Message from Nam by Danielle Steel Page B

was used to that kind of woman, although in his youth, even George had liked them a little looser. Paxton watched her all that evening, her mouth so prim and tight, she could barely speak, and yet she didn’t seem shy about expressing her opinions. And finally after dinner, Paxton exploded into the kitchen, and when they were alone, she let her hair down with Queenie. “My God, she’s so rigid and so opinionated, how on earth does he stand her?” But she was exactly what he wanted. In his view, she was the perfect southern woman. He had been well trained by their mother. “What does Mama think of her?” She was curious about that, but Queenie only shrugged.
    “I don’t know. She don’t tell me nothing.”
    “It must be like looking in the mirror, or maybe she doesn’t see it.”
    The rest of the evening was incredibly boring for her, as was the rest of the trip. They went to church on Christmas Eve and again on Christmas morning. She saw a few of her friends and was shocked to discover that two of her friends who had chosen not to go to college that year were getting married, and another one who’d gotten married after graduation in June was already pregnant. Here she felt years too young even to consider responsibilities like that, and they were already fully embarked on adult lives with husbands and children. It made her think of Peter again, everything did now, and he called her every few days, but most of the time she answered the phone herself so no one was aware of how often he called her. Her mother only mentioned him once, and said she thought it odd that a boy from California would call Paxton all the way to Savannah and she hoped it didn’t mean anything unpleasant. “Anything unpleasant” being an involvement with a boy who wasn’t from Savannah, Georgia.
    Paxton went to the employment office of the newspaper while she was there, and despite Mr. Wilson’s offer to smooth the way for her, she didn’t take advantage of it, and managed to get hired for a summer job while she was on vacation from Berkeley from June to August. She was looking forward to it, but now anything that would take her away from Peter depressed her. And that bothered her too. She didn’t want to be totally dependent on him, and there was still so much she wanted to do with her life, to fulfill the promises she’d made herself. But he had promised he would wait, and she knew he would. He had repeated that promise again and again when he had called her in Savannah over Christmas.
    She had agreed to fly home the day before New Year’s Eve, and her mother seemed to be so involved with George and Allison and her own friends that Paxton didn’t think she’d really mind it. She even admitted to them that she wanted to spend New Year’s Eve with her friends at school, and although her mother said she thought that “unkind of her,” she actually seemed to accept it. George took her to the airport again, after Paxton spent a quiet morning in the kitchen with Queenie. She had developed her annual chest cold by then, and Paxton had made her promise she would go to the doctor.
    Paxton’s mother had gone to the hairdresser before she left, and had said good-bye to her earlier that morning. And as Paxton prepared to say good-bye to George, she told him to give her best to Allison, and he almost flinched at the familiarity with which she said it.
    “You two are serious, aren’t you?” she couldn’t resist asking him in the intimacy of the moment. Intimacy was a word which her brother hated.
    “I have no idea what that means,” he said with a tone of icy annoyance, and she couldn’t help laughing softly. He had just turned thirty-three, and if he hadn’t figured it out by then, he was in serious trouble. “It’s most unladylike, Paxton, for you to ask that.” The thought came into her head of how comfortable Peter and Gabby were and it made her sad to realize how different her own life was, and how stiff and stilted her