The kids had come to spend Saturday with us, but now they were gone. I figured these Saturdays weren't going to last much longer. Jack was engaged and had brought Marion along with him. She seems like a great girl, pretty and smart. Melanie wasn't engaged, not yet, but Donna says she's been talking a lot about a guy at college who's majoring in civil engineering. She thinks Melanie is sleeping with him, but told me not to worry because Melanie knows how to take care of herself. It's probably only a matter of time before I find myself walking her down the aisle. That's going to be tough because Melanie has become as much my daughter as Jack is my son.
When I look back, I wouldn't have believed any of this was going to happen. I was thirty-nine and the single father of a teenage boy named Jack. Jack was a handful, not because he got into trouble, but because he was curious and wanted to try everything. He got that from his mother, I suppose, because he didn't get it from me. If she'd lived, Mandy would have known how to handle him, but a drunk driver took her away from us when Jack was two.
He doesn't really remember her. That made it harder for him to grow up and made it harder for me to raise him. It was hard for him to tell his friends he didn't have a mother. It was hard for me to explain to him when he asked me about his mother. How do you tell a young child about the woman you loved more than life itself only to have her taken away?
I managed to bring Jack up by myself, and he'd turned out to be a responsible and caring young man who played most sports when he was in high school. I'd never played any sports when I was in high school. I was too light for football, too short for basketball, too slow for track, and wore bifocal glasses that made catching baseballs bouncing on the ground nearly impossible. I'd be watching the ball through the upper section and when it got close, had to change to the lower section to see it in focus. Jack had inherited his size, strength, and 20-20 eyesight from his mother's dad.
When Jack was sixteen, my father passed away and left my mother all alone, so I made the decision to move back to the town where I grew up so I could be there for her. Fortunately my job enabled me to do that. After Mandy died, I gave up my job as a newspaper editor and started free-lancing articles for several newspapers and magazines. That way I could stay home with Jack and still earn a living. I wasn't rich by any means, but my work usually sold and Jack and I lived a comfortable life. I was writing a novel in hope of improving it from just comfortable.
I was a little concerned about my old high school though. Jack was showing a talent for mechanics as well as for sports, and I wasn't sure my old high school would challenge him like the large city school he'd been attending. In the end, I decided he was smart enough to figure out things by himself if they didn't teach him in school.
That high school, like many others in the area, had a dance after every home football and basketball game. They called them "sock hops", because they were held in the gym where basketball games were played, and the kids had to take off their shoes so they wouldn't damage the hardwood floor. The sock hops were chaperoned by a few teachers and any parents who wanted to volunteer. That was to keep the surging hormones of the high school kids in check, and was pretty important because most of the gym lights were turned off to make the gym seem more like a dancing place.
I'd been to many sock hops in that same gym when I was in high school, and when he was a senior, Jack said he wanted to go to the first one of the season, I said I'd go along to chaperone. He wasn't really happy about that, but he agreed.
When we walked in the gym door, Jack said "See you when it's over", and took off. I understood because I'd felt the same way when I was his age. He was a man and didn't need me looking over his shoulder to see what he was doing.
I trusted Jack, but I was also concerned about him. Jack had discovered girls the year before, but more importantly, girls had discovered the tall, good-looking guy who played sports, and he got a lot of attention from them. I thought I'd taught him right, but you never know with teenagers.
I found a seat in the bleachers and sat down preparing to be bored for the next two hours. After about a minute, I realized I was doing the same thing I'd done at the sock hops when I was in high school -- sitting in the bleachers and watching the other kids dance.
The reason I didn't dance back then wasn't because I didn't want to dance with a girl. It was because none of the girls wanted to dance with me. They wanted to dance with the jocks. Oh, there was Jeanette Majors and Rhonda Anderson, but Jeanette was about three inches taller than me, and while Rhonda was about my height, she was about double my weight. I never asked either to dance because they'd have accepted and I'd never have lived it down.
Anyway, that night I sat there watching the kids dance. Some looked pretty good, no doubt because they'd learned the moves from television. Some looked like they sort of made up their own moves. Some, including Jack just stood on the sidelines and talked, although when a slow song played, some of the talkers would get pulled out onto the floor by a girl.
