Unknown
Sally_s Secret Lover
Chapter 1
I wonder why it is, Sally Denham thought quizzically to herself, that nothing in life ever turns out quite the way you think it will? Take me, for instance, a born and bred New Englander – what am I doing in Quiggville, Tennessee? I'm not even sure I like the South (perhaps 'approve of' was more the term), yet here I am practically committed to spending the rest of my life here! Once Ray gets his partnership we'll be committed for sure.
Funny, how the expression had slipped into both their vocabularies so that one or the other of them seemed to use it several times a day. Once we get the partnership. Will our lives really change so radically, and for the better, when the magic day comes? As a matter of black and white practicality they would. We know what the drugstore grosses every year, and the net. Half that net will be ours … not just a salary. A salary that was far too low considering what pharmacists were making elsewhere, even taking into account that this apartment over the store was thrown in free of rent and utilities. Ray, of course, wouldn't see that he could be making twice as much in Knoxville or Nashville, or anywhere else in the country. And as Sally pointed out, that they could save the necessary capital twice as fast.
«But then I wouldn't get this chance, the option that I have by working here!»
«DO YOU mean an option in writing, like on a piece of property?» Sally's pretty brow wrinkled slightly.
«No, not an option in the literal sense. I meant the agreement between me and John Blodgett that I can come in as a full partner.»
«And you have only his word on that?» the tiny furrows creased deeper and her clear gray eyes were disturbed, «No witnesses or anything?»
«Honey, that's the way business is done in small Southern towns … just by sort of talking things over. When the time comes, we'll draw up some kind of agreement. You have to remember that things are slow-paced here.»
She would grant that. Things were snail-paced in Quiggville, in fact, and if it wasn't for the appointments of her piano pupils she often would not know what day of the week it was. Yet to see Ray so happy and absorbed in his work was worth it all, she felt. Traditionally a wife was the helpmate of her husband and should make the sacrifices and endure the necessary hardships to give him his start.
When they had met on the campus, Ray had made his prospects clear from the very beginning. His parents were dirt-poor farmers from the mountain area of Tennessee and he was attending school through a scholarship and money he had saved while in the army. Sally was not wealthy by any means, but certainly better off financially and in family background. They had married during their senior year and moved to Quiggville right after graduation. Ray had been recruited with glowing promises by John Blodgett … he needed a pharmacist immediately; the old man who had the job had died and the local residents had to go ten miles to the county seat to have prescriptions filled. In answer to Ray's questions about a share in the business he said he would be willing to take in a partner as soon as Ray could raise «a little cash to bind the deal» as he was occupied with other business interests and did not like to work in the store himself.