Maine - J. Courtney Sullivan [115]
Alice stared blankly. She wanted to go home.
“Gosh, I’m sorry,” he said. “I talk a lot when I’m nervous. May I say, you look beautiful.” He twisted his fingers around the cuffs of his sleeves. “Your brother said you were a looker, but, wow. How he ever saw fit to set a guy like me up with a girl like you, I’ll never know.”
My sentiments exactly, she thought, though she smiled back.
When Timmy returned, she drank the second glass of gin down quickly, and then another. She began to feel warm and light, swaying in place to the music. She hadn’t had much to eat that day—she never did before a date—and she thought a bit tipsily that this Daniel wasn’t really the sort of guy you needed to starve yourself for, but maybe he wasn’t so bad.
He asked her to dance. It was a fast one, “Don’t Sit Under the Apple Tree,” even better than the Glenn Miller version on the radio. She was pleasantly surprised to find that Daniel wasn’t as clumsy as she might have imagined. He dipped her back and his big palm felt hot against her spine. He spun her and spun her until she began to feel dizzy. After a while, Alice grabbed his arm and said, “I need to sit down.”
He took her hand and led her off the floor. Her brothers were gone by then, off to the movies to forget the pain of what they had seen at Fenway Park. Alice couldn’t believe they would just up and leave her like that, but leave they had.
There were no empty seats at the bar. Daniel approached a bunch of men in air force uniforms clustered around the taps. He put a hand on one man’s arm.
“Hey, pal, do you mind giving up your seat to the lady?”
The young man jumped to his feet—he was tall, with jet-black hair and broad shoulders. She wished for a minute that Daniel Kelleher could somehow figure out a way to look like him.
“My pleasure,” he said as he stood up, and Alice wanted to grab him and say that she wasn’t with this guy, not really. She imagined how years later, they’d tell their friends the story of how they’d met while she was on some dreadful fix-up courtesy of her stupid brother, and then her real true love came along and offered up his chair.
But a moment later, the man was pulled off into the crowd. “Can I get you anything?” Daniel asked. “Another drink? A glass of water?”
She knew she ought to go for the water, or see if he’d like to sit down to dinner so she could get some food in her stomach, but Alice just said, “Another gin sounds swell.”
It was then, as he leaned forward to get the bartender’s attention, that Alice spotted her sister chatting with a beautifully dressed older woman. Mary’s cheeks were flushed, and she wore an emerald green gown that Alice had never seen before. Had she been wearing it under her coat when she left the house that morning? Or had Henry given it to her today?
Mary was laughing at something the woman had said. Alice thought her sister looked like a member of high society, no different from her companion. The sight made her feel uneasy. A moment later, Mary looked up and their eyes met. She kissed the woman on the cheek, gesturing toward Alice. They parted ways, and Mary began moving through the crowd as the band switched gears and started to play a soft, slow song, one of Alice’s favorites, “Moonlight Serenade.”
Halfway to where she stood, Mary pulled someone up from a table full of elegant men and women in fine attire: Henry. She whispered in his ear and he rose to his feet. They walked slowly toward the bar.
“There you are!” Mary said when she reached her side. She embraced Alice, and Daniel looked up in surprise. “I’ve been looking all over for you. Where are the boys?”
“They went to the movies,” Alice said. “What are you doing here?”
“You told me to come. And it turned out some of Henry’s friends were here already. With a table, as luck