About twenty minutes into the dance, I saw a woman and a young girl walk into the gym. Just like Jack had done, the girl waved to the woman and then disappeared into the throng of other girls. The woman started walking toward the bleachers.
I knew most of the people in town since I'd gone to school with most of them, but I didn't recognize the woman. I figured she'd just moved to town, though I hadn't heard of any new arrivals. My mother would have learned about any from her sewing club and she'd have told me. The sewing club gossip usually beat the town newspaper by about a week.
The woman kept walking like she was looking for a place to sit. There were several parents and teachers sitting in those bleachers, but apparently she didn't want to sit with them. She kept walking toward me. When she got closer, I could see her face, and although her face was more mature, her smile was the same.
It had been a lot of years, but it was the same smile Donna had given me when we were seniors at the last sock hop of the year. Mr. Baker, the high school principal had announced over the PA system that since this was the last sock hop of the year, the next slow song would be a "Sadie Hawkins" dance.
For those too young to understand, a Sadie Hawkins dance is where the girl asks the guy to dance instead of vice versa. There was usually at least one, always to a slow song, at every sock hop. It gave the backward boys and wallflower girls a chance to meet and dance.
I'd have told Donna no if I could have, but it was an unwritten rule that a guy didn't turn down a girl who asked him to dance. I didn't know how to dance, but that wasn't the reason. You didn't really have to know how to dance a slow dance. You just held the girl and rocked from side to side. What was embarrassing was that Donna didn't have much of a figure, she wasn't all that pretty, and she was taller than most of the other girls. To most of the jocks, Donna was "The Scarecrow", because she was tall and thin, and they said if you got her clothes off, she'd scare you so bad you wouldn't be able to get it up.
She'd changed a lot from the tall, gangly girl I remembered. Even in the light coat she wore, I could see she had a sensuous woman's figure, and instead of short, bobbed hair, she had waves that reached below her shoulders. It was hard to see much else because of the dim lighting.
The woman climbed the three bleacher steps to my row, and sat down beside me and smiled that smile again.
"Craig Lawrence? You're Craig Lawrence. You didn't recognize me, did you?"
I smiled back.
"Not at first. You've changed a lot since high school, Donna."
"Yeah, we all have, I suppose. Did you see Beverly? She's put on at least fifty pounds since high school."
I shook my head.
"No, but maybe I just didn't recognize her. I've just moved back to town."
Donna smiled.
"I moved back about six years ago. I thought I had to live in Knoxville in order to have a good job. The bank job I had was a good job but living there wasn't so good. When my mother told me the bank had an opening for a loan officer, I decided it might not pay as well, but I wouldn't have all the traffic and other things I didn't like. I moved back and bought a house down by the Methodist church."
I chuckled.
"Well, if I need a loan, I know who to see now. Have you been doing that since we graduated?"
Donna frowned.
"No. I went to UT first and got a degree in accounting. Then I got married and had Melanie. I've been working since my divorce."
I said I was sorry to hear she gotten a divorce, and Donna said not to be.
"We only got married because I was pregnant with Melanie. She was the only thing we had in common, and Harry really didn't like being tied down with a baby. When she was one and a half, we agreed to split everything down the middle and go our separate ways. I don't know where he is or what he's doing. He hasn't tried to see me or Melanie since we signed the paperwork."
I said I didn't think I could do that, not see my own child, and Donna shook her head.
"I couldn't believe it either, at first, but then I realized Harry just wasn't a family type guy. Instead of settling down with me and Melanie, he wanted to do what he'd done before we were married. He was into car racing, and spent most of his spare time working on his racecar. Every Saturday he was at a racetrack. That was OK with me when I was pregnant because I could go with him. Once Melanie was born, I had to stay home with Melanie while he went to the races."
I really wanted to know how she'd hooked up with a guy like that. In high school, Donna had seemed like a very sensible, if not really attractive, girl. I'd been in several classes with her and she always seemed to be smart as well. I couldn't figure why she'd ever gone out with a guy whose love was racing cars.
While I was thinking about what I was going to say next, Donna chuckled.
