Radio romances (July-Dec 1945)

To the End of the Journey (Continued from page 21) crinkled around his eyes. "No," he said, "go on. I like to hear you talk." And at that a warm, comfortable feeling spread all through me. I had been talking too much, and another boy would have been bored, but it seemed that even my faults pleased John. Still, when we said good night, I refused to let him take me home, refused to give him my address. I was explaining that it was against the rules when Philip came up to us, caught part of what we were saying. "It's no good, Johnny," he said. "Beth won't go out with soldiers. She says they all have girls at home." John laughed. "She may be right at that. I've got a girl at home. Her name is Mary Lou Walters and I kissed her once at a Hallowe'en party in sixth grade and once when I went away. She writes to me, sometimes once a week and sometimes once every three months, depending on how busy she is with her dates. Now, Beth, is it all right for me to see you again?" "At the dance next Friday," I said firmly. John just grinned. "You'll see me sooner than that." On the way home in the car with the other hostesses, I disciplined myself sternly, tried not to think about John, tried to put down the unreasoning happiness welling within me. I didn't want to fall in love now, and certainly not with a boy I'd met at the center. Other girls in Corona had — and one of the boys had gone back to the fighting and had been killed, and another had been sent home and had found that his home-town girl was far more important than she had seemed during his stay in Corona, and another had met a new girl in England. . . . And sometimes the girls themselves made promises that, they discovered later, they had no wish to keep. The times were too uncertain. You couldn't be sure of anything, even of your own feelings. But I couldn't stop being happy. I awoke the next morning to a day of drizzling rain and fitful wind, and still it seemed to me the most beautiful day that had ever been. I whisked through the Saturday cleaning with an efficiency and a cheerfulness that both surprised and gratified my mother, and I dressed myself as carefully for the Saturday shopping as if I'd been getting ready to go out on a date. John's eyes had told me last night that I was pretty — and that, somehow, meant that I must be pretty all the time. I was cheerful about the routine of shopping, too, about waiting in line at the meat counter, and walking an extra block in the rain for the home-baked bread Father liked, and about the pushing, steaming crowds in the supermarket. And then, halfway through my shopping at the supermarket, I ran straight into John. "Next Friday," he scoffed, as he took the handle of the cart from me. "I told you I'd see you sooner than that." "I don't know how you did it," I said breathlessly, finally. "How did you know where I'd be?" His grin widened. "You told me." I stared in astonishment, and then I remembered telling him the night before that I shopped on Saturdays, telling him about the bakery and the 'supermarket. "You see," he said, "there's no getting away from me, Beth. Where do we go from here?" John went home with me that afternoon, and carried in the boxes of groceries, and listened to the ball game with Father, and became, so far as my parents were concerned, one of the family. That surprised me — that Mother liked John immediately, and showed it. Usually, she was cordial, but a little reserved toward the young men who came to the house. "You've plenty of time, Bethie," she'd say. "There are lots of boys in the world." 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