From: bewalton17@aol.com (BEWalton17)
Newsgroups: alt.tv.quantum-leap.creative
Subject: QL: The Enemy (Chapter 14)
Date: 2 Dec 1998 05:03:02 GMT
Message-ID: <19981202000302.27332.00000944@ng-fc2.aol.com>






                        CHAPTER FOURTEEN
     Al left to pick Nate up quite a bit earlier than he had to. 
It was easier that way, easier to just be gone.  
     Ruthie, he thought miserably.  She still turned him on, and
cold water didn't do a damn thing about it.  If she were any other
woman, he would have seduced her there in the kitchen.  It wouldn't
have taken much, and he knew it, just as he'd known it yesterday.
     But she *was* Ruthie, and that complicated things.
     First, she was married to Sid Weiss, whether Al liked it or
not.  Her re-marriage had been a bitter pill for him to swallow,
almost as bitter, in its own way, as Beth's re-marriage had been. 
He didn't love Ruthie, but he'd always counted on her loving him. 
This was not arrogance; it was only the truth.  Ruthie's love was
one of the only good things he'd been able to hold onto in his
life, and losing it to Sid had been hard on him.  He'd forced them
to settle for a civil ceremony by refusing to give her a Jewish
bill of divorce, or _get_, which he would have been obliged to
provide when she had asked for it if he had been Jewish.  But by
the law of the land, she was married to Sid, and Al believed her
when she said she wanted it to work.  He had gone back to the
scribe in Boston who had written their _ketubbah_ (there weren't
many who were willing to write religious documents for
intermarriages) to obtain a _get_ in July, but he had never had the
heart to give it to her.  He'd planned to this time around, even
brought it with him, but he knew perfectly well that he would go
home with it still safely tucked at the bottom his duffel bag,
rolled into its cardboard tube.
     Maybe she would ask for it again, he thought, and if she did,
he would give it to her.  He'd played enough games with her life.
     Second, although he didn't love her, he did have a lot of good
feelings for her.  She was _mishpocheh_, family; she was a part of
his life, and any tensions that built up between them threatened
the space she occupied there.  Things were fragile enough with this
business of Nate's custody hanging in the balance; Al was not
willing to risk any more.  He didn't have so much family that he
could afford to squander it on a hormonal whim.
     Finally, there was Nate himself to consider.  Ruthie had made
it clear that there was to be no reconciliation of the marriage,
and if the part of their relationship that was more (or less) than
friendship did not fade away, Nate would grow up confused.  He
would never completely accept their divorce, because he would see
that they hadn't accepted it either.
     So Al had settled for a useless cold shower, and left an hour
early to pick Nate up from school.
     He parked on a tree-lined street beside Beth Israel
Elementary.  It was a hell of a lot nicer than St. Joe's had been,
and probably a few light years ahead of whatever hovel had passed
for a school in Ruthie's neighborhood.  He leaned back in the
driver's seat, lit up a cigar, and thought about schools, and about
neighborhoods, and about Ruthie.
                                
1954.
     The priests at St. Joe's had tried to hold classes on
Saturdays for awhile, but even the orphanage kids, who were
presumably under their direct control, had been truant most of the
time.  They'd held on grimly through the last Saturday in March,
then announced that Saturday classes were officially over.
     Albert Calavicci, who was under no one's control, direct or
otherwise, and who had lost count of the number of times he'd been
hit with a ruler for truancy, blasphemy, and a thousand other
charges, thought that the old bastards had just decided they had
better things to do, now that the sun was back out.
     This was fine by Albert.  He didn't have much use for school. 
He did most of his learning on his own, in the public library (he
always told the guys he was meeting with some girl or other when he
was planning to go there), at his chessboard (an inheritance from
Father Brusero, the only one of the witch-doctors who had been
worth a damn), and, especially, on the streets of the Lower West
Side.  There was no lesson that those streets didn't teach.
     He was in none of those places on the first Saturday in April.
     Even rebels needed some time off now and then, and that
Saturday he was playing basketball with a few of the guys from the
ward.  He wouldn't exactly have called them his friends -- he
couldn't think of anyone offhand who he would have called a friend,
except his sister Trudy, and he hadn't seen her since their father
had died four years ago -- but they were okay.
