Into the Light by Ellen O'Connell

through the front door, she began working her way around the building, passing first a couple lost in each other’s arms, then two men embroiled in a heated discussion about the best variety of wheat. She made it to the back door and the path to the garden, out of breath from hurrying and from the fear it was all for naught. She’d never know if he had left before she got away or if he had never....
    “I was about to give up.” His voice floated to her out of the blackness of the night.
    “Oh.” Relief washed through her, leaving her weak in the knees. “I was afraid you would. If you were here that is. I had to dance with every eligible man my aunt could rope into it. She says I promised. I don’t remember, but if she says so, I did.” She felt her way to her bench and dropped down, heedless of her skirt or anything else. “I’m sorry. I’m babbling. I thought I’d never get away.”
    “I’m glad you did. Somehow I expected you this time, and I was starting to feel disappointed.”
    “Me too. I mean disappointed that I couldn’t get away. You’d give up and go inside and I’d never know and never recognize you, and, well, I’m glad it didn’t happen.”
    “Maybe it’s time we give up the mystery and tell names.”
    Deborah hesitated, but she still didn’t want to know — or to tell. “No, let’s not, but — is your hair dark?”
    “Plain old brown, the middling kind of brown. How about you? I took brunette to mean dark. Is it?”
    “Yes. Almost black, but not quite.” She settled back, ready to bring up the last book she’d read or ask him if he’d ever seen an electric car like the one the newspaper said won a fifty-mile race in two hours. Fifty miles in two hours!
    “When we talked before, you sounded firmly established in the unmarried state, yet you admit you’re dancing with eligible men. Have you changed your mind?”
    “No. The problem is my aunt is stubborn as stone,” Deborah said, more sharply than she intended. “The fact I’m not — enthusiastic just means she drags over any unmarried man with a pulse, the more desperate the better. When I got away, she had hold of this old, smelly....”
    “You’re angry.”
    “No, I’m not.” She closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She didn’t want to talk about Aunt Em or anyone else in the family, and how could she divert him to the kind of thing she did want to talk about? “Maybe I am a little. I’ve told her often enough that I don’t want to marry, and she just keeps hoping and arranging and, and fussing.”
    “She cares about you and wants you to have a better life.”
    “Married isn’t better, not for a woman.”
    “Aah. So your reading has included authors such as Mary Wollstonecraft and Susan B. Anthony, and you’re an acolyte. If I try to debate their theories, you’ll be angry with me.”
    As a matter of fact Deborah had never heard of Mary Wollstonecraft. Susan B. Anthony had been mentioned in the newspaper once — unfavorably. Deborah decided she needed to see what she could get her hands on written by those two ladies.
    “I wouldn’t be angry with you, but no one with an ordinary family would ever understand about mine.”
    “What’s ordinary? My father believes the only real crime is getting caught, my sister makes Lady MacBeth sound sane, and my mother walks around with a smile on her face pretending she doesn’t notice.”
    “My grandfather was so mean his own children wished him dead. Someone else killed him before anyone in the family could, but it was a close run thing. When I was seven years old, my cousin killed my father. I saw him do it — the same cousin who gives me books, the same cousin who couldn’t bring himself to put his old dog out of its misery last week and had to ask a neighbor to do it.”
    He laughed. “You win. For a spur of the moment effort that was excellent.”
    “I thought so.” She closed her eyes, relief giving way to sorrow. She should never have let resentment