The Invitation

by Jude Deveraux

  Chapter Three

  Jackie tried to be sensible during the following days, but it wasn’t any use. She tried to talk to herself, telling herself that she was an adult woman, not a frivolous, starry-eyed girl, but she didn’t listen to her own advice. She cursed herself for having been born a woman. What in the world was wrong with women anyway? They met a man who was nice to them, and within minutes they began planning the wedding. She told herself that it had been an ordinary encounter, that what had made it seem extraordinary was that she had just been hit hard on the head. Otherwise she would have had her wits about her and she wouldn’t have given another thought to the incident.

  She made herself remember all the many men she’d met over the years. There was the time she’d been on a boat with Charley and a very nice man who…well, the truth was, he was more than nice. He was absolutely gorgeous, tall, with dark blond hair, crystal-clear blue eyes, and he had spent eighteen years or so in various universities studying a number of subjects, so he’d been fascinating to talk to. He was brilliant, educated, terribly handsome, everything a woman could want, but although they had spent the whole four days of the trip together while Charley was prostrate with seasickness, Jackie had not fallen in love with the man. Of course, she argued with herself, she had been married, and maybe that had something to do with it. Maybe William was the first interesting, handsome man she’d had any contact with since she’d become a single woman.

  She had to smile when she thought that. After Charley’s death she had been amazed at the number of men who came to “pay their respects.” At the time she had been grieving, wondering what she was going to do with herself without Charley to take care of, and suddenly there were many men offering her anything she wanted. It was flattering and annoying at the same time.

  She didn’t so much as go out with a man for six months after Charley died, but the combination of loneliness and the constant invitations she received broke her. After months, she began to go out to dinner and movies, to auto races, to picnics. You name it and she went to it. And at each one it was the same thing: “How many brothers and sisters do you have?” “Where did you grow up?” “Where did you go to school?” “How many races have you won?” “Who are the celebrities you’ve met?” “What was it like having dinner at the White House?”

  After six months of these dates, she began to consider having cards printed with vital information on them, so she could avoid having the same boring conversation over and over. Didn’t anyone ever have anything interesting to say? Like “What’s the biggest lie you ever told?” she couldn’t help thinking. That was what William had asked her. And he had made her a sandwich she liked, not a conventional sandwich of grilled cheese or beef with mustard, but a real sandwich.

  A year after Charley died she had moved to Chandler, for she was tired of the circuit, tired of people who had seen so much and done so much that they were dying of ennui by the time they were thirty. Jackie was afraid that if she stayed with them she would become one of them. She wanted to be with people who had wonder in their voices when they talked of airplanes. “I don’t know how those things stay up,” they’d say. Words that once bored her to tears, words that made her angry with their very stupidity, now pleased her with their simplicity. She liked Chandler, liked the people in it, people who had done little in their lives—little except keep the world going, that is.

  And now, here in this sleepy little town, she had met a man who had done what no other man since Charley had been able to do: he had interested her.

  On Thursday she cleaned house. On Friday she went shopping and spent twice her three-month clothing budget, and when she got home she decided she hated everything she’d bought. She went through all the clothes in her closet, pulling out things she’d kept for years. She couldn’t decide whether to try to look like a sweet-tempered housewife or a sexy woman of the world. Or maybe she should aim for the movie-star-at-home-look of tailored trousers and a silk shirt.

  By Saturday morning she was sure that her whole life depended on this afternoon, and she knew that whatever she chose would be wrong. When she awoke that morning she was angry, angry at herself for acting like a love-starved girl, for making something out of nothing. Maybe this man wouldn’t show up. Even if he did show up, it could be very embarrassing to be dolled up as though she were going to the school dance. What if he came wearing work clothes, ready to get started overhauling a plane engine or whatever he wanted to do? What if he didn’t show up at all?

