Synopsis

A passion for books creates a lasting bond between teenage Patty Jo and David, but small-town prejudice and social differences doom their romance.

After a summer of reading and falling in love, David heads for university, foreign adventure, and a dazzling career; Patty Jo marries slick, over-confident Don Ried.

Yet plans can go horribly wrong. The victim of her violent husband, Patty Jo abandons her home and children to live on the streets of Toronto. David, a high-ranking executive in Paris, is dismayed by the superficiality of corporate success.

Forty years later, Patty Jo and David meet again. Both have defied society; both have fulfilled their dreams. And what if first love was the right one after all, and destiny has the last word?

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Excerpt

“Would you like to go out rowing with me?” He’s never done this in his life, picked up a townie. It’s just that she looks so good. He’s been wondering what she’s like for all these months, has nurtured the idea of contact, has fantasized this meeting until it was inevitable. Now it’s happened. And at this very moment, he wants to be in a boat with her, and far away from town, somewhere on the lake’s far shore. To be talking to her alone, discovering who she is.

“Can’t.” So softly said, he can barely hear her over the lap, lap, lap of waves, the roar of cottage traffic on the road behind. He can’t miss the faint rosy flush spreading over her cheeks.

“You can’t?”

“Have to go home.”

“Perhaps another day?”

No answer, no sign of interest. She simply stands, brushes the back of her pink slacks cut short to reveal delicious ankles. She’ll be on her way, will escape if he doesn’t think of something fast. He can’t let that happen, not when he’s gotten this far.

“Where do you live?”

Her face tightens, and he’s pretty certain she’ll ignore the question, resent his curiosity, quash his attempt to make something happen. But before stepping away, she does answer. “Vesta.”

As he thought. That other part of town. The other side of the tracks, definitely that. “I’ll walk you back,” he says.

She doesn’t react, so together they cross Main, turn the corner. It’s hot on the back streets, away from the lake breeze. Stuffy hot. Tar oozes from sidewalk cracks; front yard sprinklers send out iridescent rainbow mists, dampen their legs as they pass, perfume the air with wet green. What he wants to do right now is run through those shimmery cascades, leap like a little kid because he’s sky high, walking a beautiful blonde home on a sunny summer afternoon.

Of course, at eighteen, if you walk down the road with a girl who makes you tingle, you can’t be childish, ruin everything by hopping around and cheering.

“Why do you have to go home?”

She raises tense, square shoulders. “Because it’s four thirty. I have to be there by four thirty.”

Which isn’t much of an explanation. Perhaps she has a date. Perhaps she has a boyfriend, is waiting for the phone to ring.

“Because?” He holds his breath.

“Ma and Pa will raise hell if I’m not.”

That’s all? Except the sentence, the whispery voice, both beg answers.

About the Author

Writer, photographer, social critical artist, and impenitent teller of tall tales, J. Arlene Culiner was born in New York and raised in Toronto. She has crossed much of Europe on foot, has lived in a mud house on the Great Hungarian Plain, a Bavarian castle, a Turkish cave dwelling, a haunted house on the English moors, and on a Dutch canal. She now resides in a 400-year-old former inn in a French village of no interest where, much to local dismay, she protects spiders, snakes, and all weeds. She particularly enjoys incorporating into mysteries, non-fiction, and romances, her experiences in out-of-the-way communities and her conversations with very odd characters.

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