I promised and hung up and went back to my room. I wanted things to be the way they had once been between us. I did not want to hurt her. I did not want to hurt myself. But I felt as if a whole area in my mind was dead and numb. The part where she had once been. She had been loyal while I had been gone. She was the one who had the faith I would return. She did not deserve this.
On the following morning, Thursday morning, Hillston lay clean and washed by the night rains, bright and glowing in the April sunshine. Timmy had often talked about the city.
"It's more town than city. There isn't much of a transient population. Everybody seems to know everybody. It's a pretty good place, Tal."
It lay amid gentle hills, and the town stretched north-south, following the line of Harts River. I drove up the main street, Delaware Street. Traffic had outgrown the narrowness of the street. Standardization had given most of our small cities the same look. Plastic and glass brick store fronts. Woolworth's and J. C. Penney and Liggett and Timely and the chain grocery. The essential character of Hillston had been watered down by this standardization and yet there was more individuality left than in many other cities. Here was a flavor of leisure, of mild manners and quiet pleasures. No major highway touched the city. It was in an eddy apart from the great current.
Doubtless there were many who complained acidly about the town being dead on its feet, about the young people leaving for greater opportunities. But such human irritants did not change the rather smug complacency of the city. The population was twenty-five thousand and Timmy had told me that it had not changed very much in the past twenty years. There was the pipe mill and a small electronics industry and a plant that made cheap hand tools. But the money in town was the result of its being a shopping center for all the surrounding farmland.
I had crossed the country as fast as I could, taking it out on the car, anxious to get to this place. The car kept stalling as I stopped for the lights on Delaware Street. When I spotted a repair garage I turned in.
A man came up to me as I got out of the car. "I think I need a tune-up. It keeps stalling. And a grease job and oil change."
He looked at the wall clock. "About three this afternoon be okay?"
"That'll be all right."