     Tony Locarro had called a foul on Johnny DiGesare, and they
were fighting over it, so the game had come to a stop when the
little blonde girl came around the corner.  All of them had turned
to look at her for a split second.  It wouldn't occur to Al how
strange that had been until many years later, as he sat in his car
beside Beth Israel Elementary.  No one had pointed her out, they
had been involved in their fight, and yet, without exception, they
had turned their heads and glanced quickly at the newcomer. 
     She had obviously come from the Jewish neighborhood a few
blocks away.  She was dressed in a long-sleeved dusty pink dress
that looked like it had started its life on an adult's frame, and
been clumsily sized down.  She was tugging absently at the sleeves,
which shifted from side to side from the oversized shoulders, and
the waist hung somewhere around her hips.  Her long, shockingly
blonde hair had been pulled into a braid so tight it nearly
screamed.  Albert thought she was beautiful.  Not very bright --
this neighborhood was none too friendly to strangers (or, for that
matter, to its own) -- but beautiful.
     Then the fight about the foul started up again, and Albert was
called on to make a decision.  Just when he'd become referee was
unclear, but he took the job anyway.  He decided in Johnny's favor,
and Tony went along with it.  They started the game again.
     He had just intercepted a pass and was turning to drive down
the court when he caught sight of the blonde girl for the second
time.  Frankie Marchetti, a St. Joe's bully two classes under
Albert's, and his good-for-nothing pal Carlo Something-or-other had
ganged up on her.  Carlo was holding her by the shoulders, and as
Albert looked up, Frankie punched her in the stomach.
     Without thinking about what he was doing, he handed the ball
off to a member of the other team, ran to the chain-link fence and
started climbing it.  When he reached the top, he jumped.  His feet
hit the sidewalk just as Frankie hit the spring-button on his
switchblade and started moving toward the girl.
     He grabbed Frankie's wrist with his left arm, and brought his
right in low to punch the nozzle in the gut, just so he'd have a
clue what the girl had felt.  Albert didn't hold with men hitting
women, and he figured any guy who tried it ought to get back what
he'd given.  He pulled the knife out of Frankie's hand and reached
back to put it in the girl's.  He didn't have time to see if she
took it, because Frankie had decided to put up a fight.  He was two
years younger than Albert, but he was big for his age, and a mean
fighter.  Albert had taken him on once before, in the schoolyard,
for picking on a little girl with a harelip.
     Suddenly, Carlo cried out and ran off, his arm dripping blood
from a gash under the elbow.  Frankie was distracted, and Albert
took the opportunity to punch him in the gut again, then in the
jaw.  The second punch sent Frankie into the sidewalk.  He started
to get up, then saw something that made him scramble to his feet
and follow Carlo.  Albert turned briefly, and saw the girl crouched
in a fighting posture, holding the switchblade out like a dagger. 
Her eyes blazed in the mid-morning sun.  There was something strong
and good in the image, like the picture of that French chick in the
church window.
     Not bad, he thought.  Feeling like he ought to end the fight
properly, he shouted after Frankie and Carlo, "Go pick on someone
your own size!"
     When he turned back to the girl, the fighting posture had
disappeared.  She had stood up and lowered her arm, and her eyes
were wide and confused.  She looked like she was about to faint,
although Albert would have believed that impossible when he'd seen
her a moment ago.  "Are you okay?" he asked.
     He heard the knife fall out of her hand and hit the sidewalk
as she nodded slowly.
     "You sure?"
     Her eyes, which were an incredible shade of blue, turned up to
meet his.  A feeling something like an electric shock went through
Albert's head.  It wasn't sexual attraction, although that was
present as well (it was present, to be fair, with just about every
girl who crossed his path).  It was a sense of recognition, a
feeling that somewhere behind those alien blue eyes was a mind that
Albert knew as well as he knew his own. 
     Then the feeling passed, and she was only a frightened girl. 
He extended his hand to her.  "I'm Albert," he said.
     Inexplicably, she backed away from him.  "I -- I have to
leave," she stammered, then turned and ran.
     Albert watched her until she had disappeared around the
corner.  When he turned back to St. Joe's, the guys were lined
against the other side of the fence.  Tony Locarro was smirking. 
He blinked his eyes rapidly and clasped his hands together.  "My
hero!" he swooned, and the rest of them laughed.
     "Imagine that," Tommy Carbone said from the back.  "St. Joe's
has its very own White Knight."
