Crossroads by Belva Plain

head up the woefully dated sales division at Wright Glass works.
    “A bit too slick for my taste,” he’d said of his new employee. “A bit too much of the snake oil salesman. Although that may be what one wants in a ‘marketing man.’ ” Father had been suspicious of newfangled business disciplines and labels. “Give me a man who has come up through the production line,” he liked to say.
    But the sales for Wright Glassware were down across the country, and Bradford, who had a marketing degree from Har-vard, had been highly recommended by several of Father’s friends. Father had signed him on—reluctantly. And Cassandra had fallen in love.
    Cassandra sipped her coffee and leaned back in her chair.
    So think back now, since my mind is already headed in that direction
. . . how could I have loved Bradford? Yes, he was interesting. He
was an intellectual, or was that just a pose? He was charming and
fun. But there was more.
    Not only did he come from a family that was far more distinguished
than mine, he’d mentioned a trust fund—oh, so discreetly—
so I thought he had money. I thought a man who was independently
wealthy wouldn’t need to marry me for the glass works. I fell in love
with Bradford because I thought he was interested in me for myself.
I fell in love with him because he laughed at my jokes. Because he
was good-looking with his red hair, and his blue eyes. And face the
facts, I fell in love with him because Father didn’t like him.
    But then she’d found out that while Bradford’s family pedigree was indeed as long as he’d said it was, there wasn’t any money. And knowing he was poor, all her father’s warnings about fortune hunters had come back to haunt her. When Bradford asked her to marry him she said no. She kept on saying it for a full year.
    So why did I marry him? Because Father had died after a horrible
six-month battle with cancer, and for the first time in my life, I was
alone. Because after Father was gone there was no one to run the
glassworks, and I thought I needed a man to do it. Because Bradford
could be very persuasive. Because I was twenty-eight and tired of being
a virgin.
    Not the best reasons in the world, but she’d built a marriage on them. And then Bradford had died. And as Cassandra was preparing to fly to Louisiana to bring the body home she had a phone call from a lawyer she’d never heard of whose office was in New Orleans. The man said he had handled Bradford’s affairs in New Orleans. Cassandra hadn’t known her husband had any affairs in New Orleans besides those that concerned Wright Glass works. She and the man had scheduled a meeting for the next day.
    And there she was, dressed in mournful black, sitting across a desk from a middle-aged lawyer whose voice was low and whose expression was very kind.
    “You know,” he said in an accent that had a slur of the South to it. “Your husband came to this city quite often.”
    “Yes, on business.” There was something about the way the man was looking at her that made her uncomfortable. She heard herself start to offer an unasked-for explanation. “The outlet here in New Orleans was his idea, you see, and I’m afraid it wasn’t doing very well. My husband felt an obligation to oversee it personally, to be hands-on. . . .”
    The man opposite her had shifted his eyes away. He couldn’t look at her.
    “But . . . there is something else you wanted to tell me,” she said slowly. “Some other reason why he came here so often . . .”
    There followed a silence that she had never forgotten. Mr. Robichaud had lowered his glance to the floor, then raised it to the bright light beyond the windows, and speaking with obvious difficulty, he said, “Life is not always what we expect, is it? Every one of us has to learn that in some way, sooner or later.”
    “With all due respect, I think I’ve learned that lesson . . . especially recently.” She drew in a breath. “Please, Mr. Robichaud, tell me what else it