Talk of the Town by Mary Kay McComas Page A

Deliberately he tilted his head to one side, looking into stormy seas of emerald green, murky with longing and need. His heart was beating hard and wild in his chest. He could . . . He would calm the stormy seas, feed the need, and grant her every wish. Later. In private. Fully. And most thoroughly.
    "Rose," he murmured, their lips barely brushing. "You forgot my lunch."

 
     
    FOUR
     
    Redgrove was one of several small, New England-flavored lumber and fishing villages scattered along the rugged Pacific coastline between San Francisco and the Oregon border. Eureka being the most populated because of a choice natural harbor, and because it was the site of the world's largest redwood mills.
    Redgrove was a blink and a half long. Population: six hundred and two, in the early sixties before the Redwood National Park was established. No one had bothered to change the number on the sign since then. It was one of those tiresome and irritating little bus stops that motorists had to slow down from sixty-five to thirty-five miles per hour for fifteen minutes before they hit the main drag —along which most of the town's residents lived.
    Once upon a time, Rose had done some traveling. She called it traveling, though her intent at the time had been to run away, to escape her past, present, and future in Redgrove. But when the skyscrapers of Chicago made her lonely for the mountains and the tall redwoods, when the Arizona desert didn't smell like the ocean and the waving fields of grain on the plains of Kansas and Montana were conspicuously lacking the sound of the breakers smashing against high bluffs, she came back to Redgrove declaring "travel" to be the only valid method of learning to appreciate what you have at home.
    Everyone but Earl had admired her freedom and independence, and her wisdom in "globe-trotting" while she was still young and unfettered enough to enjoy it. She'd scoffed at their definition of globe-trotting, knowing she'd seen only a small fraction of the world before she'd come crawling home. But Earl knew. Earl had answered the phone the night she'd called home crying, miserably homesick and pleading for the money to pay for a six-state bus ticket home.
    To this day she couldn't regret either decision. She couldn't see the ocean from her bedroom window, but she could smell it and feel it in the moist rolling fog, and if she was very quiet—didn't even breathe—she could hear the waves pounding the rocks on the beach less than a mile away. She could stand there and feel the notion she had of being safe among the ancient redwoods, protected from behind by the snow-capped mountains, secure in the regularity of the tides. They were just the little things, of course, things she took for granted—unless she was feeling uneasy or isolated inside.
    She stood there feeling exactly that, waiting for Gary. Uneasy and isolated. The sun was preparing to kiss the horizon, turning the sky mauve and magenta, as romantic as it was miraculous, as it was mysterious. She found no comfort in it.
    She hadn't been out to dinner with anyone but Earl and Harley in years. She'd "done" lunch with Justin several times—in broad daylight, without dancing, without the frightened squirrels in her stomach, and without the hope that she wasn't making another huge mistake.
    "Mom?" Harley's voice had been cracking like cheap china all day. It made her smile.
    "What?"
    "Are you ready? It's almost six-thirty."
    She rolled her eyes heavenward. What a nag! Harley had been pestering her about this "big date" since she'd come home from work at four-thirty. "Aren't you going to take a bath? Use a little extra of that stinky rose stuff. It smells nice." "You're not wearing jeans, are you? He's gonna think there's something wrong with your legs. Don't you have anything with a skirt on it?" "Would it kill you to use some lipstick or something?"
    "Yes, Harley, I'm ready to go."
    "Get out of the window," he said, appearing in the doorway—for a final