Morning by Nancy Thayer Page A

three-thirty, a dimming December hour on a dreary day, and Sara was tempted to wallow in her despair.
    She was glad the mail had come. She reread the sheet Julia had sent, and looked seriously at the garlic bulb a moment, considering. How did one get hold of date flour? If she mixed it with beer—and sat on it ? In her mind she could almost hear Julia’s laughter. Sara laughed in response. She might be crazy, but she wasn’t going to sit on flour mixed with beer—or on this garlic. Tossing the letter with the other mail for Steve to see, Sara opened the packet from Fanny Anderson.
Dear Mrs. Kendall, [the accompanying note on heavy creamy bond writing paper read]
Because of your kindness I am taking the liberty of sending you some more pages from my Jenny manuscript. Please don’t feel obligated to like them or even to read them. I am hard at work on another Aurora Dawn book and have little time even to think of the Jenny pages. But since you went to the trouble of calling.…
With very best wishes,
Fanny Anderson
    Thirty pages of Jenny! Sara looked at the packet as if it were a box of chocolates. This was the cure she needed; her work, some good book to dig into with all her talent and abilities. She brewed herself a pot of decaffeinated coffee (in deference to her premenstrual insanity; caffeine was supposed to aggravate PMS), and settled down to work.
At seventeen I was caught up in a maelstrom of desires. I wanted . What I wanted seemed infinite and nameless. I loved many things with intensity—with such a great intensity that, having felt that love, it seemedI had given love sufficient for eternity and must move on to other things or die of boredom.
I loved my parents and our farm, the Kansas skies, the free far windy sweep of land, but I wanted more . I had been dating for a year an “older” man, Will Hofnegle, a farmer across the county who at twenty-two had inherited his parents’ large farm. He was a good and gentle man who worked hard on his land and yet had the energy and insight to care for me as I was. He rode horseback with me; but he also listened to me read my stories aloud; he gave me picture books about Paris and Rome. He understood what I wanted. I would have been desperately lonely in Kansas without him, for I had no other friends, no one else who understood my love for literature and my desire to escape into a more literary world.
Will’s life was full of physical beauty—his horses, Herefords, spaniels, barns and stables, rich rolling fields, which were much more productive than ours; and he was tall and handsome and moved through his life with a loping unhurried grace. He offered himself and his farm to me, he offered to marry me, and did not take it as an insult when I told him I had to try to get out for a while. He told me he would always be there for me if I needed him.
I won a scholarship to the University of Kansas. I wanted to go east to college—perhaps I still had fantasies of a dramatic reunion with Jeremy Gardner—perhaps I simply just wanted to go east, to get away. But my parents couldn’t afford to send me anywhere else, and I was told I should feel lucky to have a scholarship. Everyone told me I should be grateful to be going off to college, but even before I got there, I wanted more .
It was probably predictable that I immediately became obsessed with Henry Cook, the instructor of the required freshman art appreciation course. He was from the East. Little else mattered. He wore cashmere sweaters, tweed jackets, elegant loafers made of leather that looked and felt like silk, and there was something about him—his accent? the way he cut his hair?—that reminded me of Jeremy Gardner on a basic, physical level.
The other students at the college seemed gushily naive, too easy to please, silly. In contrast, Henry was handsome, nervous, even tormented, like a powerful energetic neurotic Thoroughbred trembling with the need to run. And he became my conveyance; I became his jockey.