Read Online The Crossroads by John D. MacDonald - Free Book Online Page A

girl in Acapulco. They took a big cabana at the Hotel de las Americas and spent most of their time either in bed or around the pool drinking and eating Chinese food. And there were new friends, as always, to join the group. She sort of liked being married, she decided. Pete was crazy and cute. She gathered that he and his father and brothers and sister owned a motel. She worried about the money. It seemed to be a lot to spend if you just owned a motel down south someplace.
    They flew back and had a couple of days in New York. She packed up the rest of her stuff and shipped it on ahead. She found out Pete had a Corvette in a storage garage. They had a goodbye party for Barney and drove south. Pete drove in a scary way, but they certainly made good time.
    And then she had to meet the rest of the family. Peteacted nervous about that, about the only thing she had ever seen him nervous about. She stopped worrying about the money they had spent when she saw that it was a real big business, with people working for the Droveks all over the place. They all seemed friendly enough to her. Not real close like, but friendly. Everybody was so terribly busy there didn’t seem to be any time for family get-togethers. She and Pete lived in the big motel in a nice room and their house was started right away. She tried to get them to build the kind of a house she wanted, but Pete explained that it wasn’t as if they’d own it. The corporation would own it and they would just lease it from the corporation. So the architect who’d done the other work designed it and the decorators who did work for the Droveks decorated it and furnished it, and neither she nor Pete had anything to say about it, except Pete did get them to put in that great big bed. That crazy Pete.
    He went to work right away. He’d had four years of college and three years in the service, and now he would work for the Crossroads Corporation for the rest of his life. She found out about the money. Pete’s salary was a hundred and fifty dollars a week, and from his stock they got about twelve thousand dollars a year. But that didn’t mean there was a lot for her to spend. That crazy Pete spent an awful lot of money. He went on trips to see friends. He didn’t seem to want to take her along. Sometimes he would. But it wasn’t much fun. It wasn’t that he didn’t like her. He just didn’t seem to want her in that part of his life. And she certainly knew he wasn’t going off to play around with other girls. When he would come back he would be after her something fierce in that big bed, like he couldn’t ever get enough, but always kidding, sort of. Making jokes. Calling her funny names.
    Then they both had all those examinations in Walterburg. They couldn’t find anything wrong with either of them, but somehow she just couldn’t start a baby.
    She told herself that she had everything she could want. Pretty clothes and a beautiful little home and a cute husband who made enough money. But nothing seemed to really belong to her. It was like pretending tobe married. His family seemed too busy to give her much time. And she couldn’t seem to make any girl friends. It wasn’t like being in the city. There were some cute girls working in the restaurants, but they knew she was one of the three Mrs. Droveks and it made it strained and funny. Not really friendly. It wasn’t that she was trapped out here in the country. Pete had bought her the secondhand Chevy on her twenty-fourth birthday. She could drive into Walterburg, but it wasn’t the sort of place where you could meet anybody sort of casual, like going in a bar or something.
    In her restlessness, when Pete was away or busy, she got into the habit of walking over to the Starlight Club at about five-thirty and having a couple of drinks at the bar, and then eating in the Motor Hotel Restaurant. She would pretend she was a woman of mystery, on a long trip. And that was the way she had met Mark Brodey, the head bartender at