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G RTF'S mother came hurrying through the gate that morning, calling me, waving the telegram.
"I got one too," I cried, running out upon my little square porch to meet her. "Oh, Mother Baird! He's really coming home!"
She stood at the bottom of the porch steps with the sun glinting on her high silvery rolls of hair, and even in the midst of my excitement a part of my mind paused to marvel at her beauty and her untouched look.
Mother Baird laughingly called herself a "farm gal" since they had moved to the remodeled farmhouse on the outskirts of Rosemead; but she looked as little like a farm gal as the neat new Baird subdivision looked like the worthless weed-grown farm which Father Baird had taken in on a mortgage during the depression. With the mushrooming of the plane assembly plant in Rosemead, bringing sudden life to this sleepy little town and in influx of workers clamoring for houses, Father Baird had been quick to subdivide the old dry farm and to build the rows of neat little stucco cottages which sold like hotcakes to the plant employees.
"We'll have a party to welcome Grif home," Mother Baird was saying, "a really gay one, Peggy, with all his old school friends."
All his old school friends! The old familiar sense of loneliness swept over me, making me feel left out, a stranger. I didn't belong to Grif's old school crowd. While he was finishing high school in a whirl of senior class festivities and football triumphs, I had been working in the Y.W. cafeteria and going to night school, taking a secretarial course.
' We had met by accident. I was taking the cut-off across the park on my way to school one evening when my dropped handbag skidded across the
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It's funny hoiv you can meet the man you're going to love.
Waiting for Grif to come home, loving him completely, Peggy didn't dream that she was waiting for a stranger
path, spilling its awful contents at the very feet of a' tall red-headed fellow who turned out to be Grif Baird. It's funny how you can meet the man you are going to love like that, when, you least expect anything so wonderful to happen. You laugh with a stranger about the crazy things a girl carries in her handbag, and the next evening, and the next, he is there on a bench in the park, with the sunset shining on his light hair, waiting for you. So you sit on a bench, or walk along together, slowly, not caring whether you ever get to night school, because you have just discovered that his eyes are deep and brown and every time they look at you something happens to your heart.
"Medical discharge," Mother Baird's voice floated into my preoccupation. "That means, of course, that he'll be home for good. He will go right back into the office with his father, and everything will be the same again. We'll forget there ever was a war."
She was looking past me now, engrossed in plans of her own. She had looked exactly like this when she told us that Father Baird was going to build us a Model Home for a wedding present. It was to be located on the most attractive site in the new subdivision, right next to their old farmhouse. The new would stand out in smart contrast to
A STARS OVER HOLLYWOOD STORY
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^JTfus sfory was adapted from "And The Sparks F/etti", an original Stars Over Hollywood story written by Ralph Rose.