Your Chariot Awaits Read Free

appreciate blue skies and sunshine.
    I made lemonade while waiting for Jerry. From fresh lemons, of course. Jerry doesn’t like the frozen kind. I expected him any minute, but a half hour went by. An hour. Two.
    I kept peering out the window, watching for him. Joella got home from work and waved as she struggled out of her old Subaru, looking tired after being on her feet all day.
    Where could Jerry be? He runs a Web site–design business in addition to his position in the finance department at F&N—but if work was detaining him, he could have called. I bounced between annoyance and worry.
    Finally, almost three hours after I’d gotten home, I heard his Trans Am pull into the driveway. He didn’t look the way I felt, down and discouraged, as he slid out of the car and headed for the front door. In fact, he looked quite jaunty. His combination of jeans and black T-shirt molded his muscles, and he looked sophisticated and a bit dangerous. A combination that can tingle even an almost-sixty heart—even though, now that I saw he was okay, I was exasperated with him for not calling. I let him ring the bell before I opened the door.
    â€œHi, babe. Hey, you’re looking good!” He grabbed my upper arms and gave me a quick kiss.
    Jerry Norton is the guy I’ve been dating for almost four months now. Granddaughter Rachel shudders at the term. No one dates anymore, she says. But it still works for me. Anyway, Jerry is my first maybe-serious relationship in a long time. No spoken commitment here, but neither of us was dating anyone else. We like hiking together, and he has a little sailboat he keeps at a friend’s dock. We take it out on the bay or inlet, sometimes out into the rougher waters of Puget Sound. He cooks up a mean slab of salmon on my barbecue, he loves my fried chicken, and we both enjoy finding new places to eat out. He’s hardworking, ambitious, fun, and good-looking, with curly, dark hair and a smile and lean body that look especially good braced against the mast of the sailboat. I have that photo on the nightstand in my bedroom.
    With the proper nudge, I think I could be in love with Jerry. Maybe I am anyway, but unwilling to admit it to myself just yet. Maybe just a wariness that comes with this time of life, combined with a bad marriage experience in my past. Plus the fact that Jerry is nine years and ten months younger than I am, and I’ve never been quite sure what he sees in me. Joella, bless her heart, says I sell myself short.
    Now I said, “I thought you were coming right over.”
    â€œSorry. I got tied up on some e-mail stuff.”
    â€œSending out résumés already?”
    He looked blank for a moment; then his expression sobered, as if the question reminded him this was a day of gloom. “Well, uh, like I said, we need to talk.”
    â€œLemonade?”
    â€œSure.”
    I went on through to the kitchen, and he perched on one of the tall stools at the counter separating kitchen and dining room. I poured a glass of lemonade for him. The termination letter with the F&N letterhead lay on the counter. He didn’t pick it up, but he apparently knew what it said.
    â€œTough break. You’ve been with F&N a long time.”
    â€œI guess everyone got the same letter.” I knew because in my department we’d compared. Only my friend Letty Bishop was being kept on for the final days, after the department supervisor turned down the job. “You too?”
    â€œWell, uh, no.”
    â€œNo?”
    â€œThey’ve offered me a transfer to the San Diego office. Findley is going, and they’ve offered me a position as his assistant. That’s what I wanted to talk to you about.”
    â€œA transfer?” What I really felt was a big flood of dismay, like the tide surging in over the mud flats of Vigland Bay, but I squelched my reaction. “Jerry, that’s wonderful! You must be one of a very select