69 INCHES OF STEEL by Rebecca Steinbeck Page B

date to one function or another, to one movie premiere or business meeting or another, but mostly he liked to spend it on his mother. He pulled a small package out of his pocket and handed it to her. “I hope you like it.”
    His mother took it. She pulled away the paper and opened the box. A tear rolled down the side of her face as she gazed upon the beauty of what was in it like a child in awe of all the pretty colors of the rainbow. She pulled the broche out of the box and held it up to the light. It glistened and sparkled like a diamond, but to Jonathon’s mother it was much more valuable than that. Indeed, it meant more than the world to her and Jonathon knew it. It belonged to her grandmother who had long passed away of cancer and she had pawned it several years ago when she had no money and he was yet to make his first sale to one of the Big Six publishers. He had watched his mother hand it over to the man behind the counter in a shop a couple of towns over and him hand over much less than what it was worth and Jonathon found out not so long ago and through the small town grapevine that he had kept it all this time. He had seen the hurt in his mother’s eyes that day so set his mind then and there on getting it back and today was the day. He went into the shop on his way to Bellingen and paid the man ten times what the man had paid his mother but he didn’t care. He cared only that his mother was happy. Besides, it was the least he could do for the woman who raised him to become the man he had.
    She leaned forward and hugged her son. “Thank you, Jonathon.”
    “My pleasure, Mom,” he replied. And it always was.
     
     
    CHAPTER THREE
     
    “I ’m going to go for a walk if that’s okay,” Jonathon said, finishing his cup of tea.
    His mother smiled. “Of course it is.” Walking was his favorite thing to do besides write, and it had been for as long as she could remember. He would walk most times with his nose in a book of one kind or another, usually a novel but sometimes a biography or a ‘how to’ book, one that he could garnish the knowledge of someone better than him at what they did and apply to his own way of doing things so that one day he would be better not so much as them but himself. Other times he would walk without one, instead enjoying the goings-on around him, many out of which he might pluck an idea or two for a story he could then write and turn into another million or two dollars. She worried about him when he did the former because one day he might not be paying attention to the car that crosses the line and hits him and then she would have to bury her son as well as her husband.  “That would just break my heart,” she once told her sister who was almost as long gone as her husband. Cancer had reached out and grabbed her just as it had grabbed their grandmother who had told them it was hereditary. Her sister had believed her and she died a few years later. Jonathon’s mother did not and she was alive and kicking. Jonathon always hoped she would stay that way because he loved her and as rich as he was, no amount of money could ever bring her back.
    He gave his mother a kiss and went outside without a book. He did however take his jacket. It was just as well because there was a chill in the air and soon the chill would cut to the bone. The fog would lay itself over Bellingen like a blanket as it had many times before and on more than one occasion Jonathon had hoped for, and had ultimately seen if only in his minds eye, another ghoulie or ghostie to jump out of the fog at him and inspire yet another story that would cut his readers to their bone.
    He stood on the bottom step of his mother’s front porch and looked around. The sun was setting behind the hills he had travelled over to get to Bellingen and they guarded the small town from the rest of the world like a hulking giant. He had climbed those hills with his friends from school any number of times as a kid and fallen down one of