First Impressions by Kate Courtright

Author:Kate Courtright [Courtright, Kate]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781959491002
Publisher: Kate Courtright

4—BREAKFAST IN BED

The next morning, the staff sat around the table in a somber mood. When Mrs. Hodges came in to speak to Heidi about the dinner menu, she took in all their gloomy faces and asked, “Did someone die?”

They looked at each other guiltily. Doug made no appearance all morning. None of them looked like they had slept well, and Janet’s eyes were red from weeping. Heidi had heard muffled sobs through the wall and wondered who was crying. She was surprised to see it had been Janet, though she had limited sympathy, as Janet had brought all that negative attention on herself. She sensed no one approved of her revealing Doug’s secret that way.

“We’re just tired of all this rain,” Debbie said. “Will the sun ever come out again?”

“It always has,” Mrs. Hodges said. This reminded Heidi of Doug, who had given her the same response on her first night here, when she asked if the power would ever come back on. She suspected he felt ashamed and exposed and wondered if he would speak to her again. She wondered if she should even want him to.

All night her parents’ warnings had drummed through her head, their insistence that she was naïve and vulnerable and ripe for being taken advantage of. To a point, she agreed with them. That’s exactly what made her such easy prey for Alan, though her parents had for years perceived him as a protector, not a control freak. Their perspective had changed when they realized how unhappy she’d been in the relationship but, if anything, it made them even more fearful on her behalf.

Her shock at learning that Doug had spent time in prison was made worse by her newfound awareness that she was very attracted to him. He was the first man in a long time that she’d caught herself daydreaming about. Ridiculous as it was, those fantasies zoomed right past the parts where they kissed and fell in love and involved introducing her parents to this handsome, rugged guy who embraced both hard physical labor and serious intellectual pursuits.

She was already worrying about what they would think about him just starting college at the age of twenty-six, and the possibility that he might want to major in English, given his apparent interest in Shakespeare. Her parents considered the whole concept of majoring in English, and the liberal arts in general, to be frivolous and irresponsible, unless one’s life ambition was to be an English teacher. As they paid for her college, they had expected to approve of her course of study, and she hadn’t even questioned their right to do that. When they said they didn’t consider an elective in Victorian novels worth however many thousands of dollars they calculated it to be, she’d been disappointed, but hadn’t challenged them.

She didn’t have to imagine what their response would be to their learning that Doug was getting a late start at college because he’d been incarcerated. What had he done? she wondered. Maybe she had proven herself a poor judge of character in the past, but she liked him.

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