Bygones Read Online Free PDF

time?”
    “Seven.”
    “All right, see you then. And, Keith, I really am sorry. I mean it.”
    He expelled a breath. “I know.”
    After Bess had hung up, she sat staring at the fire. What was she doing with Keith? Merely using him to slake her loneliness? He had walked into her store one day three years ago, when she’d been three years without a man, three years insisting that all men belonged at the bottom of the ocean. He was a little on the plain side, but one of the best sales reps she’d ever encountered. Known in the trade as a ragman, he’d wheeled in a big forty-by twenty-inch sample case and announced that he liked the looks of her store. He needed a gift for his mother, and if she would look through his fabric samples while he perused her merchandise, they each might find something they liked. If not, he’d never darken her door again.
    Bess had burst out laughing. So had Keith.
    He bought a vase trimmed with glass roses, and she was indeed impressed with his samples. He called a week later and asked if she’d like to go out.
    On their first date, he had been impeccably polite-no groping, no sexual innuendos, not even a good-night kiss. They had seen each other for six months before their relationship became intimate. Immediately afterward he’d asked her to marry him. For two and a half years she’d been saying no and he’d been growing more frustrated by her refusals. She had tried to explain that she wasn’t willing to take that risk again, that running her business had become her primary source of fulfillment. The truth was , she simply didn’t love him enough.
    He was nice, but when she saw him, she only smiled, never glowed. When he kissed her, she only warmed, never heated.
    And of course there was that thing about her children. He was jealous of Lisa and Randy, and slightly selfish.
    If Bess had to say no to him because of a commitment with Lisa, he became piqued. He held that her stand on his sleeping at her house was ridiculous, given that Randy was nineteen years old and no dummy.
    There were many facets of Keith that displeased her.
    So the question remained, Why did she continue to see him?
    The answer was plain: he had become a habit, and without him life would have been infinitely more lonely .
    She sighed, then rose and wandered into the dining room and on through an archway into the living room. In the corner where two large windows met, a grand piano stood in the shadows-black, gleaming, silent since Lisa had grown up and moved away.
    Bess switched on the music lamp. Its rays shone down upon an empty music rest and closed key cover. She wondered why she herself had given up playing. After Michael left, she’d shunned the instrument just as she’d shunned him. Because he had liked piano music so much? How childish. There were moments when the sound of the piano would have been comforting.
    She opened the bench and leafed through the sheet music until she found what she was looking for. Then she raised the key cover. The notes shimmered through the darkened room as she found the familiar combinations and struck them.
    “Me Homecoming”-Lisa’s song, Michael’s song. Why she had chosen it, Bess neither dissected nor cared. As she played, the tension left her, and she began to feel an immense sense of well-being.
    She was unaware of Randy’s presence, until she ended the song and he spoke out of the shadows. “Sounding good, Mum.
    “Oh, Randy!” she gasped. “You scared the devil out of me! How long have you been there?”
    He smiled, one shoulder propped against the dining-room doorframe. “Not long.” He sauntered into the room and sat down on the bench, beside her. He was dressed in jeans and a brown leather jacket. His hair was black, like his father’s, and spiked straight up and finger-long on top, trailing in natural curls below his collar in back. Randy was an eye equals Fatcher , with a lopsided, dimpled grin, perfect teeth, and brown eyes with glistening black