The Social Climber of Davenport Heights by Pamela Morsi

But…
    “Jane Lofton,” he said. “Just take the silver. Think of it as a gift from someone from the old neighborhood.”
    “We knew each other in Sunnyside?”
    “Middle school,” he answered. “I’m Scott. Your project partner in seventh-grade science. Sedimentary-rock strata.”
    I’m sure my jaw dropped open. I stood there looking at his face, remembering him from another lifetime.
    “Scott? The junkman’s son?”
    That designation would have been an insult back in Sunnyside. Scott held out his arms, indicating our surroundings.
    “Of course, we don’t call it junk anymore, Janey,” he told me with more than a hint of condescension in his tone. “Now we say ‘antiques and collectibles.’”
    I was too disconcerted to even comment. Fortunately, it wasn’t necessary.
    “If you don’t mind,” he said, “I’m very busy. Take your gift and run along. Next week, I promise to bargain like a fishwife.”
    He turned back to his grimy typewriter and I walked out, reluctantly carrying the silver casters.
    All the time I’d been getting bargains off the junkman’s son from Sunnyside. I shook my head with disbelief.
    Sunnyside was an area of town that now existed only in the memories of those who had lived there. The final leg of the interstates that brought suburban dwellers into downtown had its three-level interchange built right over the neighborhood. The junior high, directly underneath one of the massive cloverleafs, was the first thing to go. Our class of impressionable thirteen-year-olds had been scattered by buses to distant schools. I’d gotten a scholarship to St. Agnes. When the house we lived in was slated for demolition, my mother moved us to an apartment closer to the hospital. I never saw any of my fellow classmates again.
    As far as I was concerned, that was just as well. The last thing in the world that I would ever want to do is to wax nostalgic about my working-class origins.
    My mother was a smart, attractive, ambitious young woman. I think perhaps she only made one mistake in her life. That was marrying my dad. Leon Domschke had been suave and handsome, a German Frank Sinatra, my mother had said. A difficult type to imagine. And imagine was all Icould ever do. Mom left him when I was just a toddler and there was not a photograph of him in her possession. As a teenager I conjured up the idea that he was like Allison MacKenzie’s father in Peyton Place , just a name made up to hide my out-of-wedlock birth. But after Mom died, I found her divorce decree among her papers. There had, indeed, been a Leon Wilbur Domschke. Where he came from or went to, I never knew.
    I put the silver casters, still wrapped together in the wrong masking tape, in the cup holder of the Z3.
    I should have gone ahead and cheated him, I thought to myself. The junkman’s son at least would have gotten half the money he deserved and I wouldn’t feel as though I owed the man anything. But no, I had to try doing something good, get my motives questioned and end up with an unwelcome obligation.
    Annoyed, I started up the car, slipped it into gear and laid rubber as I drove away. Back at the office, I’d just walked in the door when Kelli, the receptionist, said I had a call. It was from the Shelter for Displaced Wild Creatures asking for a donation. It was the first ripple in what turned out to be a tidal wave.
     
    The next few weeks were some of the strangest I had ever lived.
    The response to my night of check writing was immediate and overwhelming. Never underestimate the scope and range of a donors list. It was as if my phone number had appeared out of thin air on the speed dial of every solicitation organization in the world. There were reputable, well-known philanthropic organizations, obscure, esoteric charities, and there were scams of every form and function.
    I became very adept at saying no. I’d given what I had given and that was all I intended to give. I was forceful and certain.Disabusing any and all