  She went to the stable that had been converted into a hangar, climbed a ladder and began trying to take the ruined propeller off her wrecked plane. The first thing she did was drop the wrench, tear one fingernail half off, then cut the bright red polish off another nail. Holding her hands up to the light, she grimaced. So much for having beautiful hands, she thought, but then she shrugged. Maybe it was better that she didn’t try to impress him.

  Standing on a ladder, wearing greasy coveralls that once had been a rather pleasant gray but were now stained into a non-color, Jackie was pulling on the bent propeller with a wrench. Wiping her hair out of her eyes, she left a smear of grease on her cheek as she looked around the shaft and saw a pair of feet. Expensively shod feet. After wiping her face on the sleeve of her coveralls and smearing more grease on herself, she looked down to see a good-looking young man staring up at her. He was a tall man, with dark hair and eyes, and he was staring at her in a very serious way, as though he expected something from her.

  “You need some help?” she asked. Most people who came to Eternity, if they weren’t friends, were tourists wanting to see the ghost town, or they were lost.

  “Remember me?” he asked in a very nice voice.

  She stopped trying to loosen a nut and looked down at him. Now that he mentioned it, there was something familiar about him. But she couldn’t place him. No doubt he lived in Chandler and she had gone to school with him.

  “Sorry,” she said, “can’t seem to place you.”

  Without so much as a smile, he said, “Do you remember this?” Holding out his hand, he had something in his palm, but she couldn’t tell what it was.

  Curious, she climbed down the ladder to stand in front of him. She was considered a tall woman, but this man topped her by several inches, and now that she was closer to him, he seemed quite familiar. Taking the trinket from his hand, she saw that it was a school pin. CHS was embossed in gold on an enameled background of the school colors, blue and gold. At first the pin meant nothing to her, but then, looking into the tall man’s dark, serious eyes, she began to laugh. “You’re little Billy Montgomery, aren’t you? I wouldn’t have recognized you. You’ve grown up.” Stepping back, she looked at him. “Why, you’ve become quite handsome. Do you have hundreds of girlfriends? How are your parents? What are you doing now? Oh, I have a thousand questions to ask you. Why haven’t you come to see me before now?”

  There was only the smallest smile on his face that betrayed that he was pleased by her enthusiastic greeting. “I have no girlfriends. You were always the only girl I ever loved.”

  She laughed again. “You haven’t changed much. You’re still too serious, still an old man.” Easily she slipped her arm into his. “Why don’t you come in and have a cup of tea and tell me all about yourself? I remember how awful I used to be to you.” As they started walking, she looked up at him. “It’s hard to believe that I used to change your diapers.”

  Still smiling, arm in arm, they walked toward her house. Billy had never talked much when he was a child, and now his silence gave Jackie time to remember. He and his brothers and sisters were her first baby-sitting job. He had given her her first experience in child care and her first experience with dirty diapers. After that first day, she had gone home to tell her mother that she would never, never have any children, that children should be kept in a barn with lots of straw until they were housebroken.

  She’d always liked Billy. He was so quiet and always ready to listen or to do whatever Jackie
wanted to do. If she suggested reading a book aloud to the other kids, they’d invariably want to play monkeys-in-the-grape-arbor. If Jackie wanted to play rolling-down-the-hill, then the kids would want to sit quietly in the house and play with their dolls or trains.

  But Billy was different. He always wanted to do what Jackie wanted to do when she wanted to do it. At first she thought he was just being agreeable, but too many times over the years Billy’s mother had asked Jackie what she was going to do with the children that day. When Jackie told her, his mother would laugh and say, “That’s just what Billy was saying he wanted to do.”

  Jackie was pleased with the quiet little boy, but she wasn’t so pleased when she wasn’t baby-sitting and he’d show up wherever she was. If he was downtown with his family and he saw Jackie, he’d leave his family and follow her. Never mind that sometimes he had to cross a wide street in front of rearing horses and motorists frantically slamming on their brakes. He just wanted to be with Jackie wherever she was. Jackie’s mother started to tease her daughter, saying that Billy had fallen in love with her. Jackie thought it was kind of cute until Billy began showing up on her doorstep in the evenings. Then he became a pest. He became the pesky little brother she never had—and had never wanted.

