CHAPTER 32
Pauline
In my dream, I am back home in Quakertown. I am young again. Seventeen. Thomas Bright, the son of the cigar maker, is looking at me from across the straw-strewn dance floor.
I know him from school and church socials and from the times his family has occasionally come to my parents’ restaurant. He is nice-looking. Tall. Taller than his three brothers even though he’s the youngest by five years. I’ve seen him staring at me before. He doesn’t stare at any of the other girls, only me. And that makes my heart pound a little. My friend Carrie whispers to me that I’m probably going to have to be the one to ask him to dance because everyone knows he’s too shy and quiet to come over and ask himself. She says that because she thinks I won’t do it. But I do. I walk over to Thomas Bright. And his eyes grow wider with every step I take toward him.
“Are you going to or aren’t you?” I say when I reach his side of the barn. I look down at my clothes and I see that I’m wearing a yellow dress with tiny white flowers all over it. It’s the one I saw in a store window in Allentown and that Mama said was too expensive.
“Am I what?” Thomas Bright says, and when I look up again, I see that he is also more handsome than his brothers.
“Are you going to ask me to dance?”
“If... if I did, would you say yes?” he asks.
“Ask me and see.”
He smiles at me and says, “Will you marry me, Pauline?”
I look down at my clothes again, and I’m wearing a creamy white dress with lace trim and pearl buttons. The one I bought in Philadelphia. I have a bouquet of asters and mountain laurel in my hands. We’re not in the barn anymore; we’re in the Quakertown Community Church and Mama is sitting in the front pew with my daddy. She is dabbing her eyes with a pale violet handkerchief.
I look up at Thomas and I say, “I will.”
He kisses me and when his lips come away from mine I tell him Willa is going to live.
“Oh!” he says.
He is looking away from me now, at something in the distance.
“Here it comes,” he says.
And then I am awake and my body is ablaze.
