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and you know it!”
    He took his eyes off the road to stare at her and the car followed his gaze, rolling off the left edge of the paving onto gravel. Stephen jerked the wheel and they swerved back onto the paving.
    “But you told me you wanted…” he began.
    “No matter what I said! It’s wrong.”
    “Katie, what’s the matter with…”
    “I lied to Momma.” Two tears rolled down her cheeks. “She’ll be waiting there, worried. It’s not been easy for her, Stephen, since my father died.”
    Stephen pulled into a lay-by and stopped the car. He turned and faced her. “Katie, you know how I feel about you.” He reached for her hand, but she jerked it away. “I’ll not have you sad,” he said.
    “Then let’s really go to the fair.” She looked at him, her eyes glistening. “That way it’ll not really have been a lie.”
    “If that’s what you want, Katie.”
    “Oh, it is, it is.”
    “Then that’s what we’ll be doing.”
    It’ll save your money, too, Stephen,” she said, reaching for his hand. “You can buy that new stethoscope you’ve been wanting.”
    Stephen kissed her fingers, realizing that he had been maneuvered and this likely was a pattern that would be repeated many times in their life together. More than anything else, this amused him. He had no doubts they would be married after his graduation. And how like Katie it was, thinking of saving the money and the benefit to himself. He had mentioned the need for a new stethoscope only once. Again, she pulled away her hand.
    The headlights of an approaching car bathed her in a brief glare, leaving him with the image of her sitting stiffly, fists clenched in her lap, eyes tightly closed.
    “I love you, Katie,” he said.
    “Oh, Stephen,” she sighed. “Sometimes I ache with the love of you. It’s just…”
    “It’s the waiting,” he said.
    “Shall we go to Mallow?” she asked.
    He started the car and turned back the way they had come, thinking as he drove how lucky he was to have found Kate.
    “Let’s go around Cork,” she said. “If someone should see us… well, we shouldn’t be seen coming from this direction.”
    “I know a shortcut to the Mallow Road,” he said.
    She smiled in the darkness. “Is that where you take all your girls?”
    “Katie!”
    “It’s bad of me to tease,” she said.
    They drove in silence while Stephen turned off onto a narrow lane with high hedgerows on either side. This brought them presently to the Mallow Road at the eighteen-kilometer signpost.
    “We’ll be stopping at the Bridge House for petrol,” Stephen said. “They’ve a restaurant.”
    “There’ll be food at the fair,” she said.
    “You’re not hungry?”
    “Now that I think on it, a sandwich would be fine.”
    And cheaper , he thought. Kate seldom stopped being practical. It was a trait he admired. She’d be a good manager.
    At the Bridge House, he bought two beef sandwiches and two bottles of Guinness, passing them through the open window to Kate before paying for the petrol.
    “The man says it’s going thin, the left front tire,” she said.
    “I’ve had a look at your spare,” the attendant said. “Would you be liking it changed?”
    “No.” Stephen shook his head. “We’ve only a little ways to go.”
    “I’d be traveling it slow like,” the attendant said. He accepted Stephen’s money and made the change. “Slow as a peddler’s cart and the horse ready for the knackers.”
    Stephen hesitated, then: “Slow ‘tis.”
    He eased the car gently out of the Bridge House driveway behind a long lorry, which pulled away from him as he held his speed to forty kilometers an hour.
    Now that there was a reason to go slowly and they were headed for Mallow, Kate found herself content. She rested her head against the back of the seat and looked at Stephen. It was good to be here with him. She could see a whole lifetime of interludes such as this. They would start saving for a car , she thought. It was none too soon,