Hi all!  I'm putting a portion of Peggy's work up for you to look at and critique.  Let me - and her! - know what you think.

See you in a couple of weeks!  Sally

One Day In August

A novel by

Peggy Cheney

Prologue

August, 1968

It was August in California.  At 4:00 am, it was already clear that it would be a hot day.  But that was not important.  What WAS important was my mission.

We were leaving this morning, my husband and my daughter and I, to drive back to Ohio.  Before I left, there was something I HAD to do.

Carefully moving so as not to awaken anyone, I slipped out the back door, around the far side of the garage, and into our car.  It was a standard shift so all I had to do was let out the brake, let out the clutch, and slide quietly out of the driveway before starting the car.

Within a few minutes, I reached my destination.   I was not expected.  When I knocked, softly, however, he opened the door fairly quickly.

I don’t remember if we spoke.  If we did, I do not remember what we might have said.  But we were immediately in each other’s arms.  After 6 weeks of seeing each other nearly every day, talking non-stop, and realizing we had much more in common with each other than with our respective spouses, we had finally given voice to our mutual feelings just the night before.  And that was not enough for me.

He was getting ready for work.  His wife and son were asleep just down the hall.  At best, we had only a short while.  Our lovemaking was rushed and joyous and probably foolhardy as we put the living room sofa to good use. 

My unaccustomed boldness in precipitating this event seemed like something anyone but I would do.   Something beyond good sense, beyond in the best possible way, was driving me this day.  Some deep and essential part of my soul insisted that I follow through with what we had given voice to the night before, that I make our words and feelings a concrete reality which we could hold on to in the days to come when we were so far apart.

Parting was a huge wrench.  But he had to go to work and I had to go back and prepare for a long journey east.  It was 1968 and I was 21, he was 26.  Now we had a memory.  And a secret.

Chapter 1

July 1969

George was a tall, slender blond man with an open expression in pale blue eyes.  He was weary.  He still had close to 400 miles to go to get home, to get to his mother’s place in Philadelphia. 

He had the radio on and the only real news was about man’s first steps on the moon.  His mind catalogued this as an important event but his thoughts were elsewhere.

“Yes, my thoughts are definitely elsewhere,” he mused aloud.   He re-lived their recent encounter again in his mind and felt a surge of warmth flow all through his body.  He knew he had to go back to Philly but everything in him had wanted so badly to stay with her.

“I need to be more aware of my driving and the other cars on the road,” he said to himself.  But with the distracting memories and having gone without sleep for 19 hours, he was on the edge of exhaustion.

As he drove, he thought about the last year of his life.  How things had changed so much, mostly for the good.  This time last year, he lived in California, he was married, with a son and he worked for the post office. 

Now he lived in Pennsylvania with his mother and he was scrambling to find work that would pay enough for him to get an apartment of his own.  An old high school buddy had recommended that he check out a particular construction company that he heard was hiring.  That was on the top of his list to do in the morning.

“If I really told anyone the truth, I’d have to say that I am truly dazed and confused,“ he thought.  “I just spent three hours with the woman I love and I had to leave her behind. Basically, I am heading alone into the unknown, up the creek without a paddle.”

Leaving his son behind in California and relying on his mother for room and board when he was 28 years old, distressed him and depressed him.  He wished he could talk freely with his mother about his relationship with Marie but he knew she would be upset if he tried.  Her generational thinking about “infidelity” would make it into a sordid affair. 

Even though he wanted to shout out to the world about what he had found with Marie, he wouldn’t tell anyone.  He wanted to cherish their few hours together without exposing his heart to a judgmental world.

Little did he know at the time that his ex-mother-in-law had written a letter to his mother telling her about Marie, couched in very negative language. 

A MORNING IN JUNE

William James Courtney, III, more commonly known as Will, was 10 years old.  It was June and he was on his bike, enjoying the warm summer day.  Will was a skinny but wiry boy, with unruly brown hair, brown eyes and slightly larger than normal ears.  He was a curious boy and tended to view everything and everyone with interest.  Sometimes this got him in trouble and his mother was always telling him it was not polite to stare.

