In the June when Melanie Johnson was twenty, she moved from the little mining town in western Pennsylvania where she was born to Washington, D.C. The jobs up her way were few and poor, and she hoped that she would be better off there.
She was wrong, at least in the short run. The work wasn't all that steady then, with a lot of federal cutbacks throwing everything off. Even so Melanie thought she would have made it, if it weren't for a couple of robberies and her own bad judgement in picking boyfriends. She had not in any sense had much experience with men before she moved to D.C., but she learned a lot in the year she was there. Some of it too late.
Melanie Johnson met Frank Taylor at about the time she first moved down. He was introduced to her as a friend of somebody who worked with her in her first job, and he kind of crossed her path time and again; parties, the neighborhood supermarket, just seeing him on the street. He was always polite and friendly, and a couple of times -- well, it's like this.
Most of that year she was living with a man whose name doesn't matter here, because Melanie worked on forgetting it herself. He was the first man she ever lived with. He moved in with her halfway through that year and he locked her out of the apartment near the end of it, after a fight.
Melanie knocked on Frank's apartment door at one o'clock on the Monday morning in April that the fight took place and she stayed there for three days until she could get her (now-ex)boyfriend thrown out of the apartment.
Frank loaned her the money to buy a new lock then. Earlier in the year he had come in and identified what was wrong when the toilet acted up. At the end of that year he helped her pack and ship her stuff back to Pennsylvania. She had given up on living alone for a while and was going to move back in with her parents. It takes much less money to starve up there.
While Melanie was packing up she was thinking that Frank had been such a good friend that she wished she had money to buy him a nice something for a going-away present. Silly, of course, since if she had any money she wouldn't be going away. Melanie was just thinking that thought as she set down a box of clothes and turned around.
Frank had been placing books into a carton while he admired the way Melanie's boobs filled out her t-shirt and her legs moved so nicely in her shorts, and was a bit embarrassed that she caught him at it.
She smiled at him, and suddenly realized that she certainly did have something that he liked, which it would cost her no money to give to him if she wanted to. She had never thought of him that way, but she could have done worse. She damn well had, for most of this year.
When they took the last boxes into the Greyhound station to ship north, Melanie told him that she was going to turn in the apartment keys to the landlord on Sunday morning, the next day, and she asked him if he would be home in the afternoon. He said yes, he usually was on Sundays.
Melanie went back to her apartment that night and slept on an air-mattress. It was kind of strange and bare; what hadn't been shipped had been sold or given away, except for what would fit in one suitcase. She lay there before drifting off to sleep thinking about Frank and wondering whether she really should follow her impulse toward him. He was considerate in many other things; how would he be where it could count the most?