     Albert felt hot blood rise into his cheeks.  It was an old
taunt; he'd been the last of the boys to give up playing Excaliber
in the attic, and they had never let him forget it.  But he wasn't
a goddam white knight.  He was just doing what anyone would have
done.  "Shut up," he growled, and started to climb the fence.
     Tony gestured for the others to bow when he landed on the
court side.  "Clear the way for Sir Albert of the Pick!"
     Albert grabbed Tony by the lapels of his jacket and pushed him
into the fence.  "You got a problem, Locarro?"  Tony shook his head
rapidly.  Albert threw him aside.  "How about the rest of you?"  No
one had any comment.  Albert turned up his collar, gave them his
best j.d. glare -- which was pretty goddam intimidating, if he did
say so himself -- and went inside.
     By Wednesday, they had forgotten the incident.  Albert had
given them something new to talk about by sneaking Myra Boychik out
of Mass Sunday evening, and not showing up again until Monday
morning.  The fact that he had actually slept in the alley behind
Aiello's restaurant was irrelevant; the rest of their assumptions
were right.  There had been no more ribbing about being a White
Knight.
     Albert, however, had not forgotten.  After he'd left Myra on
Sunday, he'd followed the night streets into the Jewish
neighborhood, trying to look nonchalant while he glanced into lit
windows, hoping to catch a glimpse of the blonde girl.  He wasn't
sure why he felt compelled to do this, but he did it anyway.  One
house after another, window by window, but he didn't see her. 
Finally, a middle-aged man with a full beard and long curls beside
his face had run out of one of those houses and chased him out of
the neighborhood.  He'd sat down in Aiello's alley to wait until he
thought the man would have gone inside, and wound up falling asleep
there.
     He'd spent Monday and Tuesday scrubbing the floors of the
wards, which was a punishment not for sneaking out but for refusing
to go to confession about it.  He'd had to do this every time he'd
run away, and he usually had to it with open cuts on his hands from
the ruler they had hit him with.  His thoughts kept returning to
the blonde girl, and to the electric shock feeling he'd gotten when
she looked up at him.  He would push those thoughts away -- not
because he resented them, but because he could do nothing about
them at the moment -- but they would sneak back in a few minutes
later.
     On Wednesday, the day she came back, the floors were done, and
Albert was allowed to go back to his life on the ward.  Normally,
that would have included swapping stories and stealing smokes with
the guys, but Albert had not forgotten about Saturday, even if they
had.  Instead, he set up his chess board in the back corner of the
common room and worked on a rook-centered offense he was trying to
build.  It was difficult to do without an opponent, but he hadn't
had one since Father Brusero died in December, and he'd gotten
accustomed to it.  Brusero had been an inveterate gamer, and he had
found in eleven-year-old Albert a kindred spirit.  Albert (who was
now almost fourteen) had always loved games, any games -- the
objective was clearcut, and the rules, once learned, were not
subject to sudden changes.  After twenty minutes, he was completely
focused on his strategy, which was good after two days of unfocused
thinking.  He heard the others start heckling someone, but it was
far away and he paid no attention.
     He moved the rook on his experimental side (which he thought
of as "the Good Guys") four spaces forward to knock out his
fictional opponent's bishop; so far, so good.  He crossed to the
other side of the board, and reviewed the position from the "Bad
Guys"' viewpoint.  
     "Albert?" one of the priests interrupted him.
     Albert waved an impatient hand at him and continued his
perusal of the opponent's perspective.  The queen was no threat. 
He had barricaded her on an early move.  The other bishop was out
of play.  Neither rook could reach him in a single move.  The Good
Guys looked to be in pretty good shape.  Unless...
     Damn, he thought.  The rook, which occupied a key space, was
directly in the path of the Bad Guys' knight.  It was the same
mistake he had been making since his first game; Father Brusero had
told him to check the knights every time, even if they weren't near
him, but he never did, and when he lost, that was almost always
why.
     Albert sighed inwardly and captured his own rook.  So much for
the Calavicci offense.  He looked up at the priest.  He was one of
the younger ones, and Albert wasn't sure what his name was. 
"Sorry, Father," he said generically.
     "Are you winning?" the priest asked, with a smile that was
supposed to be jovial.  Albert didn't bother to answer the
question.  The smile faltered.  "You have a visitor," he said, and
walked away, revealing the blonde girl, who had been standing
beside him.