Today, Will was on his way to meet up with Bob and Joe, his two best friends.  They planned to ride the 2 miles to the lake on their bikes to explore.  None of them had been to the lake since last fall and there was always something interesting to be found along the shoreline.

Will rode along his regular route, past Mr. Wilson’s house with the flower beds around front already blooming with pink Vinca, purple ageratums, and yellow marigolds.  Past the Davis house where he could hear their new baby crying.  Past the Johnson’s where his friend Patty lived with her grandma and grandpa.  Each house he passed, Will cataloged in his mind as he rode by. 

Will knew all of his neighbors, probably better than they expected.  He knew all their names, their approximate ages, where they worked or, if they stayed home, what they did at home.  He knew their relatives and noted how often they visited.  He knew what they ate, what they watched on TV and what kinds of music they listened to.

Will was very observant and tucked away everything he heard and saw as he went down his street.  He had dreams of becoming a policeman when he grew up and he planned to be a detective.  He had cultivated his ability to memorize details, even ambiguous ones.  Will committed everything to memory and, at home in his closet, up on the top shelf, to the back on the left, he had a file box with cards for each family on his street listing all the information about them he had “collected.”

The neighborhood could be called solidly middle class.  All the homes were more or less well-maintained, with decent-sized yards in both front and back.  The homes on the left side of the street were backed by a woods and the ones on the right had a creek winding along behind them.  At the end of the street was a cul-de-sac where Will and his friends would sometimes ride around in circles on their bikes, seeing how fast they could go until one of them invariably would finally fall over and then they’d all fall over and lay in the dust laughing.

There was a new family at the end of the street, where Oak Street, Will’s street, intersected with Sumac Street.  This house was one of the more modern ones, built when Will was in First Grade.  There had been 3 families live there in that short time and Will was always interested to see who would move in next.

The family who lived there now was named Eubanks.  The adults were Peter and Janice and their children were Kevin, 7, and Jennifer, 4.  Mrs. Eubanks worked as a secretary for the Boldt Company and Mr. Eubanks had been transferred from Chicago to be the new comptroller at the Merck manufacturing plant in nearby Ridgley, Arkansas.

Today when Will rode by, there was an unfamiliar car in their driveway.  Will automatically made a mental note of the license number.  Just as he stopped at the corner to wait for a car to go by (Mr. Deville on his way home for lunch), Will heard what could have been a gunshot.  It seemed to come from the Eubanks house.

He turned to look back just as a woman came running out the door.  It was not Mrs. Eubanks.  Will had never seen this woman before.  She wasn’t their regular babysitter, Becky, either.  This woman looked to be in her early twenties, maybe 5’ 6” and about 120 lbs.  She had long black hair pulled into a ponytail and was wearing blue shorts with a yellow tank top.  She seemed to be wearing sandals.  All this Will took in at a glance.

The woman got into the driver’s seat of the car, started it with a gnashing of gears, and backed out of the driveway so fast that she nearly hit the postman’s truck which was parked at the curb on the other side of the street.

She barely paused at the intersection, not seeing Will on his bike in the shadows under the oak tree on the other side of the street.  Will watched her as she sped down Sumac to see if she turned toward town or toward the freeway at the end.  It was the freeway.

“Should I go over there and knock?” Will thought aloud.  “Or should I go home and call the police?”  He knew he should do something, just not what.  “Maybe I should go get Joe and Bob and all three of us could go over there,” Will pondered.

He decided to just go over and knock.  He could always tell the guys about it later.  Will’s curiosity was stronger than his trepidation about going over there alone.

Will turned around and rode his bike up the driveway to the Eubanks’ house.  He looked up and down the street to see if anyone else was out who he could ask to come with him.  He saw no one.  Taking a deep breath and saying to himself, “Well, I’ve got it to do,” his favorite phrase from a Louis Lamore novel he read last month, Will walked up the steps to the front door and knocked.  And waited.  And nothing happened.  He noticed the doorbell, black on a black door facing, and pushed the button.  He could hear it ringing inside.  Still nothing.

Will opened the screen to knock directly on the door.  When he did, the door, which was not latched, swung open.  And Will’s life changed forever.