The Mountain Read Free Page A

couple in town you’d expect to have a row like that?” she said. “With a firearm involved?”
    “About the last,” he agreed.
    “Marriage,” she said. “Delicate thing, isn’t it?”
    Tom, Sam Cussler and Ray, all married to willful women, just shook their heads. One whistled, one laughed ruefully and one muttered, “Yer damn skippy,” under his breath. That last was Sam, a very fit and energetic seventy-year-old who had recently married Justine, aged twenty-six.
    “So, June,” Ray said, “you must be tickled your old flame is coming home. And he’s a bachelor again.”
    It was going to be a very long day.

Two
    J une, Tom Toopeek, Chris Forrest and Greg Silva had grown up together. They were best pals, confidants, equals. The boys didn’t seem to even notice that June was a girl until puberty hit, at which point she became somewhat aloof, having to contend with private matters. Instead of being sensitive, they’d climbed the big tree outside her bedroom window and tried to catch a glimpse of something female. Chris fell and broke his arm. Elmer applied a heavier than necessary cast and Chris walked with a starboard list for six weeks.
    By the end of junior high, Chris and June were an item. Steadies. They were a couple all through high school—she the cheerleader, he the quarterback. There was another cheerleader, Nancy Cruise, who chased Chris relentlessly, despite the fact that he already had a girlfriend. Chris, only a boy really, proved susceptible. There were times he questioned whether he should be tied down while so young. When he strayed, it wasalways in the same direction—to Nancy Cruise. And during those brief periods of victory, Nancy would gloat. Then Chris would beg June to take him back promising never to wander again, and Nancy would plot ways to break them up. It was a four-year tug-of-war. June scored more time on the quarterback’s dance card, but Nancy was a constant and very real threat.
    If Nancy was hard to take, her mother was unbearable. She was a domineering, bossy woman and a fearful presence in the town, the chair of every committee and president of the PTA for three straight years. She was a bully, to boot. What damage Nancy endeavored to inflict on poor June, Mrs. Cruise would attempt to double.
    As June remembered it, the romantic triangle Nancy and Chris presented caused the only flaw in an otherwise happy high-school experience. In retrospect, she should have dumped him after the first cheat. But, like most girls, she didn’t want to be alone, and there was no one she wanted besides Chris. Then, after much negotiation—his begging, June’s waffling—she yielded her virginity. From that point until graduation, Chris did not stray again. That June knew about, anyway.
    There was one area in which Chris and June weren’t at all compatible and that was the importance they put on performance in school. June enjoyed studying, which made her high grades appear effortless. Chris was restless, easily bored, and he struggled to stay focused. She was valedictorian; he barely graduated. When it was time for college, that difference played amajor role in breaking them up. June got scholarships and went off to Berkeley while Chris’s parents were lucky to get him to enroll in the local junior college.
    For a while they wrote each other long love letters, enjoyed passionate weekend visits, made plans for school breaks and fantasized about marriage. Just after Christmas of her freshman year, June decided to change her major from nursing to premed. The new program was even more difficult and she found her studies exhausting. She didn’t go home as many weekends, the love letters became love notes. The change happened overnight. June’s mother, Marilyn, phoned her at school to tell her that Chris had dropped out of school, run off to join the navy, and had taken Nancy Cruise with him. They had eloped.
    He never explained, never said goodbye, never said he was sorry.
    Six months