Slow Waltz in Cedar Bend Read Online Free PDF Page B

had always seemed a special time for family
     and close friends. Her parents were coming from Syracuse, that was probably enough. But Jimmy made up a list, looked at it,
     and said if two-thirds of them came, it would be a respectable showing.
    Jimmy’s list was predictable, safe. He said, “I thought about inviting Michael Tillman, but I doubt if he’d come. He doesn’t
     seem the type for Thanksgiving dinner. Then again, Michael’s single and so is your friend, Ann Frazier, from sociology. They’re
     both kind of different, maybe we can do a little matchmaking over turkey.”
    Jellie thought about it. She imagined Michael sitting at their dining room table. Strange and different Michael Tillman, big-shouldered
     and brown-eyed with brown hair longer than the approved length for a business school faculty member. A little something out
     of the ordinary. Sunburned in the face, almost a workingman’s face, as if he’d be comfortable cashing his paycheck in a bar
     across the street from where he might have worked as a machinist. And his long, smooth fingers with the faintest imprint of
     grease even hard scrubbing couldn’t remove.
    A month before, she and Jimmy had been coming home from a local theater production. The night streets were wet from October
     rain, and suddenly there was Michael beside them when they stopped for a light. He sat on the Shadow, revving its engine.
     She remembered the car radio was playing a song by Neil Diamond, “Cracklin’ Rosie,” while Jimmy was telling her to find the
     public radio station devoting an entire evening to Beethoven. It stuck in her mind, the song playing at that moment. From
     that time on, she could be anywhere and hear “Cracklin’ Rosie,” and instantly she was back on the streets of Cedar Bend, looking
     at Michael on the Shadow.
    Jimmy had leaned out the window of the Buick and said, “Hi, Michael.”
    Michael—yellow bandanna tied around his head, leather jacket, boots, and jeans—turned and waved to the Bradens, then looked
     straight ahead. When the light changed he gunned the Shadow and was gone, straddling that smooth black machine of his and
     disappearing into the countryside.
    Jimmy said, “I think it’s a bit chilly and wet to be riding a motorcycle, don’t you?”
    But Jellie didn’t hear him. She was watching the Shadow’s taillight moving away from her. And she wanted to be riding with
     Michael Tillman, to be going out there where she had once traveled and was now afraid to go again. She wanted to climb on
     that black machine and feel the beat of its engine between her legs and the roar of wind in her ears.
    Admit it, she’d always had a taste for a peculiar kind of man, the sort that seems ill designed for the world in which they
     live (Jimmy is a whole other story—those were her break-even years). Michael Tillman was like that, she sensed, as if a great
     fist had reached back and plunked a hard-drinking, hard-cussing, nineteenth-century keelboatman into the 1980s, given him
     an intelligence out beyond where the rest of us live, and said, “Now, behave yourself,” all the while being doubtful that
     he would. And he didn’t.
    Her taste in men probably had something to do with the genes arching forward from her great-great-grandmother, Elsa, who had
     been a radical feminist when it was considered improper if not immoral for a woman to think about such things, let alone speak
     and parade in the streets on behalf of them. Elsa Mark-ham had left her husband, taken up with an equally radical socialist,
     and gone on the road as a warrior for women’s rights and free love. The Markham family didn’t talk much about Great-Great-Grandmother
     Elsa.
    Jellie kept that side of herself hidden for a long time. Not totally suppressed, hidden, tucked way back where it couldn’t
     get hold of her and disrupt the well-designed life her parents had drafted in clear terms for their two daughters. Jellie’s
     older sister, Barbara, had