     Albert looked at her for a long moment.  In all of his
thinking about her over the past few days, it had not occurred to
him that she would come here.  She had obviously been badly
frightened on Saturday, and girls stayed away from things that
frightened them.  Besides that, girls didn't follow boys without
being prodded into it.  But here she stood, and Albert found
himself with nothing to say.
     Oh, hell, he thought.  Since when do girls play by the rules,
anyway?  He smiled and said the only thing that came into his mind,
trying to make it sound as easygoing as possible.  "Hey.  I didn't
think we'd see you around here again after Saturday.  You're pretty
tough, for a girl."
     It must have sounded alright, because the girl visibly
relaxed.  "I wanted to say thank you," she said.
     Albert shrugged, and slipped into a more familiar way of
talking to a girl.  "What was I gonna do?  Let that nozzle cut up
your pretty face?"
     She didn't blossom at the flattery, which was what Albert had
expected, and that made him uncomfortable again.  Instead, she
looked around the room at the other St. Joe's kids, who, Albert
realized, had almost all been outside with him the day she had been
attacked.  "The rest of them would have."
     A vision of Tony Locarro clasping his hands together and
saying My hero! went through Albert's mind, and he winced.  He had
just been doing what anyone would have.  Hadn't he?  Of course he
had.  He'd just happened to see the trouble first, that was all. 
"Aw, they're good guys," he said, to get past her accusation.  She
did not have the good grace to agree and let the subject drop, but
was nervous enough to not say anything more.  Albert racked his
brain for something to say to her.  He was usually good with girls,
and the situation was unnerving him.  Finally, he said, "Do you
have a name?"
     What he heard, at first, was "It's Trudy," and his sister's
face, wide open and innocent, surfaced in his mind.  He missed her
suddenly and acutely.  Then the blonde girl spoke again, as if
clarifying, "Ruthie Minkin."
     "Ruthie," he repeated.  Not Trudy, then.  And what was he
doing thinking about Trudy, anyway?  He never thought about Trudy. 
There was nothing he could do for her.  This girl was Ruthie,
Ruthie Minkin, and she was not his sister, and he didn't want her
to be.  He nodded emphatically at the sentiment.  To confirm it, he
asked a question which neither he nor anyone else would have ever
asked poor, slow Trudy.  "Do you play chess?"
     It turned out that she didn't, but Albert was able to teach
her the game in considerably less time than it had taken Brusero to
teach him.  Whether it was because he was a better teacher or she
was a better student was irrelevant.  He beat her soundly on the
first game, guessing that she would respond to an honest loss
better than she would to a well-intentioned win handed to her on a
silver platter.  His guess was correct; she demanded a re-match
immediately, and her playing improved at what Albert considered a
fairly alarming rate.  Her first few moves, she mimicked his
intense concentration, but she quickly developed her own style. 
She began talking as soon as his move was complete, then, seemingly
at random, moved a piece a space or two, often doing serious damage
to Albert's strategy.  During one of these interludes, she asked
him how old he was, and he told her he would be fourteen in June. 
She looked about eleven, but he knew it was sometimes hard to tell
a person's age.  Figuring it was always better to guess older
(people often thought he was younger than he was, and he hated it),
he asked, "What are you, about twelve?"
     "Yes," she said without hesitation.  She moved her queen six
spaces, knocked out his bishop, and smiled cheerfully.
     Albert stopped answering her when she talked after that.  It
took him fifteen more minutes to win.

1984.
     More cars were arriving on the street.  Al checked his watch. 
It was almost time for midday pickup from Nate's kindergarten
class. 
     He'd been angry when Ruthie had told him the truth about her
age.  Not because he hadn't already guessed that she was younger
than she had implied -- that was fairly obvious, and he found her
reasons flattering.  He was angry because she had waited until
after she had gotten him drunk and they had somehow wound up having
sex to tell him the truth.  She was even younger than he had
guessed, twelve years old (twelve and a half, she'd insisted
ludicrously).  He was sixteen.  Something about it made him feel a
little sick.  Every time he heard of some little girl screwing up
her life by taking too many steps way too fast, it was Ruthie's
face he flashed on, and his own that served as a mocking mirror.
     He left her alone in the park where they had done it, crying
into her hands.  An hour later, his conscience brought him back. 
