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However, by then I was starting to get a picture in my mind’s eye, and Steve Bennett was the main focus of that picture.
Chapter Ten
After Steve left Texas to go back to Pensacola, I spent every waking moment thinking about him, and I dreamed about him when I slept. I lived for his calls and would lie on my bed late at night, whispering into the phone and picturing him in my mind’s eye. That summer, I worked at a transport company in San Marcos, and I was good at my job, though everything seemed inconsequential.
My parents, of course, advised me to forget him. They saw no future for me with a man in the service, a man whose fate was controlled by the dictates of duty. He was a passing fancy, they said, not a sound plan for the future.
I was sitting on the porch one evening in late June when I heard a faint rumbling sound and felt a subtle change in the atmosphere, like the tinge of rain in a coming storm. I jumped up and rushed to the porch railing. In the street, hazy with the colors of sunset, he rode toward me on his motorcycle and suddenly my world came back into focus.
I rushed out to meet him and flung my arms around him, feeling the heat of the day in his shoulders, and our kiss was filled with yearning, passion and promise. He’d ridden all day to see me, nearly five hundred miles with only stops for gas. I’d never been that important to anyone before.
After he got cleaned up, I brought him a glass of iced tea. Since my parents were gone for the day, taking Gran to Austin for new bifocals and tea at the Driskill, we had the house to ourselves. We took full advantage, kissing long and hard, working ourselves into quite a state.
“I came to talk to you about something,” he said, and he seemed nervous. “I’m being transferred to Naples.”
“Naples,” I said, thinking of a golf resort in Florida. Then my mind, sluggish from kissing him, grasped what he was saying. Naples, Italy. What did I know about Naples? Pizza and vaporetti, lemon groves and traffic and antiquities. It was half a world away. “Italy. You’re going to Italy. For how long?”
“A few months, and then I’ll be transferred somewhere else, probably Virginia.”
“Well,” I said. “Well. Send me a postcard.”
“That’s not going to work for me,” he said.
It wasn’t going to work for me either, but who was I to stand in the way of such an opportunity. “I wish you weren’t going away,” I said, my heart on the ground. “We’ve only just met.”
“That’s why this is so crazy. I’m in love with you, Gracie. I swear I am.”
Those words lifted my heart up to the stars. “Really?”
“Yeah. You took me by surprise. I never thought—never expected I’d find someone again.”
For some reason, the “again” didn’t register. All I heard was “I’m in love with you.” Maybe I should have probed deeper, asked him about the word “again.” But I was flying high and this feeling felt so new and fragile that I didn’t want to disturb it. I said, “The day I met you, I told my grandmother I was falling in love with you. She didn’t think it was so crazy.”
He smiled at me, and there was such joy and relief in his face that I hugged him. Then he said, “I want you to come with me, Grace.”
“To Naples?” It was surreal, a concept beyond my grasp.
“To Naples. And everywhere else I go.” He was awkward as he went down on one knee and took a small velvet box from his pocket. “Grace McAllen, I want to marry you.”
I forgot how to breathe for a moment. Then I cried, with relief and trepidation and with the absolute certainty that this was exactly what I was supposed to do. I collapsed against him, and he sheltered me in his arms, and a great warm wave of calmness came over me.
“Yes,” I said. “I want to marry you, too.”
Chapter Eleven
Most people would consider it a coup to marry an officer in the U.S. Navy, but the McAllens counted it a failure on my part. Some fathers would even thank their daughters for eloping, but that was not the case for me. I heard nothing but displeasure and bitterness. Dropping out of college for a man I barely know, gallivanting off to a foreign country to live among strangers. Where had they gone wrong?
