Strangers

always willing to lend a hand to other waitresses when they got behind in their orders, but she was incapable of interacting with anyone on a personal level. A pale, scuttling girl (twenty-three, but still more girl than woman), she was reluctant to open the door on friendship, for fear she would put her trust in someone who might hurt her. She had been drab, mousy, meek, beaten by life - and the instant Ned had seen her, he had felt the need to fix things for her. With enormous patience, he began work on her, so subtly that, at first, she was not aware that he was interested in her.
        They were married nine months later, although his repair work on her was far from finished. She was more badly broken than any creature he'd encountered before, and there were times when, in frustration, he felt that, even with his talent, he would be unable to fix her and would spend the rest of his life tinkering endlessly without much effect.
        During their first six years of marriage, however, he had witnessed a slow healing in her, maddeningly gradual. Sandy had an indisputably bright mind, but she was retarded emotionally; she learned to take and give affection only with tremendous effort, much as a dim-witted child struggles mightily to learn to count to ten.
        The first indication Ned had had that major changes were taking place in Sandy was the sudden marked improvement in her sexual appetite. The turnaround had come in late August, two summers ago.
        She'd never been a hesitant lover. She exhibited extensive carnal knowledge, but she made love more like a machine than a woman, with a joyless expertise. He had never known a woman as silent in bed as Sandy had been. He suspected something in her childhood had stunted her, the same thing that had broken her spirit. He tried to get her to talk about it, but she was adamant about letting the past stay buried, and his persistence was the one thing that might have caused her to leave him; so he asked about it no more, though it was difficult to fix something when you could not get at the part of it that was broken.
        Then, in August of the summer before last, she came to the conjugal bed with a noticeably different attitude. Nothing dramatic at first. No sudden release of long-imprisoned passions. Initially, the change involved only a subtle new relaxation during the act of love. Sometimes she smiled or murmured his name as he made love to her.
        Slowly, slowly, she blossomed. By that Christmas, four months after the change began, she no longer lay upon the bed as if she were made of metal. She strove to find and match his rhythm, searching for the fulfillment that still eluded her.
        Slowly, slowly, she freed the erotic power chained within her. Finally, on April 7, last year, a night Ned would never forget, Sandy had an orgasm for the first time. It was a climax of such power that for a moment it frightened Ned. Afterward, she wept with happiness and clung to him with such gratitude, love, and trust that he wept as well.
        He thought her orgasmic breakthrough would finally enable her to speak of the source of her long-hidden pain. But when he cautiously inquired, she rebuffed him: "The past is past, Ned. Won't help to dwell on it. If I talk about it… that might just give it a new hold on me."
        Through last spring, summer, and early autumn, Sandy gradually achieved satisfaction more often until, by September, their love-making nearly always brought her fulfillment. And by Christmas Day, less than three weeks ago, it was clear that her sexual maturation was not the only change in her but was accompanied by a new pride and self-respect.
        Concomitant with her sexual development, Sandy learned to enjoy driving, an activity she had once found even less pleasurable than sex. Initially, she expressed the modest intention of driving to work from their trailer out near Beowawe. Before long she was lighting out in the truck on solo spins. Sometimes Ned stood at a window and watched his uncaged bird soar off, and he viewed each flight with delight but also with an uneasiness he could not explain.
        By New Year's Day, just past, the uneasiness became dread and was with him twenty-four hours a day, and by then he understood it. He was afraid Sandy would fly away from him.
        Maybe with the stranger who'd come in with Ernie and Faye.
        I'm probably overreacting, Ned thought as he put three hamburger