Better to Wish Read online

  “Good-bye,” Abby said quietly over her shoulder to Miss Doris as she left the Barnegat Point library. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  Miss Doris gave Abby a finger wave and whispered, “Bye.” As head librarian, Miss Doris felt she must always honor her own rule of no talking in the library, unless speaking in a whisper to one of the other librarians.

  Abby stepped out into the heat and fanned herself with the magazine Miss Doris had let her take home. That was one of the nice things about her job at the library: She got to bring home all sorts of new books and magazines before anyone else saw them, as long as she returned them when she arrived at the library the next morning.

  Abby walked slowly along the main street through town. She still marveled that Pop had relented and allowed her to look for a job.

  “A respectable job,” he had said firmly. In other words, Abby was not allowed to work as a waitress or at the movie theatre or behind the counter at Miss Maynard’s store. In fact, he didn’t want her working at any store. “You’re not supposed to look like you need a job,” he had told her. “How about seeing if Miss Doris needs help at the library? That would be nice, genteel work for a young girl.”

  Abby had sighed, although in truth she’d liked the idea of working at the library. She would be surrounded by books all day long. She could read to little children and see new books when they came in, and at the end of her shift, she could check out books about writing and the great poets.

  A month after she had graduated, Abby, dressed in one of her church dresses and a hat that she felt Mama would have approved of, had approached Miss Doris at the library, and half an hour later had been offered a job.

  “Part-time,” Miss Doris had told her. “Five mornings a week. But at the end of the summer I’ll reconsider. I may have an opening for a full-time employee then.”

  Employee. Abby loved the word. She had gotten her way. Sort of. She wasn’t a college student, but she wasn’t sitting around Barnegat Point waiting for a husband to appear at her door either.

  Abby continued languidly down the street. At Allie’s, a café that had opened at the beginning of the summer, she took a seat at a tiny table by the door and ordered a cup of coffee and a sandwich, feeling supremely grown-up. She paid for the food with her own money — not Pop’s — and sat and read the magazine. When she was finished with her lunch, she tipped Allie and walked the rest of the way home, humming under her breath.

  “Hello!” she called as she entered her house. The windows were flung wide open against the heat, and a fan was turning in the parlor. “Where is everyone?” she called. She had seen Adele’s abandoned crayons and a Shirley Temple coloring book on the porch, but no sign of Adele or anyone else.

  “Hello?” she called again.

  “Abby, please, I was trying to nap.” Helen’s voice floated crankily to Abby from upstairs. Presently she appeared on the landing, hands cradling the roundness that would soon produce Abby’s new little brother or sister.

  “Well, you didn’t have to get out of bed,” Abby snapped. “I didn’t know you were asleep. I was just wondering where everyone was.”

  “All you had to do was go in the kitchen and ask Ellen.”

  “Fine,” said Abby, the contentment of the day washing away. She huffed into the kitchen and sat down at the table. “I will be so glad when she finally has that baby” was the first thing she said to Ellen. “Three more months. How are we all going to stand it?”

  Ellen smiled. “You’re as cranky as she is.”

  “Sorry. She makes me so mad. According to her, I never do anything right. I’m rude and thoughtless and stubborn and —”

  “Don’t listen to her.”

  Abby made a face. “Where are Rose and Adele?”

  “Rose took Adele down the street to play with Bertie. They’ll be back later.”

  Abby tiptoed upstairs to her room and lay on her bed. Eighteen years old and she was still living at home in a room with dolls on the shelves. Darcy had quietly gotten married to Arthur a month earlier, and they had moved to their very own house, a tiny cottage outside of Lewisport. And Maureen, whose job at the phone company was going well, had moved to a room in a boarding house in St. George. At least once a week, Zander, who was working at the offices of the Record that summer, would call for Abby and they would go to a movie or maybe take a ride in his fancy new car, but Abby felt like an infant compared to her friends. She was grateful to be able to go to the library every morning, and she liked getting a paycheck, but when she returned to the house on Haddon and entered her room, she felt like a little girl again. A little girl without very much to do.

