Now I'll Tell You Everything (Alice) by Phyllis Reynolds Naylor Page B

left, the way he’d held me . . . “Makesme wild waiting for you,” he said. “Think how much I’d enjoy a night to remember all summer long.”
    But we didn’t have all night. I’d still had packing to do. And I clung to my wish to have all the time in the world when we did it for the first time.
    Now, lying there on a cot in Oregon, I began to wish I hadn’t been so particular. I’d heard that first times weren’t so great for the woman, but I would have enjoyed the rest of it, wouldn’t I? And Dave would be over the moon. Or not. He was a man I really liked and respected. Loved, even.
    Now we had to wait till I got back.
    I’ll be at the airport, he promised. And there was time for us both before school began.
    Spent the last two weeks of June at the Olive Garden working—late shift. Someone’s on vacation. I was next on the wait list. They tell me that story is true, by the way—about their salad.
    “What story is that?” Abby asked when I read his e-mail aloud.
    “That a girl came for an interview once, concerned that because there are topless restaurants where the waitresses are naked from the waist up, Olive Garden’s ‘bottomless’ salads meant . . .”
    “O’m’god,” Abby said, and both she and Jayne broke into laughter.
    Jayne had just washed her hair. She’d treated it with conditioner and was now sitting at the window, letting the sun dry it naturally, threading her fingers through it every once in a while. “So who’s this Dave guy, anyway? Someone special?” she asked.
    “A good friend,” I said. “Part of the crowd we hang out with.”
    Abby gave me her famous half smile. “More than a good friend. I’ve seen the way he looks at you.”
    “He looks at all the women. He’s a guy !” I said, and went on clipping recipes from the stack of newspapers Jayne had been collecting for several years. “He’s really fun to be around—makes funny remarks about how I look—my eyes, my hair. The ‘haystack’ he calls it, the way static electricity affects it.”
    “Remember when he gave you that comb shaped like a pitchfork?” Abby said, laughing. “He just loves everything about you. Lights up like a Christmas tree when you walk in the room.”
    It was all true, and what I didn’t read aloud were the last few lines of Dave’s e-mail: When I kissed you before you left, I didn’t want to let go. . . . Right now all I want is you in my arms again . Three months is too long, Alice.
    And I replied, Sometimes all I can think about, Dave, is you.
    Truthfully, I checked Patrick’s blog now and then to see if he was having second thoughts about the Peace Corps. He wasn’t:
    Learning to adapt to a lot of things, like the rats as big as kittens that scratch their way into my house at night, havingtheir babies and fighting in my walls. Lots of reggae music here, and that I can take.
    Had my first trip into a primary rain forest—huge, gorgeous trees. Saw a lemur—they look like moving teddy bears. One did me the honor of peeing on my head.
    I’m really fond of the elderly woman who’s like a grandmother to me. Last night she told me about the “hungry season” in Madagascar, when rice is so expensive. Life is hard in these villages. I’m here as an environmentalist, and the two projects I’d like to start are a garden and a compost pile, and making some kind of a solar oven/food-drying system like they taught us during training. But I still need to be more fluent in their language. The one phrase I’ve been good at, when villagers talk to me, is “Mora mora azafady!” meaning, “Slower, please.”
    I wished I could be that definite about something. At the same time I was yearning for Dave, I found I was liking Oregon a lot—liking the freedom from the clock. I could understand Abby’s satisfaction in making a product she could see and feel and eat. The idea of being self-employed began to look a whole lot better to me than going back to school for two more years.