CHAPTER ONE

 

 

 

"I'm as sorry as you are, honey, but there's absolutely nothing I can do about it. Some of the other guys checked with the front office and they said the same thing... Jed's the last word on who gets laid off. Until business picks up again after the energy crunch, I'm just out of luck!"

 

Don Willard had tried to break it to his wife Diane as easily as he could, but there just wasn't any way to camouflage the truth- he was going to be out of a job in thirteen days. The company had suffered from the gas shortage and they were taking the easy way out. Like most businesses, they were laying off people who needed their jobs the most. None of the executives were feeling the pinch, nor the foremen like Jed Collis; they were all cozy and secure in their homes out in Forest Park, not over here on the east side of town worried about where the rent money was going to come from.

 

He had thought about not telling her, taking the time that the company owed him for leave to look for something else. But what was there in this one-company town? Nothing.

 

Diane kept a stiff upper lip until Don had finished with the bad news and gone on to work; then, and only then, did she allow herself the luxury of a good cry.

 

"Why now? Oh, God, why now?" she sobbed woefully, her pillow already stained with tears. "And tonight was supposed to be my big surprise... I was going to tell him I might be pregnant! Pregnant and without a job. Some surprise!"

 

Through sheer force of will, she managed to clean the house and do the laundry and be at the warehouse dock when Don got off at four. He had a ride in the morning, but in the afternoons she always came for him in their five-year-old Chevy Malibu. Sometimes they would stop for dinner at one of the town's five eating places. They weren't classy enough to be called restaurants, but the two of them had figured it out that they could eat about as cheaply as cooking at home, as long as they stayed clear of the expensive meats and stuck with chicken and pork.

 

She was a little early arriving at the dock and Jed was outside at the tiny podium-like desk that he kept, checking over the day's worksheets and manifests.

 

Jed was a coarse looking man, the kind of man, she imagined, that would be a tough sergeant in the Marines. With his short-sleeve shirt on, she could see the Vietnam War vintage tattoos on his muscled, upper arms. He even wore his hair like they did then, in an antiquated crew-cut that everyone laughed about- behind his back, of course, for Jed wasn't the kind of man to take kidding. He lived alone since his wife had left him three years before. Some of the old-timers said that she ran away with a salesman from up north, anxious for a shot at a better life somewhere away from this forgotten, decaying town.

 

The textile products company that Don worked for was the one shot in the arm, the last hope for Evansboro, though most of the optimists had even given up now and were just fighting to keep the tiny town alive. The railway station was gone, burned down by unknown vandals on a wintry night. Four service stations had closed for good, leaving just Doc's Independent Self-Service, which was something of a local joke since it only had gas about one out of a dozen days. Most everyone, Don included, drove five miles to the nearest real town to buy from the stations that thrived there on the Interstate highway, another thing that passed Evansboro by.

 

"Hi, Diane, you're a little early, aren't you?" Jed asked, climbing down from the loading dock. He walked over to her window, close enough to touch her if he had dared.

 

Diane was the prettiest girl in town, almost everyone agreed, and though some of the older citizens whispered about her cut-off short jeans and miniskirts and sun-back halters that she wore during the warmer months, hardly anyone would deny that she was naturally beautiful, one of those clear, sparkling country girls born with earthy good looks that were the root of a hundred traveling-salesmen jokes.

 

"Yeah, I guess I am... but it doesn't matter. I won't be coming much longer, will I? Not after next week."

Jed looked down, averting his eyes from hers. "So Don told you. I'm sorry, Diane, for your sake, but it couldn't be helped. He had the least seniority of anyone on the dock and..."

"But how about the year before that? The year he spent inside at the looms?"

He ran his fingers nervously through his short-cropped hair, his face flushed. "Sorry, Diane... but I have to call it as I see it. Nothing personal, Diane, 'cause you know how I've always felt about you."

"Please, Jed, let's not start that again," she pouted, not at all anxious to have old memories, especially painful ones, rekindled.

 

She had gone out with Jed a couple of times when they were growing up here; of course, he was a lot older, much too old to be dating girls in high school like she was at the time. But Diane was always a bit of a rebel, too high strung for this tiny town. Some of the folks who went to the Baptist church called her a "flirt" and a "man-teaser", but those kinds of words just rolled off her back because she knew what she was like inside. And that none of those rumors about her were true.

 

The rumors were the part that hurt, at least in the beginning. And on more than one night Diane lay awake, tears on her cheeks, painfully wondering how anyone could start such stories when none of them were true. Sure, she had gone out often enough, and sometimes with older men, college men and occasionally a local boy who had gone off to the Army, but she never let them go all the way, not ever. But none of them had ever believed it until he tried his luck, and most of her Saturday nights were spent practicing the art of self-defense, often in the back seat of an old car out at the Highway 64 Drive In.

 

Jed had been one of the non-believers, cocksure and confident that if anybody got in her pants, it would have to be him. And it almost took the police to stop him.