  She was skimming the last page of the magazine later when she heard Pop’s car in the drive and, not long after that, his rapid knock on her door.

  “Abby?”

  Abby tensed. Had Helen already told him about their argument?

  “Come in.” She sat up, patting her hair into place.

  Pop stepped inside and perched on the edge of the bed. He was smiling. “I have some wonderful news.” He sounded very pleased with himself. “Guess who stopped by the shop this afternoon.”

  Abby shook her head. “I don’t know. Who?”

  “Zander.”

  Abby wasn’t sure what she was supposed to say to this, so she said nothing.

  “He isn’t going to be here much longer, you know.”

  Abby looked sharply at Pop. “What do you mean?”

  “Zander,” he said, “has enlisted in the army.”

  “What?” cried Abby. Zander hadn’t said anything about the army to her.

  “He’ll be shipping out in three weeks.”

  Abby almost exclaimed, “Oh no!” But Pop was a firm believer in the United States Army and enjoyed watching America flex its muscles, so she lay back on her pillows and again said nothing.

  “That isn’t the wonderful news, though,” said Pop. “The wonderful news is that Zander has asked for your hand in marriage.”

  For a moment, Abby simply stared. “My hand?” she said finally. “Zander wants to marry me? Marry me?” And then she added, “Now? He hasn’t even graduated from college yet.”

  Abby couldn’t remember a time since moving to Barnegat Point that Zander hadn’t been part of her life. Not in the way that Rose or Adele or Maureen or Darcy had been part of her life. With Zander it was different. He was always there somehow, even when he wasn’t actually present. Abby was aware of Zander, whether she was watching him from her bedroom window or dancing with him at the Valentine Dance or thinking of him working away at Harvard while she plowed through her high school homework. When she wrote a story or a poem, she could hear Zander critiquing it as she worked.

  Certainly Zander was cute. Darcy had pointed that out many, many times. In fact, he was more than cute. Once he had moved past his scrawny phase, he’d grown into the kind of boy who all the girls wanted to be seen with. He was handsome and smart and … exciting. He was so exciting that Abby was a little surprised that Pop still held him in such high esteem. Zander drove his car too fast, and he liked alcohol. A lot. Pop, who never drank, had made remarks about Zander’s alcohol consumption. But when you got right down to it, Zander was still a Burley, the son of the richest man in Barnegat Point, and that meant a lot to Luther Nichols.

  “Zander wants to marry me?” Abby couldn’t help saying again. She and Zander had spent more time together than usual that summer, but they hadn’t discussed marriage.

  “He does,” said Pop solemnly. “And he’s the only boy I can think of who’s worthy of you. A Burley-Nichols match. Now, it may be that you’ll want to have the wedding after he comes back from Europe, but it makes much more sense to have it right away, before he leaves.”

  “Pop!” exclaimed Abby. What she wanted to say to him was “You can’t make my decisions for me.” What came out of her mouth instead was “I don’t want to marry Zander,” although she wasn’t sure that was true.

  Pop’s face darkened. “Abigail
, if Zander Burley asks for your hand in marriage, then you accept. I have to be able to hold my head up in this town.”

  “But, Pop —”

  “This isn’t open to argument. This isn’t a suggestion. I’m telling you that Zander has asked to marry you, and so you are going to marry him.” He frowned at her. “I thought you’d be happy.”

  “I am. I like Zander. But I like Wyman and Richard, too.”

  “I don’t see them coming around with proposals. More important, Abby, if you and Zander marry, you’ll never have to worry about money. You can have the perfect life here. The best of the best of everything. Now you go next door. Zander is waiting for your answer.”

  “I’m supposed to go over there right now?”

  Pop sighed. “Look, if you want to wait until after he’s back from Europe to have the wedding, that would be all right. But you have to accept his proposal now.”

  He left the room then and Abby knelt at her window. She tried to see into Zander’s room, and she wondered what the Burleys would do with his room once he shipped out. Then she stood for a long time in front of her mirror, looking at her eighteen-year-old Barnegat Point self and seeing instead her five-year-old Lewisport self. What would Mama say to her if she were here? Would what she said matter? Mama had never stood up to Pop.

