Read Blessings for Free Online Page B

stopped for a sandwich in the middle of the afternoon at a luncheonette off campus.
    “Do you mind if I sit with you?”
    She looked up at the tallest boy she had ever seen, with a head of the reddest hair she had ever seen.
    “No, of course not.” In a new school and a new city, one needed to keep meeting people. And she moved her books aside on the table.
    “I’ve been wanting to talk to you. I watched you here every day at lunch last week.”
    A fast talker. A wise guy? She answered, revealing neither surprise nor pleasure, “Why didn’t you, then?”
    “You were with a crowd. There wasn’t any good way to begin.”
    She waited. She wasn’t going to help him without knowing more about him. He had friendly eyes, but he’d begun too fast and had made her wary.
    “I like the way you look. And your voice was something else I noticed. You don’t have a shrieking soprano.”
    “I’m noticing your voice too.” His accent was full of soft vowels. “You from the South?”
    “Atlanta. My name’s Peter Mendes.”
    “Jennie Rakowsky. From Baltimore.”
    He put out his hand. People didn’t do that on campus. Maybe it was a southern custom. Southerners were supposed to be more mannerly, more formal.
    “I’d like to know you better, Jennie.”
    She’d heard that before. Drinks and then bed, taken for granted, without having known each other more than a couple of hours. Well, he’d have a surprise in store for him if he was counting on that.
    “Would you have dinner with me tonight? Do you like Italian food?”
    “Everybody likes Italian food.”
    “Okay, then. I know a great place. It’s not fancy, but it’s all home cooking. What time can I pick you up, and where?”
    “I didn’t say I’d go. I said I liked Italian food.”
    “Oh.”
    She saw a flush almost as bright as his hair rise on his cheeks and was instantly sorry. He wasn’t a wise guy. He was straight and simple.
    “Please.” She reached out to touch his hand. “I was only teasing. I’ll go with you, and thanks. I’m in the new dorm, and six would be fine if it’s all right with you.”
    There was a tenderness about his mouth as it widened into a smile. In that instant she knew that she liked him, and all the way back to the library she hummed to herself.
    What did they talk about over the ubiquitous checked tablecloth, the candle, and the tomato stains? On the college campuses of 1969, one didn’t hold a ten-minute conversation without reaching the subject of Vietnam. Jennie said she’d wanted so much to get to the convention in Chicago the year before, but she still had been in high school and her parents had been adamant. Peter’s experience was the same.
    “It’s not that they don’t think it’s all horrible, what’s happening in Vietnam,” Jennie said. “But, well, they think kids shouldn’t go out in the streets. It doesn’t accomplish anything. They think Chicago was just a wild scene. You know how it is.”
    Peter nodded. “Everything’s a mess. Sometimes I think the whole world’s going to rack and ruin. Sometimes I have so much angry energy, I think I’ll really be able to change things when I get out into the world.” Earnestly he drew his brows together, and as suddenly relaxed into a laugh. “The funny thing is, here I am ranting about fixing things in the future, and do you know what I’m going to study? Archaeology! Crazy, wouldn’t you say?”
    “Not if that’s what you like. Why do you?”
    “It started one summer in New Mexico when I saw the Indian reservations and read about the Anasazi, the Ancient Ones. They have a wonderful philosophy, all about their place in nature, about how things are joined, all things with one another—trees, animals, and people— and we have to live in harmony.”
    Oh, she liked his face, his generous thoughts, his long, clean hands, his freckled neck and arms, and his clean white shirt! She liked the fact that his middle name was Algernon and that he could laugh about