  Her mother made an agreement with Billy’s mother that Jackie would look after Billy three afternoons a week. When Jackie heard, she was furious, but her mother wouldn’t listen, so Jackie decided to get rid of the kid. She planned to do that by scaring him to death. At fifteen she was a complete tomboy, and Billy, at five, was big for his age and quite sturdy. Jackie would climb a tree, leaving Billy alone at the bottom for hours. She hoped he’d complain to his mother, but he never did. His patience was endless, and he seemed to have a sixth sense about what he could and could not do. When he was five, he wouldn’t swing on the rope tied to the tree branch that overhung the river, nor would he when he was six, but when he was seven, he grabbed the rope and swung. Jackie could see that he was terrified, but he set his little mouth and did it, then dog-paddled over to her in the water. She was tempted to not say one word of congratulations, but then she grinned at him and winked. She was rewarded with one of Billy’s rare smiles.

  They were better friends after that. Jackie taught him to swim and allowed him to help her around her house. Billy, who spoke only when he had something to say, said that Jackie’s house was more fun than his. In his house the servants got to do everything, but at hers the people got to do the good stuff themselves.

  “That’s one way of looking at it,” she’d said.

  Billy’s mother was the one who suggested that he ask Jackie to go to the movies with him. Jackie, who had no money for such frivolities, was thrilled—until she saw the most handsome boy in her class outside the theater. She stopped to say hello to him, but Billy put his little body between them and told the six-foot-tall teenager that Jackie was his date and he should get lost—if he knew what was good for him. It was six months before the ribbing at school stopped. The other kids were merciless in teasing her about her three-foot-tall bodyguard who was going to bruise their kneecaps with his fists. “Do you pick him up to kiss him good night, Jackie?” they taunted.

  By the time Billy was seven the townspeople referred to him as Jackie’s Shadow. He was with her whenever possible, and no matter what she did she couldn’t make him stop following her. She yelled at him, told him what she thought of him, even tried telling him she hated him, but he was still always there.

  One day when she was seventeen, a boy walked her home from school. They stopped by the mailbox for a moment, and as the boy reached out to remove a leaf from Jackie’s hair, out of the bushes sprang little seven-year-old Billy, as wild as a wet cat, launching himself at the unsuspecting boy. Jackie, of course, wanted to die. She pulled Billy off the boy and tried to apologize, but the boy was embarrassed because Billy had knocked him flat into the dirt road. The next day at school everyone gleefully renewed taunting Jackie about her midget lover whom she kept hidden in the bushes.

  Billy’s mother, a sweet woman, heard of the fracas and came to apologize to Jackie, justifying her youngest son’s actions by saying, “He loves you so much, Jackie.” That was not what she wanted to hear at seventeen. She wanted to hear that the captain of the football team loved her, not some kid half size.

  She wouldn’t speak to Billy for three weeks after that episode, but she relented when she woke up one morning and found him asleep on the porch swing. He’d climbed out of his bedroom window sometime during the night and waited for the milk truck to arrive. After hiding himself among the milk cans, he got out when the driver stopped at Jackie’s house, where he curled up into a ball on the hard slats of the swing and fell asleep. When Jackie saw him, she said that he was a curse of the magnitude of the plagues of Egypt, but her mother thought Billy was cute.

  Billy had been tagging along behind her the day she met Charley and fell in love with the airplanes.

  Billy had said, “Do you love airplanes more than you love me?”

  “I love mosquito bites better than I love you,” she’d answered.

  Billy, as usual, said nothing, which always made her feel worse than if he’d yelled or screamed or cried like other kids. But Billy was an odd little boy, more like an old man in a kid’s body than an actual child.