  Abby changed into a clean dress, brushed her hair, and walked slowly down the stairs to the front hall. She met Rose and Adele on her way out.

  “Where are you going?” asked Rose.

  “Nowhere. I’ll see you later.”

  Abby’s heart began to pound as she crossed her yard to the Burleys’. By the time she reached their front porch, her hands were shaking so badly she could barely ring the bell.

  Zander answered the door, a shy smile on his face. He beckoned her inside. “Let’s go sit down,” he said, and led her into the parlor. He closed the door behind them and looked at her expectantly, taking her hands in his as he pulled her onto the sofa.

  Abby offered him a smile. “Pop just told me,” she said. “I can’t believe it.”

  “I know it’s sudden. But, Abby, I think I’ve been in love with you since the day we met.” Zander blushed. “And when I found out how soon I’d be going overseas, I didn’t want to wait any longer to ask you.”

  “Pop wants us to get married right away,” said Abby. “Before you leave.”

  “That was my idea,” said Zander.

  Abby drew in her breath. “I can’t do it.”

  “You want to wait?”

  Abby shook her head. “No.”

  “What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying that I can’t marry you.”

  Zander dropped his hands to his lap.

  “It just doesn’t feel right. I’m sorry.” Abby kissed Zander’s cheek. Then she rose and let herself out. She stood on the Burleys’ porch and looked at her own house. The light was fading and Ellen had turned on a lamp in the parlor. Abby could see Adele, her head bent over her coloring book. Helen was standing by the fireplace, talking to Pop.

  Abby turned right and walked down Haddon Road. She needed to think before she faced her father.

  She knew what she’d done. She knew what this meant.

  She could leave Barnegat Point. She would have to leave.

  It was time to say good-bye.

  “Bye, Sylvie. Bye, Jean. Bye, Martha.” Abby fastened her new velvet hat to her head with a complicated arrangement of bobby pins and let herself out of Fosgood’s, a temporary-job placement agency. She waited for the elevator to arrive at the fourth floor, mentally listing the things she needed to do that evening. Buy a pork chop for dinner, she was thinking, when a hand caught her elbow.

  “Come out for a coffee with June and me before you go home?” asked Edie Matthews. “We’ve hardly seen you this week.”

  “Mr. Fosgood keeps dumping files on my desk,” said Abby. “Huge files. I’ve hardly had a spare moment since Monday.”

  “So come with us. We’re going to Schrafft’s.”

  Abby sighed. “I’d like to, but that’s all the way downtown. I’ve got to get home. Take a rain check? Maybe on Friday?”

  “All right. See you tomorrow, Abby.”

  Abby stepped out into the chilly, damp air of a February evening in New York City and began the walk from Forty-Eighth Street to Sixty-Third Street. Her purse clutched tightly in one hand, she hurried along among the crowds of people who were rushing home or running errands, always hurrying, hurrying.

  Nothing in Barnegat Point could have prepared Abby for Manhattan. She had never encountered so many people moving so fast. New Yorkers, it seemed, never did anything slowly. Rush, rush, rush. Rush from home to work to the store to the theatre to a museum. Abby loved every second of every day with its rat-a-tat rhythm. When Rose wrote letters from home, she wanted all the details of Abby’s glamorous life.

  “It isn’t glamorous,” Abby had told her on one of their rare phone calls. “I work for a temp agency. I live in a two-room third-floor walk-up and I don’t have a telephone.”

  “But you’re on your own. You have a job. You’re in the middle of the greatest city in the world. You see famous people walking down the street.” (Abby had once glimpsed Richard Widmark in a delicatessen on Broadway.)

  Abby had laughed. “It is fun,” she’d agreed. “Yesterday Edie and I took a carriage ride through Central Park.”

  “Oh, that sounds wonderful!”

  “It was. I felt like we were in a movie. Oh, and I’m going to have another poem published!”

  “Abby, you’re famous!”

  “Not yet. Three poems and two short stories. I’m not famous. But it is exciting. Look, I have to go. I’m using Nate’s phone again, and he’s not even charging me. Kiss Harry and Teddy for me. And say hi to Adele the next time you see her. Bye!”

