Lightning

With cold rainwater trickling from her wet hair down the nape of her neck and along the curve of her spine, with her day at the library shot — how could she concentrate on research after this insane scene? — and with more than a little disappointment that her secret admirer had turned out to be this dirty, sweaty, inarticulate lummox, Laura said, "Listen, Mr. Packard, I don't want you sending me any more toads."

"Well, see, I really want to send them."

"But I don't want to receive them. And tomorrow I'll mail back the ones you've sent me. No, today. I'll mail them back today."

He met her eyes again, blinked in surprise, and said, "I thought you liked toads."

With growing anger, she said, "I do like toads. I love toads. I think toads are the cutest things in creation. Right now I even wish I were a toad, but I don't want your toads. Understand?"

"Ummmm.

"Don't harass me, Packard. Maybe some women surrender to your weird mix of heavy-handed romance' and sweaty macho charm, but I'm not one of them, and I can protect myself, don't think I can't. I'm a lot tougher than I look, and I've dealt with worse than you."

She turned away from him, walked out from under the veranda into the rain, returned to her car, and drove back to Irvine. She shook all the way home, not only because she was wet and chilled but because she was in the grip of anger. The nerve of him!

At her apartment she undressed, bundled up in a quilted robe, and brewed a pot of coffee with which to ward off the chills.

She had just taken her first sip of coffee when the phone rang. She answered it in the kitchen. It was Packard.

Speaking so rapidly that he ran his sentences together in long gushes, he said, "Please don't hang up on me, you're right, I'm stupid about these things, an idiot, but give me just one minute to explain myself, I was fixing the dishwasher when you came, that's why I was such a mess, greasy and sweaty, had to pull it from under the counter myself, the landlord would have fixed it, but going through management takes a week, and I'm good with my hands, I can fix anything, it was a rainy day, nothing else to do, so why not fix it myself, I never figured you to show up. My name's Daniel Packard, but you know that already, I'm twenty-eight, I was in the army until "73, graduated from the University of California at Irvine with a degree in business just three years ago, work as a stockbroker now, but I take a couple night courses at the university, which is how I came across your story about the toad in the campus literary magazine, it was terrific, I loved it, a great story, really, so I went to the library and searched through back issues to find everything else you'd written, and I read it all, and a lot of it was good, damned good, not all of it, but a lot. I fell in love with you somewhere along the way, with the person I knew from her writing, because the writing was so beautiful and so real. One evening I was sitting there in the library reading one of your stories — they won't let anyone check out back issues of the literary magazine, they have them in binders, and you have to read them in the library — and this librarian was passing behind my chair, and she leaned over and asked if I liked the story, I said I did, and she said, 'Well, the author's right over there, if you want to tell her it's good,' and there you were just three tables away with a stack of books, doing research, scowling, making notes, and you were gorgeous. See, I knew you would be beautiful inside because your stories are beautiful, the sentiment in them is beautiful, but it never occurred to me that you'd be beautiful outside, too, and there was no way I could approach you because I've always been tongue-tied and stumble-footed around beautiful women, maybe because my mother was beautiful but cold and forbidding, so now maybe I think all beautiful women will reject me the way my mother did — a little half-baked analysis there — but it sure would've been a lot easier for me if you'd been ugly or at least plain looking. Because of your story I thought I'd use the toads, that whole secret admirer bit with the gifts, as a way to soften you up, and I planned to reveal myself after the third or fourth toad, I really did, but I kept delaying because I didn't want to be rejected, I guess, and I knew it was getting crazy, toad after toad after toad, but I just couldn't stop it and forget you, yet I wasn't able to face you, either, and that's it. I never meant you any harm, I sure didn't mean to upset you, can you forgive me, I hope you can." He stopped at last, exhausted. She said, "Well."

He said, "So will you go out with me?" Surprised by her own response, she said, "Yes." "Dinner and a movie?" "All right."

"Tonight? Pick you up at six?" "Okay."

After she hung up she stood for a while, staring at the phone. Finally she said aloud, "Shane, are you nuts?" Then she said, "But he told me my writing* was 'so beautiful and so real.' "