She followed Bill to the hot-rod. She sat next to him, and he started the rod down the road. He turned right on 68, heading toward Xenia and away from Antrim forever.
They sat at a table in the rear of the diner in Yarborough, a few miles east of the Indiana state line. The waitress brought four hamburgers and two cups of black coffee.
“Let’s dig in,” Bill said. “I’m starving.”
She picked up a hamburger and began gnawing it. The meat tasted good — maybe not like a seven-course meal at Kardaman’s, but just as good when you were hungry enough to appreciate it. She devoured the first hamburger, then took a sip of the steaming coffee and made a face.
“I know,” he said. “This stuff tastes like battery acid. It’s slop. But it’ll help keep us awake. We’ve got to do a lot of driving tonight.”
“Where are we going, Bill?”
“I’m not sure. Into Indiana, first of all. Maybe across Indiana and into southern Illinois.”
“And what will we do there?”
“We’ll get married,” he said.
Married. No one else wanted to marry her, she remembered. Not Danny, not Craig. But Bill didn’t even ask her if she wanted a wedding ring. He simply took it for granted that she would marry him.
That sounded wonderful.
“And then?”
He shrugged. “Then we find a little town,” he said. “It doesn’t have to be much, just a little place where we can live our own lives the way we want to. That’s all we need, April. Just a place to live in and each other to live with.”
“How will we stay alive?”
He put down his hamburger. “It won’t be hard,” he said. “I’m a damned good mechanic, April. I can do anything in the world with a car. And a top mechanic can always get a job. There’s not a town in the world without a garage, and there are damn few garages that can’t use a good hand. We’ll find one that can and I’ll have a job.”
“I can work, too.”
“You don’t have to.”
“But I want to,” she said. “I can get a job waiting on tables or something like that.”
“With truck-drivers making passes at you all day long? That doesn’t sound too good.”
“I’ll manage,” she said. “They won’t make passes for long. Because it won’t do them any good. When a girl is lucky enough to be married to the best man in the world, no truck driver is going to tempt her.”
He smiled at her, reached across the small table to take her hand. He squeezed her hand and she thought that love was not so important after all. Whether or not she loved him, she was very lucky to have found him, to be with him. Together they could build a real life. A good life.
“We have to save money,” she went on. “So we can buy a house and fill it with children.”
“Do you want children, April?”
“I want your children.”
“I love you, April.”
“And I love you, Bill.”
The lie came easily to her lips. She would have to repeat that lie for a lifetime, she knew. But she would never let him know that she did not love him. She had to make him very happy; she owed him that much and more.
She ate her second hamburger and smoked a cigarette while Bill got a second cup of coffee. She watched him drink the coffee. When he finished it and set the empty cup back in the saucer, she grinned at him.
“You know,” she said, “you can back out, if you want.”
“Why should I want to?”
“Because you’re getting second-hand goods.”
“April—”
“I’m not exactly a virgin,” she went on. “I’ve done some pretty disgusting things. I’m a mess, Bill. You’re getting used goods and you don’t have to get stuck with them.”
“Maybe I want to.”
“Still—”
His eyes were very serious. “You know my car, April?”
“Of course.”
“It’s a hell of a car,” he said. “It can out-drag a Mercedes, you saw it do that. Funny thing about that car, April. It’s just a bucket of bolts when you come right down to it. The body is off an old Ford that must have rusted to hell and gone twenty years ago. The transmission’s off a LaSalle, and they haven’t made LaSalles since before the second world war. The engine came out of a Chrysler that got knocked to hell in a wreck. Just a collection of broken-down parts.”
She waited for him to go on. Instead he lit a cigarette and smoked for a few seconds. Words did not come easily to him; he was not as glib as Craig, but when he spoke he said what he meant and meant what he said. And this was far more important than glibness.
“If the parts are good,” he said slowly, “it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot how many wrecks the car’s been in, or what kind of mileage it’s carrying. I guess it’s not flattering to compare you to an old car, April. But you get what I mean, don’t you? I don’t give a damn what you’ve done or who you did it with. All I care about is the kind of girl you are.”
Craig would have spoken the words differently. He would have used an image far more poetic than a simple thing like a hot-rod. But somehow Bill’s words could not make her laugh, or even feel like laughing. She knew that he meant what he said, that his simple words were essentially far more poetic than the colorful lies Craig Jeffers had told her.
She could say nothing in reply. She wished suddenly that she did love him, knowing how much he deserved her love.
But she was not without feeling for him. He was good, he was sweet, he was gentle — and she liked him for these qualities. She liked the person he was, the fine person he was.
“Hell,” he said. “I talk too much. Let’s get out of here and put some miles on the rod.”
The name of the town was Birch Creek.
The town was not so much. There were a few hundred less people than in Antrim, and the summers were a little warmer and the winters not so cold, and southern Illinois was not quite the same as southern Ohio. Aside from that, Birch Creek could have been Antrim all over again. And yet the town was entirely different.
April stood at Bill’s side in the rectory of the small church while the minister said things to them, and when the minister finished saying things Bill put a five-dollar ring on her finger and took her in his arms.
“Some day I’ll get you a better ring,” he told her the night before. “A decent one, with diamonds.”
But she had said, “This is all the ring I ever want. Just this and you. Who needs diamonds?”
So they were married in Birch Creek, and they took a two-room kitchenette apartment on the main street of town above a dry-goods store. They spent their wedding night in a motel three miles from town. Bill had said that you just could not spend your wedding night in your own home, and that the motel would be worth the five bucks it cost them.
It was worth more than that.
It was worth the world.
She learned something that night, something that made her want to laugh and cry at once. She had gone with Bill to get away from the town, to escape her problems and start in fresh. And a very strange thing had happened.
She had fallen in love with him.
This was love, she knew. This was love, and it made the cardboard infatuation with Craig fall away and disappear as if it had never existed in the first place. This was love, and she had been miraculously lucky, managing to get away from Antrim and at the same time finding love as an added dividend.
Because that night someone opened the gates to Heaven and the world went away in a shining pink cloud. That night it was not sex but love, not flesh but a pair of spirits meeting. Everything Bill did to her made her realize how lucky she was, how happy she was going to be.