Aly's House Read Online Free PDF

man in the window seat.
    Marshall, from his vantage point three rows back and across the aisle, watched the elegant young woman sigh and close her eyes again.
    As soon as they were airborne, Marshall had drawn a polite but definite curtain between himself and his garrulous seat mate, then adjusted the back of his seat to get a better view of the woman he had first noticed in the airport. There was something naggingly familiar about her. At first he had been charmed by her embarrassment that he had caught her staring at him. He was unused to that kind of reaction from women of her age and…liberated modernity, he supposed he’d call it. Most would have continued to stare boldly, invitingly, issuing a kind of challenge that lately he had come to find less and less provocative. He had been a little touched by her disconcertion and had treated himself to an inspection of his own while she pretended such interest in her ticket, noticing then how really lovely she was. Her figure had the certain long-lined elegance that he always associated with the sleek grace of a thoroughbred, an impression he thought was further heightened by her clothes, an elegant tweed suit with a simple white blouse. And the way she wore her hair, a full, sun-streaked mane of it, golden and glorious. Now he felt sure he knew her. Could she be from Claiborne? Then why hadn’t she recognized him? He hadn’t changed that much in thirteen years. Of course, this woman—he guessed her age to be about thirty—would have been eighteen or so when he left Claiborne, not likely to remember him since he would have been away at Wharton while she was in high school. And he couldn’t recall any eighteen-year-old who had shown the promise of this woman’s kind of beauty. Still…something about the small nose, the firm little chin made him think he knew her. She was unmarried, he noticed from her ringless left hand resting on the armrest. It was a pleasing, capable hand with buffed, well-trimmed nails, the kind of hand that diamonds would not suit.
    His mother’s had been like that. He still had the simple gold wedding band she had asked him to keep shortly before she died. “A special girl waits for you, son, the kind of girl who will want this ring around her finger.” He had never met that special girl, and none of the women he knew would want a plain, gold band. Its simple eloquence would be lost on them. Somehow he knew that it would not be lost on the woman up the aisle.
    He closed his eyes. He could simply inquire, of course, but her manner had made it plain that she would not encourage conversation from a stranger on a plane, even one she clearly found disturbing. He would just wait and see if she got off in Oklahoma City. Someone from home he recognized might be meeting her plane.
    Home. A misnomer when applied to Claiborne. He couldn’t call Claiborne home. His parents were dead, his birthplace demolished, Cedar Hill laid to waste, most of his friends moved away—all the ties that bind cut long ago. Even so, more and more often he found his thoughts back in Oklahoma, buried in the past. It had begun—this going back—one cold January day in New York over a year ago. His accountant had handed him his balance sheet, smiled, and asked, “How does it feel to know you don’t have to work another day in your life to be able to enjoy it to the fullest?”
    He had studied the polished toe of a hand-sewn shoe, one of many pairs that occupied a closet filled with equally expensive custom suits, and considered an answer. “Cheated,” he had replied at last to the astonished man, “very cheated.”
    On the way back to his bachelor apartment on the Upper East Side, he had thought on his reply and decided, feeling slightly disillusioned, that the view from the top was never as good as expected on the climb up. He had found it so with everything he had attained: money, position, possessions, women. Always there was disappointment. The glow did not last, and