"No, ma'am."
At last Norma looked at Louis. "I want to thank you for what you did," she said with a shyness that was utterly unaffected and thus doubly touching. "Jud says I owe you my life."
Embarrassed, Louis said, "Jud exaggerates."
"Not very damn much, he don't," Jud said. He squinted at Louis, almost smiling but not quite. "Didn't your mother tell you never to slip a thank-you, Louis?"
She hadn't said anything about that, at least not that Louis could remember, but he believed she had said something once about false modesty being half the sin of pride.
"Norma," he said, "anything I could do, I was pleased to do."
"You're a dear man," Norma said. "You take this man of mine out somewhere and let him buy you a glass of beer. I'm feeling sleepy again, and I can't seem to get rid of him."
Jud stood up with alacrity. "Hot damn! I'll go for that, Louis. Quick, before she changes her mind."
The first snow came a week before Thanksgiving. They got another four inches on the twenty-second of November, but the day before the holiday itself was clear and blue and cold. Louis took his family to Bangor International Airport and saw them off on the first leg of their trip back to Chicago for a visit with Rachel's parents.
"It's not right," Rachel said for perhaps the twentieth time since discussions on this matter had commenced in earnest a month ago. "I don't like thinking of you rattling around the house alone on Thanksgiving Day. That's supposed to be a family holiday, Louis."
Louis shifted Gage, who looked gigantic and wide-eyed in his first big-boy parka, to his other arm. Ellie was at one of the big windows, watching an Air Force helicopter take off.
"I'm not exactly going to be crying in my beer," Louis said. "Jud and Norma are going to have me over for turkey and all the trimmings. Hell, I'm the one who feels guilty. I've never liked these big holiday group gropes anyway. I start drinking in front of some football game at three in the afternoon and fall asleep at seven, and the next day it feels like the Dallas Cowgirls are dancing around and yelling boola-boola inside my head. I just don't like sending you off with the two kids."
"I'll be fine," she said. "Flying first class, I feel like a princess. And Gage will sleep on the flight from Logan to O'Hare."
"You hope," he said, and they both laughed.
The flight was called, and Ellie scampered over. "That's us, Mommy. Come on-come on-come on. They'll leave without us."
"No they won't," Rachel said. She was clutching her three pink boarding cards in one hand. She was wearing her fur coat, some fake stuff that was a luxuriant brown... probably it was supposed to look like muskrat, Louis thought.
Whatever it was supposed to look like, it made her look absolutely lovely.
Perhaps something of what he felt showed in his eyes because she hugged him impulsively, semicrushing Gage between them. Gage looked surprised but not terribly upset.
"Louis Creed, I love you," she said.
"Mom-eee," Ellie said, now in a fever of impatience. "some on-come on-c-"Oh, all right," she said. "Be good, LOUIS."
"Tell you what," he said, grinning, "I'll be careful. Say hello to your folks, Rachel."
"Oh, you," she said and wrinkled her nose at him. Rachel was not fooled; she knew perfectly well why Louis was skipping this trip. "Fun-nee."
He watched them enter the boarding ramp... and disappear from sight for the next week. He already felt homesick and lonely for them. He moved over to the window where Ellie had been, hands stuffed in his coat pockets, watching the baggage handlers loading the hold.
The truth was simple. Not only Mr. but also Mrs. Irwin Goldman of Lake Forest had disliked Louis from the beginning. He came from the wrong side of the tracks, but that was just for starters. Worse, he fully expected their daughter to support him while he went to medical school, where he would almost surely flunk out.
Louis could have handled all this, in fact had been doing so. Then something had happened which Rachel did not know about and never would... not from Louis, anyway. Irwin Goldman had offered to pay Louis's entire tuition through med school. The price of this "scholarship" (Goldman's word) was that Louis should break off his engagement with Rachel at once.