The kids arrived ten minutes later and came up the walk to the house. They all went into the living room and, as before, Jud and Nancy sat together on the couch. They looked so serious and so young. Their nervous smiles were a little too mechanical, but Walter saw that Nancy wasn’t so jittery as before. There was a new quality of repose about her, a hint of maturity.
“So now we get the news,” Jim said too heartily.
“Yes, sir,” Jud said. “We think it’s swell, the way you’ve been, the money and all. Maybe you thought we wouldn’t stay together for all this time. Maybe you thought it was just... kid stuff. But it’s been a year and it’s going to be a lot of years.”
Nancy nodded firmly.
“And so now you want to be married,” Mary Harrison said gently.
“Well... we have a sort of a counter offer,” Nancy said. “We... you better tell them, Jud. I mean ask them.”
Jud looked down at his hands and then looked at them all, turned his eyes at last to his father, steady gray eyes. “We’re as certain as we ever were, but maybe we aren’t in so big a rush. I mean we were only seventeen last year. We’ve done a lot of talking. About the future and what we’ll do and what kind of a life we want to have.”
“We think we should wait a little while longer,” Nancy said. “I’m sorry, Jud. I interrupted.”
“You don’t have to keep putting the money in. We’re not asking for that,” Jud said. “We can both get into State. I’ve been writing to Student Aid, and we’ve got two part-time jobs lined up and we both want to go up there in the fall.”
“And we don’t want to get married,” Nancy said, “until we find out the score up there. You know, how the other married kids make out and what the living situation is and all.”
“So,” Jud continued, “we wonder if you’ll go along with this. You keep the money and start giving it back to us in September after we get up there. We can figure out what we’ll need and let you know. How much a month.”
“We’ll make budgets and things,” Nancy said, her eyes bright and eager and excited.
“And sort of plan on getting married either on Christmas vacation or Easter vacation, whichever seems to work out right,” Jud said. “We can live in the dormitories until we decide.”
Nancy said, “We just hoped... that it would sound all right to all of you.
“We know a lot of kids who got married in high school,” Nancy said. “Our friends. They acted pretty smart about it at the time, and now they seem sort of trapped. I mean they can’t ever become very much. Jud is real bright and he ought to have college, and I don’t want him having a dumb wife either. There are lots of married students at State.”
Long after the enthusiastic acceptance of the plan the kids had made, after Jim and Walter had insisted that they would keep adding to the “war fund,” and after the kids had gone off in Jud’s ancient car to celebrate at a drive-in, Walter kept remembering how they had looked as they had walked away from the house. Jud, tall with good shoulders, his slow laughter deep in the quiet of the night street. Nancy, small and trim, skipping along beside him, excited, pretty and in love.
Now Jim and Walter sat on the dark porch together. The two women were out in the kitchen, fixing a snack. They could hear the women talking, and Walter heard Mary laugh, a warm, precious sound to him.
They smoked and Walter said, quietly, “You know, Jim, that’s a pair of good kids. We’re luckier than we knew.”
“You forget something else.”
“What’s that?”
“We weren’t exactly stupid about the way we handled it.” Walter realized with quiet amusement that give Jim another year and it would turn out to have been Jim’s idea all along. The women called them and the men went in. Walter knew they were both aware now of the tragic narrowness of the boundary between disappointment and pride. And they felt the mutual warmth and closeness of two men who have escaped a great danger.
