dancing in the afternoon, chap 1

Jake stood by the window looking down the dusty road.  Behind him the everyday clatter of Bill’s store barely knocked at the edge of his consciousness.  It wasn’t until Evie Morgan’s strident voice pealed out that his attention was drawn to the figure making her way down to the store. 

“Look, that’s her.”  “From Boston, Pete says.”

“Ain’t she beautiful now,” said old man Schaffer to his gin rummy pal Matt O’Dell.

But Jake wouldn’t have called her beautiful.  Striking, maybe, but not beautiful.  She was tall with a long barefoot stride that ate up the road.  Her walk was saved from being manly by the swish of her full hips beneath the simple cotton sundress she wore.  Her waist was small.  Jake thought as she walked nearer that he could probably fit both his hands around that waist.

Around this time, it dawned on Jake that his perusal was not headed in the usual direction.  Glancing up he saw the deep auburn glow of her long hair floating down across her back.  It seems as if all her body parts, least of all the fabulous breasts that she wore unfettered beneath the deep, neckline of her sundress, all of it was conspiring to direct his attention from her face.

She stepped up to the porch by the store’s front window to put on the sandels she carried and as she did, she turned to come face to face with Jake.

Jake’s breath stopped.  Her face was smooth and heart shaped with a a small classic nose, full soft lips, and a firm chin. But it was her eyes that caught Jake.  Rich, brown, deep as the old well at the farmstead, they held infinite pain and infinite sadness.

Jake wondered what kind of experiences could mark a soul so strongly.

Then, it was over in an instant.  The shutters dropped across her face blocking from view her heart, her soul.  As she turned to the door, Jake knew that something momentous had happened.  He didn’t understand it but being Jake, he put it to the back of his mind and turned his long rangy body toward the back of the store where Bill stood with the boxes of Amy’s grocery order.  He had a farm to run and a wife to support.  The Boston lady’s mysteries were for someone else to solve.

Still, as she walked to the post office counter, the soft slap of her sandals on the wood plank floor echoed through his head within the silence of the townfolk.

In the gold-dusted air of the afternoon heat she glowed like some exotic priceless treasure suddenly transplanted to this quiet central Maine town.  Only the gray dust of the road  that covered her bare legs seemed of this world.