She looked up at him, and that electric-shock feeling went through
him again, and he responded to it the only way he completely
understood.  It was good and sweet, and for that night, he really
had loved her.
     They had tried several times -- unsuccessfully -- to go back
to their older friendship, Al because he felt uncomfortable about
her age, Ruthie because she was afraid of what might happen to her
if her foster family (which, Al had learned, was her entire
congregation; she lived week by week with whoever could afford to
keep her) found out.  But their new relationship seemed more real
than their old one now, and there was no turning back. 
     She had, ultimately, been found out, not long after Al had
left for Annapolis.  She'd called him, in tears, from a hospital,
where she'd been sent with several broken bones and a broken soul
after being first beaten, then excommunicated.  
     Al had been alarmed, but she had bounced back; by the time he
got back to her over winter break, she'd been placed with Mama and
Papa Burkholtz, an elderly couple who had lost their daughter in
the camps and loved Ruthie as if they had somehow shared a soul.
They'd taken Al into their home for that break, and Spring Break,
and an endless summer in '59, when Al had come very close to truly
falling in love with Ruthie.  She had changed incredibly on the
outside.  The plain, Hasidic clothes had been discarded in favor of
pedal pushers and a tight sweater, and she wore makeup, although
she still wore her hair in a long braid, with only a few wispy
bangs to change it.  She should have been unrecognizable, but she
wasn't.  It wasn't an old face buried inside; to the contrary,
Ruthie seemed to have become the woman Al had always seen buried
inside of her before.
     The Burkholtzes referred to all servicemen as "our boys," and
considered it such an honor to have an Academy student at their
home that they showed him off to all their friends and neighbors,
teaching him to do the Hora and participate in many events in the
life cycle of the community.  Al hadn't minded; that brief time
with Ruthie's new family had been special, almost magical.  He'd
even talked to Papa Burkholtz about the possibility of converting
and proposing to Ruthie.
     "Those are both very serious questions," he'd answered.  "For
the first, I don't think you really know what it means, Albert. 
You love us, and we love you.  But there is a great deal more.  Go
and study, then come back to us.  As to the second, Ruthie is
fifteen years old.  Let her grow up before she makes such a
decision."
     Al knew he was right, and not just for Ruthie.  Even during
those warm and comfortable days, he'd felt an urge to prowl from
woman to woman, and he'd been pretty seriously involved, on and
off, with Lisa Sherman, who would, in the space of a year, achieve
a primacy in his romantic life that Ruthie had never equalled.  He
was ashamed of this -- he knew that Ruthie was counting on him to
come back for her -- and he cut off contact entirely, hoping that
she would take the hint and move on without any painful scenes. 
After a few tentative letters, she seemed to accept his decision,
and faded out of his life for awhile.
     Al had gone through a string of women that seemed staggering
now; only Lisa had been significant, and she was already spoken
for.  (Al had a brief moment when he thought she might actually
leave her husband for him, but it was dashed rather quickly.)  
     In 1960, he met a young nurse named Beth Grady at one of the
early civil rights rallies near her hometown in Georgia.  She won
him over in less than an hour, and by the end of the first month of
seeing her, he knew she was the only future he wanted.  
     After he had proposed marriage and before she had answered,
he'd thought it fair to tell her what kind of life he'd led.  He
found it surprisingly easy to tell her about Ruthie.  Instead of
reacting with jealousy at his strong feelings for this faraway
girl, or disgust at his mishandling of the end, Beth asked him,
quite simply, if he was sure it wasn't Ruthie he wanted to marry. 
He told her he'd never been more sure of anything.  She smiled and
said, "In that case, yes."  They hadn't spoken of Ruthie again, and
Al had been flabbergasted when, in 1962, he'd come home from sea
duty to find Ruthie standing at the kitchen sink, doing the dishes
while Beth finished up her shift at the hospital.  Ruthie had been
in town for the opening of a gallery show (it featured several
young artists; Ruthie had been the only one who had bothered to
come), and Beth had looked her up and invited her to stay until he
returned home.  The stay was extended indefinitely when Al's
landlady asked Ruthie to teach her spoiled daughter oil painting. 
Ruthie, who still thought she needed any money badly, took a leave
of absence from Northwestern and took the job.
     With Beth between them, they were able to recapture some of
their childhood friendship, but the sexual feelings came back soon
enough, and, as much as Al would've liked to remember it
differently, it wasn't Ruthie who had pushed it past the limit. 