  When she ran away from home with Charley, she was too cowardly to face her mother, so she left her a note. But she was halfway to the airfield when, impulsively, she ran back. She caught a ride with a man she knew, and he dropped her off at Billy’s house, where a birthday party was going on. Most of Billy’s eleven brothers and sisters, along with most of the children of Chandler, were terrorizing each other and making enough noise to cause an earthquake, but there was no sign of Billy. His mother, calm in the midst of chaos, saw Jackie and pointed to the side of the porch.

  She found Billy there, sitting alone, reading a book about airplanes, and as Jackie looked at him she thought that maybe she did love him just a little bit. When solemn little Billy, who rarely smiled, saw her coming toward him, his face lit up with joy. “You never come to see me,” he said, and the way he said it made her feel guilty. Maybe she’d been too hard on him. After all, they’d had some laughs together.

  He looked at her suitcase. “You’re going away with them, aren’t you?” There were tears in his voice.

  “Yes, I am. And you’re the only one I’m telling. I left my mother a note.”

  Billy nodded in an adult way. “She wouldn’t want you to go.”

  “She might make me stay.”

  “Yes, she might.”

  She was used to his old man ways, but she could see his sadness. Reaching out her hand, she ruffled his dark hair. “I’ll see you around, kid,” she said and started to turn away, but Billy flung his arms around her waist and held her tight.

  “I love you, Jackie. I will love you forever and ever.”

  Dropping down on her knees, she hugged him back. Then, holding him away from her, she smoothed back his hair. “Well, maybe I love you a little bit, too.”

  “Will you marry me?”

  Jackie laughed. “I’m going to marry some fat old man and go see the world.”

  “You can’t,” he whispered. “I saw you first.”

  Standing up, Jackie looked down at him, at the tear streaks down his cherub cheeks. “I’ve got to go now. I’ll see you again someday, kid. I’m sure of it.” Even Jackie didn’t believe those words; she planned to leave this one-horse town and never return. She was going to see the world! On impulse, the way she did most things, she pulled her blue and gold school pin from her blouse and handed it to him. What did she need with a pin from a nowhere school in a nowhere town?

  Billy was staring so hard at the pin in his palm that he didn’t realize Jackie had started to walk away, walk at her normal pace, which was closer to a run. “Will you write to me?” he called, racing after her, trying to keep up but failing.

  “Sure, kid,” she called over her sh
oulder. “Sure I’ll write.”

  But of course she never did. In fact, she hadn’t thought of Billy more than half a dozen times over the following years, and then only when she was with a group that was laughing and comparing small towns. To the accompaniment of raucous laughter, she’d tell the story of little Billy Montgomery who had plagued her from the time she was twelve until she’d escaped at eighteen. A couple of times she’d wondered what had happened to him, but she knew he had the Montgomery money and connections, so he could do anything he liked.

  “Probably married now and has half a dozen kids,” some guy said once.

  “Not possible,” Jackie said. “Billy’s just a kid. I used to change his diapers.”

  “Jackie, I think you ought to do a little arithmetic.”

  To her horror she had realized that “little” Billy Montgomery was about twenty-five years old. “You’re making me feel old,” she’d laughed. “It couldn’t have been more than three years since I left Chandler.” She groaned when Charley reminded her that they had been married for seventeen years.

  So now, many years after she’d left Chandler, she was standing face to face with the little boy who had flung himself on her and sworn that he’d love her forever. Only he didn’t look too much like the little boy she remembered. Six feet one if he was an inch, broad-shouldered, slim-hipped, very handsome. “You must come in and have some hot chocolate,” she said, “and some cookies.” She wanted to remind herself that, compared to her, Billy was just a child. Looking at him, it wasn’t easy to remember that he was a boy.

  “I’d prefer coffee,” he said, motioning to her to lead the way.

  Once inside the house she felt awkward and had to force herself to move. “How is your family?”

  “All of them are well. And your mother?”

  “Died a couple of years ago,” she said over her shoulder as she moved into the kitchen.