  Now Abby continued on her way home, stopping her hurrying long enough to duck into the butcher’s and buy the pork chop. Two blocks later she stopped in a stationer’s and bought a box of note cards. She wrote faithfully to Pop and Helen. Once a week. She knew her letters were dull, but she found it hard to muster any enthusiasm when writing to them. “How are you? How is everyone in Barnegat Point? How is Miles?” (Miles was Pop and Helen’s four-year-old son, and the bane of Adele’s existence, according to Adele.) “Have you been to the cottage lately? Give my love to Ellen and Sheila and Mike.” Abby rarely mentioned herself or her life in Manhattan. Pop thought New York City was as evil as the devil himself, which gave Abby’s life there an added charm, in her eyes, but she thought it best not to rub the fact in every time she wrote a letter. She was a young woman living alone in a city of sin, working in an office in order to pay the rent on an apartment so tiny it could probably fit in the parlor of the house on Haddon. Not to mention that her living alone reminded Pop of another disappointing fact — that Abby had declined to marry Zander. What was worse, she hadn’t married at all.

  Rose, on the other hand, who was just twenty, two years younger than Abby, was already married and had a little boy. And she had remained in Barnegat Point. True, she and her family had settled in the outskirts of the town, but they saw Pop and Helen and Miles and Adele several times a week. Occasionally, Abby would waken in the small hours of the morning and think longingly of her sisters and of the town in which she’d grown up — and then the sun would rise, streaking the Manhattan sky with pink and blue, and she would look out her window at the view of the coffee shop and the shoe repair store on Sixty-Third, and remember that Mr. Fosgood had given her a ticket to the ballet or that she had a date to meet the girls at Schrafft’s, and her homesickness would melt into excitement over another day in the great Big Apple.

  Abby, now carrying her purse, her dinner, and the box of stationery, turned the corner on to Sixty-Third Street and hustled through the fading daylight to her building. She climbed the stoop, calling hello to Mrs. Graumann who, summer or winter, spent much of each day with her bedroom window wide open, elbows resting on the sill
, keeping an eye on the comings and goings of her neighbors.

  “Evening, Abby,” replied Mrs. Graumann. “You need a warmer coat. That’s not fit for the middle of February.”

  “Maybe next year,” said Abby.

  Leaving Pop and Barnegat Point had meant doing without a lot of things Abby had become accustomed to. She had to plan carefully if she wanted to go to the beauty parlor or buy a theatre ticket — or a new winter coat. But she was on her own. She had proved to herself that she didn’t need anyone to take care of her. Rose had moved from Pop’s house to Harry’s house with nothing in between. Abby had wanted the in-between.

  “You need a beau,” Mrs. Graumann said as Abby was reaching for the door. “A pretty girl like you — where are all your beaus?”

  Abby shrugged and smiled and let herself into the building, calling good night over her shoulder. She began climbing the stairs and found herself thinking of Zander Burley. According to Rose, who had run into Zander several weeks earlier, he had returned safely from overseas and was visiting his family in Barnegat Point. Maybe Abby should plan a visit to Barnegat Point. Or maybe not.

  At the second floor, Abby knocked on the door of apartment 2C. “It’s me!” she called.

  The door was opened by a slender young man with wide-set eyes and brown hair parted exactly in the middle.

  “Hi, Nate,” said Abby. “Is it still all right if I use your phone? Today is my little sister’s birthday. I promise I won’t talk long.”

  Nate smiled at her. “Sure,” he said. “I’m on my way out. Lock up when you leave, okay?”

  Nate hustled out the door, violin case in hand, and Abby sat on the couch and dialed the house in Barnegat Point.

  Adele’s excited voice came on the line. “Hello?”

  “Happy birthday!” Abby cried.

  “Abby! I’m ten today! I have two numbers in my age!”

  Abby laughed. “Did you get my package?”

  “It came yesterday, but Helen made me wait until this morning to open it. Thank you for the doll.”

  “I got her for you in Chinatown. Her dress is made of real silk.”