She had gone back to school early, and they had maintained a safe,
long-distance correspondence for the next five years.  He had only
seen her once more before his A-4 went down over Vietnam.
     A week before he had shipped out for that second tour, Ruthie
had shown up unexpectedly at the bungalow he and Beth had rented in
San Diego.
     She had changed again, and this time, Al barely recognized
her.  The woman at his door was beautiful, in an almost bohemian
fashion, with long blonde hair and loose clothing that clung to her
form in the breeze.  Her face was thinner, and aged somehow, in a
way that had nothing to do with laugh lines or crow's feet.  There
was a brittle mask of gaiety over a visage of pain... but under the
pain, looking out like a lost child, was Ruthie, and once Al saw
her there, he could not turn her away.
     He invited her inside, and they sat chastely on either side of
a chess board for an hour, playing a disinterested game and not
talking much.  Mama Burkholtz had passed away, she told him, and
Papa Burkholtz hadn't been the same since.  She thought maybe he
was just waiting to join her.  Al had been saddened by the news,
but he didn't think she'd come here to share it.  He finally gave
up trying to guess her reasons, and asked her.
     She had met someone, she said, and he had proposed. 
     "Do you want me to give you away or something?" he asked.
     She shook her head and smiled timidly.  "Jews don't do it that
way," she said.  "I just wanted to, you know, see you and tell
you... "  She started to say something else, but stopped.  "To tell
you goodbye, I guess."
     Al brushed off her goodbye, saying that she hadn't needed to
pull a disappearing act before (a lie) and he didn't want her to
now (a half-truth), which brightened her mood considerably.  "I
want to meet this guy before you marry him," he said.  "Make sure
he's good enough for you."  He meant it to come out a light remark,
but it didn't.  He didn't like the way her face looked; she was
hiding something, and he wanted to make damn sure it wasn't
something about this Mr. Right she had found before he let her
marry him.  "Think you can wait six months, 'til I get back from
Vietnam?"
     She promised.
     As it happened, he hadn't returned for six years, and he
hadn't seen Ruthie again for eleven.
     When he was first repatriated in '73, he had found Beth, his
Beth, re-married to a shyster lawyer.  He supposed he could have
found her -- he knew her husband's name, and you can't lose a
lawyer, even if you're trying -- but he couldn't handle the thought
of it.  He had re-married almost immediately, in spite more than
anything else, and the ups and downs of that marriage and his
initiation into the space program had preoccupied him for the next
four years.  He thought intermittently of Ruthie, but he had no
desire to meet the man she had married.  He couldn't face it.
     He had finally seen her again two months after his divorce
from Martje had come through.  By some alien serendipity, it was
July 4th again.  Al had been asked to ride in a parade in Chicago,
honoring local Vietnam heroes.  He'd gone not because he felt like
being honored, but because simple, frivolous things like this
always seemed to make him remember that he was, at long last, home. 
After Beth and now Martje, he sometimes forgot to be grateful for
that, and the parade gave him a good reason to remember.
     Ruthie had been on the sidelines, and she spotted him in the
convertible as it floated past at four miles an hour.  Dodging the
parade guards, she ran to the car and jumped over the door.  The
guards started to drag her out, but Al signalled them that it was
okay.
     She caught her breath from the run, then smiled brightly. 
"Hi, Albert.  Nobody told me you were home."
     "What, you didn't hear the rumors of my death?"
     "I heard them."  She wrinkled her nose.  "Beth invited me to
your memorial service."
     "Did you go?"
     "Just long enough to spit in her face."
     Al was speechless.  Everyone around him had believed him dead. 
The Navy, Beth... the priests at St. Joe's had even had a memorial
marker made for him.  But here was Ruthie, and she had not
believed, had, in fact, refused to be married until he returned. 
Her fiance had lost patience with the wait and married someone
else.  Ruthie had still not given up.  
     That night, under the fireworks, she informed him of Nate's
impending arrival, and told him that, whoever the biological father
was, she wanted the child to be his.  He'd been pleasantly
surprised to find that he wanted that, too.  A month after that,
they were married.
     It should have worked.  Everything that could possibly make a
marriage work had been there.  But it hadn't.
     Al crushed out his cigar and looked toward the school.
     Ruthie, he thought again.  Damn.
     He went inside to pick up his
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Barbara