Kathleen Gilles Seidel - Dont Forget to Smile

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Don't Forget to Smile

By

Kathleen Gilles Seidel

A LOG IN THE FIREPLACE SPUTTERED AND FELL...

The glass fire doors were trimmed with brass, in which was reflected a man and a woman.

She was in some kind of white sweater with a lacy open weave. Her head was tilted, her hair fell away from her shoulder. Her earring was a pearl, and at her throat her pulse throbbed. She was trembling.

How easy it would be to tighten his hand over hers and pull her to him.

Joe broke free and stood up. "I'd better be going."

Tory looked up at him. Her eyes were green, . brighter green than he had known eyes could be. He had thought that before.

"I'd better be going." He had already said that.

"You aren't going to make a pass at me?"

"No."

"And if I should make one at you?"

"I guess I'd want to make very sure that I wasn't dreaming."

"Oh, you aren't dreaming." She held out her hand. He took it, pulling her up...

First published September 1986

ISBN 0-373-97025-0

Copyright @1986 by Kathleen Gilles Seidel. All rights reserved. Philippine copyright 1986. Australian copyright 1986. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

All the characters in this book have no existence outside the imagination of the author and have no relation whatsoever to anyone bearing the same name or names. They are not even distantly inspired by any individual known or unknown to the author, and all incidents are pure invention.

The Worldwide design trademarks, consisting of a globe surrounded by a square, and the word WORLDWIDE in which the letter "O" is represented by a depiction of a globe, are trademarks of Worldwide Library.

Printed in Canada

For

Anne Stuart

Beverly Sommers

Deirdre Mardon

Donna Ball

A lot of divorced women these days are doing things that their mothers never planned for them, but even so you'd be excused for being surprised that Tory Duncan was running a bar in Oregon.

Not that there was a thing wrong with Tory's bar. It was almost entirely respectable, and since the original owners had intended the place to be a health food restaurant, the outside was rather pretty with a stone foundation and timber siding.

But this was not the part of Oregon where you would expect to find a person like Tory Duncan. She wouldn't have been such a surprise in Portland, which has its share of designer sportswear, young lawyers, and BMW dealers. And she would have fit in on the coast too. Interesting people move to the coast, coming up from San Francisco to build interesting houses, strange shapes that jut out into the ocean. In fact, Tory had spent a year on the coast, the first year after her divorce, not doing much, mostly admiring the scenery and letting her standards drop.

Then she left the coast and moved inland. Her bar was in Sullivan City, a pine sawmill town on the eastern slopes of the Cascades. When people think of the Cascades, they think of the western slopes with the magnificent Douglas firs and the dense undergrowth, a tangle of ferns sometimes higher than a man's head. You can't see the sky in the western forest, and the air is thick and soft. But on the other side of the mountains, the eastern side, there's not so much rain; the forest is pine, sunny and parklikemuch more ordinary than what they've got in the west.

Sullivan City is a pretty ordinary place as well, one more working-class town, big enough to have a high school, a Pizza Hut, stoplights and a fairly good fabric store, but not at all the sort of place where anyone would ever want to own a stone-and-timber health food restaurant. Tory bought her building before construction was finished, and she opened it as a bar for loggers. The men who worked in the woods came here; the guys from the sawmill and the planing mill went to Robertson's. At Robertson's, the bartender was exactly what you would expect a bartender to be.

Tory was not. She was from South Carolina, a graduate of the University of South Carolina, a Kappa Delta, and before she had gotten divorced, she had been living almost like a Tri-Deltthe Tri-Delts were the debutantes, the only thing above the K.D.s. And she was beautiful. Her face had clear, delicate lines and high cheekbones that caught the light; her eyes were a vivid green, and her hair blond, a swirl of honey and wheat that fell to her shoulders and curled under at the ends. She had the clean, open sort of all-American beauty that did as well with the four shades of eyeshadow, silk shirtwaist, and linen blazer she had once worn as it did with the neat jeans and light flick of mascara she wore now.

In college, Tory had been the perfect Southern coed. Her mother had taught her to be ever the good listener, to be endlessly cheerful, interested, sympathetic, always willing to adapt her mood, interests, values, and beliefs to whatever company she was in. A perfect Southern coedand now one hell of a fine bartender.

Other people might think that that was coming down in the world, but Tory didn't. Not even close.

It was the last Sunday before the start of hunting season, and through the first half of the NFL game, things were pretty quiet in Tory's bar. Tory suspected that her Sunday regulars were home, working their way through lists of chores their wives had made up, hoping to buy themselves some free time next weekend. It was just as well that things were slow because Tory's second bartender, Pete Millerknown around the bar as "Rich's father"had asked for the afternoon off. Tory and her waitress, Nancy Smith, were handling what business there was alone.

Which wasn't difficult because Nancy was a good waitress. She always arrived early; she never forgot who ordered what, and when she had time she was nearly as good a listener as Tory. She didn't greet the customers by name as Tory did or comment on their problems, because when Nancy had taken this job she made it clear she didn't plan on talking. Ever.

Nancy stuttered. It was a godawful stutter, a real jackhammer of a thing, and she had dropped out of high school as soon as the law had let her. She got her G.E.D. and lived at home, doing correspondence courses. At twenty-two, she was on her way to being one of the better educated people in town when Tory, who had frequently seen her at the post office, had offered her a job.

Nancy smiled at customers instead of asking them what they wanted. She wrote down the orders and passed them to Tory. This system worked nicely when Rich's father was on duty. Just as Nancy didn't talk very well, Rich's father didn't hear very well.

During halftime on this Sunday afternoon, people finally started drifting in, grumbling about the gutters they had cleaned, the screens they had put up, the cars they had washed. Tory and Nancy took their orders and listened to their complaints. Tory drew beer, poured chasers, mixed Seven-and-Sevens and bourbon-and-gingers, and changed the channel when the NFL game was over. It was just a usual Sunday afternoon at Tory's, a decent working man's bar.

This was when the gunmen came in.

Of course, no one knew they were gunmen. There were two of them, just kids really, looking like anyone elsefaded jeans, straw-colored hair, wispy beards, a type that was a dime a dozen both on this side of the mountains and over on the coast. But they were young and seemed nervous.