Things Left Unspoken by Eva Marie Everson

Author:Eva Marie Everson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Baker Publishing Group
Published: 2009-06-01T04:00:00+00:00

40

Cottonwood, Georgia

January 1947

Stella came out of the movie theater in a daze. She’d just seen The Best Years of Our Lives for the third time. Each viewing was more moving than the last. She looked over at her date, a boy named Tom she’d gone out with for a few months, a young man just home from the war.

He gave her a slow grin. “Was it as wonderful for you this time as it was the last time?”

She nodded. “I love that movie.”

“Whatever makes you happy.”

Tom was a tall and lanky man and appeared even more so next to Stella’s petite stature. He wasn’t an overly handsome fellow; his jaw was too square, his nose too small, and he wore oval-shaped glasses. But he was always a gentleman with Stella, and for Stella that was just fine. She’d gone out with him at least two dozen times and he had yet to even give her a kiss.

Her mama was nearly planning the wedding, though Stella had told her more than once not to bother.

“He’s not the one,” she’d said.

But her mother would not be discouraged. She invited him to suppers and Sunday dinners, clucked like an old hen every time he came to the house to pick Stella up for an outing.

If Tom were aware of her mother’s overzealousness, he never mentioned it.

In her mother’s mind, Stella knew, Tom was from Raymore, and that made all the difference in the world. “So what?” Stella had asked her.

“Then he isn’t from here.”

“And so? What’s so wonderful about not being from here? I happen to like it here.”

Her mother was standing in Stella’s bedroom. Together they were putting fresh linens from the line on the bed. One woman stood on one side, the other opposite her.

Mama blushed. “Stella. You know what I mean. I think it’s best for you if you married some nice young man from somewhere besides Cottonwood. Settle down close by but far enough away. It’ll be easier for you.”

Stella cocked a brow. “You mean for you, Mama.”

Since her “time away,” as Mama and Papa preferred to call it, six years ago, she’d grown sassier. “Too sassy,” Papa would say, but he never scolded her for it.

She’d also grown tough. She had to. After her return, she’d taken a job at Wright’s, but when Mrs. Wright told her mama that she was flirting with too many of the male customers, her mother had forced her to resign.

It wasn’t that she was flirting, so much, Stella had argued, though she knew she had been. But it was a safe flirtation. “If I never fall in love again,” she’d declared as though she were Bette Davis on the silver screen, “it will be too soon.” Love came at too high a price.

After Wright’s, she’d gone to work for Dr. Terrance Bird, a physician fresh out of school with a world of new ideas for practicing medicine, a spark in his eye for Stella, and a very astute wife who kept her baby blues on them both.

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