Gibson's Girl. Anne McAllister
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a tiny bit of happiness along with the embarrassment. So it wasn’t a lie.
“Is it all you were expecting?”
“More, actually.” And wasn’t that the truth!
Fortunately he didn’t ask what she meant. “So where are you staying? What’s it like?”
She told him about the hotel. It was a no-frills place. “Respectable,” Gib had told her. “Safe.” She remembered a muscle in his jaw ticking as he’d steered her in. “Wish they had locks on the outside of the doors, too,” he’d muttered.
She wasn’t sure what he meant by that She hadn’t asked.
Dave was surprised. “I thought you were going to rent somebody’s apartment.”
“This is just temporary. He hasn’t found a place yet.” She didn’t tell Dave he’d been hoping against hope that she wasn’t coming.
“You’re not staying with him!”
“Of course not!”
Gibson Walker didn’t want her at his apartment any more than Dave wanted her there. There had never been any question. When he’d realized he was stuck with her, he’d taken her to this hotel.
“I can’t afford a hotel,” she’d protested.
“I can,” he’d said in a voice that brooked no argument. He’d marched her up to the desk and paid for one night’s lodging.
She’d dug into her purse for her credit card. “I can manage one night!”
But he hadn’t paid any attention. He’d checked her in, handed her bags to the bellboy, tipped him, told her he hoped she came to her senses by tomorrow and went home. And then he’d turned on his heel and started toward the door.
“Wait!” Chloe had called, and he’d stopped, then turned. “What time do we start in the morning?”
For a long moment he’d just looked at her. Then a corner of his mouth had twisted and he’d replied. “First shoot’s at nine.” Then he’d turned again and strode out the door.
“I’ll find a place tomorrow,” she told Dave now. “After work.”
“A safe place,” Dave instructed her.
“A safe place,” Chloe agreed.
“I miss you.”
“I miss you, too. But I’ll be home before you know it.”
“I’ll know it,” Dave said gruffly. “It’s sixty-one more days.”
He’d counted, Chloe realized guiltily. Well, so had she, but with anticipation, not annoyance.
“Compared to forever, sixty-one days isn’t so long,” she said gently. “And once I get home, we’ll have forever.”
And that was the truth. She had had Dave in her life for so long she couldn’t imagine him not being there. Sometimes she wondered if she existed without him. Maybe that was what she was trying to find out.
“Sister Carmela has a lot to answer for,” he grumbled.
“It wasn’t just Sister Carmela.”
But Dave wasn’t convinced.
And he was right that it had been Sister Carmela, the new abbess at the monastery just outside Collierville, who had put the idea into Chloe’s head.
She’d interviewed Sister last month for the newspaper. They’d hit it off at once, going on to talk much longer than the actual interview required. And in the course of their conversation, Sister Carmela had told Chloe not just about her new position as abbess, but the spiritual journey that had brought her there.
She had, she’d told Chloe, come to the abbey just after college, fresh with the enthusiasm and idealism of youth.
“I loved it,” she’d said, her brown eyes sparkling. “I felt at home at once. More alive. Centered. As if this was where I’d always been meant to be. And everything went smoothly until right before I was to make my final profession. And then I began to get worried. What if I was wrong? What if I was foreclosing on my options too soon? What if I was doing this just because it seemed easy for me? Maybe too easy? I got restless, fidgety, unsettled.”
Chloe, who had been feeling some of those very same feelings for the past few months, leaned forward earnestly and held her pencil, poised to note the reply. “How did you overcome it?”
“I didn’t,” the abbess told her with a smile. “I left.”
“Left?” Chloe dropped the pencil. Scrabbling to pick it up, she’d looked up at the nun again to see if she was joking.
But though there was a smile on Sister Carmela’s face, she was apparently quite serious. “I couldn’t stay. Not until I was sure. So I decided to test my vocation, to go out, live in the ‘real world’ for a while and see if that was where I belonged. So I did.”
Chloe smiled. “And that’s when you realized...you didn’t like it?”
Sister Carmela shook her head. “I did like it. A lot. It was wonderful, and by the ‘real world’s’ standards, I was a success. But in the end, I knew it wasn’t right for me. I saw that, no matter how ‘successful’ I was out there, I belonged here. And so I came back.”
It made sense. It made an incredible amount of sense. While Sister Carmela had been talking about her monastic life, she might as well have been talking about Chloe’s.
She’d been feeling every bit as unsure, every bit as restless as the date she and Dave had finally set for their wedding approached. Granted it had been, at that time, still four months off. But some nights Chloe couldn’t sleep. She kept thinking about the rest of her life...and wondering if it was going to be any different than what she’d already had.
It wasn’t that she was dissatisfied really. It was just that she didn’t know!
She and Dave had been together so long, they seemed so perfect for each other—like Sister Carmela and the monastery—that it made her nervous.
“You’re asking for trouble,” Dave said.
But Chloe knew that wasn’t true. She was asking for a test. She needed to see what was beyond the rolling hills and river bluffs of the northeastern Iowa town where she’d grown up. Collierville was wonderful. Dave was wonderful. She loved them both. But maybe, like Sister Carmela, she was taking the easy way out.
Maybe she should leave, too.
“Not for fifteen years!” Dave had said when she told him how long Sister Carmela had stayed away.
“Of course not! A couple of months. That’s all. What do you think?”
“I think it’s nuts,” Dave had said with his customary bluntness. “What’s out there that isn’t here? Besides crime, poverty, dirt and air pollution, that is.”
Dave knew they had all that, to some degree, in Iowa. He was just trotting out the time-honored arguments that all self-satisfied midwesterners indulged in when they felt morally superior to big city folks.
But in the end, he’d supported her. He’d told his parents that if Chloe felt she had to do it, then she had to do it. He’d told her parents that he didn’t mind waiting to get married. They’d waited often enough.
“I’ll be back in August,” Chloe had reminded them all.
“Leaving me to do all the work,” her mother had said darkly.
But in fact, Chloe thought her mother was secretly pleased. She had far more interest in making it a wedding to remember than Chloe did.
“I’ll take the phone book with me. I’ll contact the florist, the caterer,” Chloe promised. “I’ll send out the wedding invitations