When at last Catherine broke off our kiss, for I would have lived in that moment for eternity, she looked back at me with smiling eyes and said “Wow!”—an expression of extreme underestimation—and yet it lifted me so high that it carried me to her doorstep without allowing my feet to touch the ground. When she turned back to me after walking through the side door to say goodnight she spoke only with her eyes which I could have held with my own for as long as my first kiss. Hers were the only lips mine had known in such a way.

My lips, despite some prodding by prissy Peggy Banister, remained loyal to hers even during the long nine months before I would see her again. She left for home unexpectedly the next morning to be with her brother who had been severely injured from a fall from his barn roof while helping his father install a fresh layer of shingles.

I hardly thought of anything but

Catherine for the following three seasons that we were apart. I made excuses to go across the street to visit with Teresa and Albert just to ask about Catherine: How was she doing? How was her brother? When would Catherine return?

I finally weaseled Catherine’s home address from Albert (while Teresa was out shopping) on the pretext of sending a get well card to Catherine’s brother and I wrote her a sterile carefully worded letter, a precaution taken in case her parents pried. In return I received a perfumed letter on pink and white stationary in which she described the hum- drum of her country life, and not a single word of endearment save for her endorsement: Love Catherine. Perfume and love; the rest was nothing but words. I scoured that letter at least one-hundred times looking for a hint of her betrothal, but I settled for perfume and love.

I unfolded that letter so many times a day until I received her next dispatch that the stationary started to tear at the creases. In return I wrote long embarrassing love letters. I managed to get a few of them into sealed envelopes but I would lose the temerity to send them before I could reach a mailbox.

Ultimately we exchanged innocuous letters to each other every few weeks; both hers and mine were endorsed with love.

When Catherine finally arrived the next year I hardly recognized her. She had developed a whole new set of curves. Her chest was swollen, her buds having bloomed and born ripe rounded citrus shaped breasts, and she had sprouted a round derriere where once her scrawny cheeks had left a vacancy in her slacks. She sported long athletic calves attached to voluptuous thighs that vanished beneath the hoop of her skirt. She wore a little make-up, a touch of rouge on her cheeks, a pout of pink lipstick on her lips and a trace of eye-shadow on her lids. When I first laid eyes on her I blushed, embarrassed, because I had hardly changed in any way that I could recognize other than having sprouted a few new white-heads. I was still a gangly pimple-faced teenager in jeans, a t-shirt and worn-out tennis- shoes.

Before I could get across the street to greet Catherine, a handsome athletic Italian kid by the name of Tony Artino almost fell over himself to get to her first. By the time I reached Catherine Tony was in full flirt with Catherine, and Teresa towered behind them beaming at Tony’s charm as though he were

James Dean.

Catherine glanced at me and smiled before averting her eyes toward the ground, “Hello Mathew.”

She lifted me off of the ground with her smile and I mumbled a shy “Hello.” And charming Tony nodded at me as though I were a toad and then continued with his full court press on Catherine.

“Come on now Catherine let’s get you settled in before you go off with your friends.”

Teresa interrupted and Catherine disappeared into the house so quickly that I wasn’t sure that I had actually seen her. When after supper I stopped by to ask Catherine to go for a walk

Teresa said me, with too much glee in her voice, “Oh, she just left for a walk with Tony. Perhaps you can catch up with them. I think they were headed for the baseball field.”

My heart was broken. Catherine, love of my life, was a fickle trollop! I fought off the tears that were welling up under my eyes and prevented them from dripping until I had turned away as cheerfully and as casually as I could “No problem, I’ll stop by some other time.” I said, and then I crawled home like an injured possum dragging the dead weight of my limbs as if they were numbed by Novocain.

I didn’t dare go over to Teresa and

Albert’s house after that and apparently

Catherine had lost interest in baseball (as had Tony) because neither of them showed up at the ball field the next morning or any other morning after that. In fact I didn’t see either of them for almost two weeks. I spent my time sulking in my room or going through the motions playing ball with Tommy and the guys but all I could think about was Catherine. Alone in my room I imagined her pressing her lips to Tony’s, his tongue touching hers, their hands on each other’s backs, or worse, groping those Beautiful new breasts that Catherine made no effort to conceal and I would cry angrily the redness of my hate seeping through the pores of my face. I would write letters to Catherine telling her how disappointed I was in the fact that she had become a whore and that I knew that she was Fucking Tony as only a whore would do, and then I would shred the paper with the pointed weight of my pen, slashing my hateful words to pieces because no matter how disturbing were the images that passed through my tortured mind I still loved Catherine with all of my heart and soul. I would still make love to her in my imagination, as I had all autumn, winter and spring, with my eyes closed in the privacy of my bedroom.

When after a few weeks I saw Albert out pacing in his front yard early one morning I asked him if he wanted to play catch.

“Have you seen that Tony-son-of-a- bitch?!” Albert Said, a thick vein throbbing like a nasty scar across his temple.

“No. Why? What happened?” I tried to suppress the joy I felt at Albert’s mispronunciation of Tony’s last name.

“That little fucker,” Albert gasped and sucked the angry spittle that sprayed from his lips, “that fucker hurt Catherine! If I see him I’ll tear his arms off!”

“What did he do to her?” I heard a voice inside of me growl with a rage that I didn’t even know I was capable of.

“That fucker molested her! She came home last night crying with her blouse torn!” Albert’s face grew purple his blood boiling to his cheeks, “I’ll kill that fucker.” He said leaning down and spraying a thick mist of spit in my direction.

I turned and pounded my feet across the pavement storming toward the park across from the ball-field where Tony and most of his friends hung out. My fists clenched and unclenched and the muscles in my face caused a twitch to ripple my left cheek. I heard Tommy ask as I passed him near the ball-field, “What’s the matter with you?” but I ignored him and marched right by him. I kept picturing Tony tearing at Catherine’s blouse trying to molest the innocent flower of my heart until I found myself standing across from Tony who was sitting on a bench with another girl, Tina Lehatski (or Tina-the-slut as they would often chide in the school yard). I didn’t even notice that Tony’s cronies, wimpy Jim Mann and big- nosed Mike Worthman and that big dark curly- haired Dan Gardipee, were loitering about. I walked up to Tony and I started flailing at his face like a windmill to the air, as Tony fell from the bench and then stood with his arms about his face. My blows missed the fast retreating thug who had molested my Catherine. When at last, my arms heavy from labor, I towered over the maggot of a man who had stumbled and fallen to the ground, where he lay on his back, I having never landed a single blow, I pointed my finger into his face and quaked a deep guttural growl, “If you ever go near her again I will kill you.” And I walked away with my back turned to him.