Read Margaret from Maine (9781101602690) for Free Online Page A

from.”
    â€œThank goodness it’s a short flight.”
    â€œNo flight is too short for me.”
    â€œI would think you’d be pretty accustomed to it in the army.”
    â€œI can tolerate it, I guess. I just don’t like it.”
    The plane dropped twice, then steadied. Margaret felt a little nervous and uneasy. She understood that part of the unease came from speaking to a man to whom she felt attraction. It had been years, more than half a decade, since she had engaged in any type of flirtation, and even that had been with Tom, her husband. And was this truly a flirtation? She couldn’t even know that for certain, although she could guess Blake’s answer. She felt entirely out of practice. She spoke to her friends’ husbands at social functions, of course, and to Grandpa Ben and Gordon, but that was a different kettle of fish. What did men talk about? With Blake she could talk about anything, but with a man she felt out to sea. What did they care about? Sports, probably. In Maine, at least near her home, they talked about farming and milk prices and tractors, and occasionally hunting. But what topics interested a man out in the larger world, she couldn’t say. She smoothed her dress a little against her legs, and when she looked back at Charlie she saw he had gone back to reading his sports page. She nodded and looked across him and out the window. The plane’s wings sliced through the clouds. A red light at the wingtip turned the mist hazy and soft, and she watched the clouds fall back and away from the plane and swirl like a bad movie flashback to introduce memory or forgetting.
    * * *
    The city felt hot and humid, as it usually did, and Charlie felt the heat build inside his suit and rest there, as if reluctant to leave. A strange custom, he thought, for gentlemen to wear jackets in such heat. And ties. As he lifted Margaret Kennedy’s bags into the trunk of the waiting town car, he was relieved to see storm clouds on the southwest horizon. A rain, he knew, sometimes cooled off the city. Sometimes, too, a storm merely nailed the heat down tighter, giving everything a swampy, malarial feel. He had not paid attention to the weather reports, so he did not know for sure what the rain might do. For Margaret’s sake, he hoped for a bright, cool wind to help her through the weekend.
    â€œLooks like weather’s coming,” he said to the car in general as he climbed inside.
    The driver, a black man with a thin mustache across his top lip, nodded and caught his eye in the rearview mirror.
    â€œWe’re going to get a break from the heat,” the driver said. “Should be a good weekend.”
    â€œWell, that’s fine,” Charlie said, at the same time thinking that he should have sat in the front seat. On one hand, it felt friendlier to join Mrs. Kennedy in the backseat, but it also felt perhaps a shade too casual. Maybe. He did not want Margaret to think he presumed a certain familiarity, that he had forgotten his official function on this trip. But he admitted to himself that he had felt . . . what? What was it, exactly? He could not name it to his satisfaction. Warmth, perhaps. Or interest. Sitting across the aisle from her on the plane, he had felt sensations he had not indulged in for a year or longer. She was undoubtedly a beautiful woman, and a kind one, and he confessed to himself that he felt comfortable in her presence. He had felt it on the phone. It felt like calling home somehow, as if they had already met. Maybe it was all tied up with the cows and the Maine farm and her valorous husband, but he felt a deep tidal attraction growing in him. He liked her, simply put. And if he felt a few tiny sparks, a little acknowledgment of the man-woman thing, what of it? More than anything, he wanted her experience in Washington to be fun and meaningful, a break in what he knew from his brother’s life could be a long, unending wait. A