Tomorrow! Read Free Page A

spring, random crocuses, and, for fall, dahlias. Both had had vegetable gardens in the back and both had long ago lost barns and acquired garages.

    But the Baileys had “modernized” their place in the years just after World War II. The sprangly shrubbery had been replaced by neat evergreens. The front porch had been carted away and the front façade remade with imitation adobe bricks and a picture window instead of the old comfortable curved bay. The vegetable garden had vanished entirely and in its place were a summerhouse and a barbecue pit where, wearing a chef’s hat and an apron with jokes printed on it, Beau Bailey, Lenore’s father, sometimes ruined good beefsteak while his guests drank martinis in the gloaming.

    As a man with a degree in architecture (who had gone into uniform from the ROTC
    before he had professionally designed so much as a woodshed), Chuck now skirted the Bailey property, critically surveying the moderne effect and looking for any recent changes. The house didn’t seem right any more, he thought. Its proportions were wrong. There was nothing in Green Prairie to warrant the use of imitation adobe either. It might be “modernistic,” but it was suitable for the desert, not for a region where winter came in November and went away in May. All in all, Howard Bailey (who was called “Beau” even by the president of the bank where he worked as cashier) had spent a lot of money for his remodeling job, and failed to fool anybody. Such was Chuck’s professional opinion—and his human opinion was similar. Putting on “side”
    characterized not only Beau, but his wife.

    Lenore was different.

    At least, Chuck hoped she was different, still.

    For Chuck could hardly recall a day in his life when he had not been in love with the Baileys’ only child. Propinquity might have explained that: there was no day when Chuck had not lived next door to Lenore. But propinquity was not needed to explain the attachment.

    Lenore long ago had won a “Prettiest Grade School Girl” contest that had included River City as well as Green Prairie. At eighteen she had been May Princess at the South High School, which meant she was the most attractive girl in her senior class. And she had been voted the
    “Most Beautiful Coed” when she had graduated from State University.

    Beauty, then, could have explained Chuck’s fealty—the simple fact that he had grown up next door to a girl who became one of the loveliest women in the city. But the matter of Lenore’s desirability involved more than the impelling forces set going by loveliness. She happened to be bright, and in addition she had been sweet and gracious, democratic and sincere.

    Now, Chuck wasn’t so sure. Where Lenore was concerned, he’d had no lasting assurance anyhow.

    They had always been “friends.” As “friends” they had enjoyed an intimacy of a particular sort. Chuck was sure, for example, that he was the first boy who had ever kissed Lenore; but it was not very impressive assurance. He had kissed her when they were both six years old. In fact, he had then carried a mixture of ardor and curiosity, which she had shared, considerably beyond mere kissing. The Baileys and the Conners were one day appalled to discover that their two six-year-olds were not merely kissing but that—in the elderberry thicket which had then existed in a then-vacant lot behind the Bailey premises—they were both stark naked, their small shoes, socks, overalls and underwear commingled in an untidy heap. Such findings perennially stun nearly all parents, and Lenore and Chuck had suffered the shocked, conventional punishments. But though Chuck recalled the episode with warmth and savor, his close amity with Lenore at six did little to bolster his confidence at twenty-four.

    He hadn’t written her that he was coming home for his thirty days because, until the last moment at the base in Texas, he hadn’t been sure of the date on which his leave would