into the process."
"In what way?"
"Hank's trying to freeze me out."
"Can he?"
"He's a very powerful man."
"What about you? Aren't you powerful?"
"Not like Hank. He owns our town. People generally do what he tells them to do."
"But not Maddie."
"That's why I need you to—"
"And not me."
"Well, you're both young and stupid. You can still afford to have principles," Bob said, and then he leaned back in the booth, crossed his arms and looked down at his half-eaten breakfast.
"Do you believe that?"
"What? About having principles?"
"Yeah."
"You'll find out in time, I suppose," Bob says, looking up at John again. There was something particularly tired about his eyes, a weariness that wasn't there a minute ago, a vulnerability that revealed a deep insecurity beneath his otherwise angry mask. "Let's cut to the chase, John. What will it take to get you to end this?"
"The only thing that will get me to end things with Maddie is Maddie. There's nothing else I'm—"
"I'll give you a thousand dollars."
John looks at him dumbly, not sure how to respond. "Mr. Winthrop, I'm not at interested in your money."
"Everyone's interested in money, John," Bob says. "I'll give you five thousand."
"If I weren't waiting for my breakfast, I'd leave and try to pretend this never happened."
"Fine," Bob said, and reached into his jacket pocket and pulled out a stack of one hundred dollar bills, sat them on the table, and slid them toward John. "Ten thousand dollars if you walk out of here right now, break off the engagement, and never talk to Maddie again."
In 1955, ten thousand dollars was a ton of cash. In their area of the country, you could buy a nice, modest house with that kind of money.
But John didn't even take a beat to think of it. He looked at the money with disdain, pushed it back toward Bob. "You're not listening to me. I'm not taking your money, and I have no intention of breaking off my engagement with Maddie."
"Why are you being so stubborn?"
"Because I love her, Mr. Winthrop."
"Oh, for crying out loud."
"And there's no amount of money in the world that would compel me to leave her now."
"How in the world did this happen? I feel like just last week everything was going exactly as I planned."
"That's the problem. Things were going exactly as you planned. No one was asking Maddie about what she had planned for herself."
"But she knew that Henry had asked for my blessing to her marry her. I never heard any complaints from her."
"Did you ask her?"
"Oh, I don't know. You're generation is different from mine. This is how things were done when I was your age," Bob said and turned and looked out the window. It was clearly dawning on him that he had lost control of the situation. "I never even heard your name until the day she brought you home. If only she had told us about you a week earlier, we could've avoided this whole mess."
John wasn't about to tell him that they'd only just met. That would only make him crazier. But he also wasn't about to lie to him and make him believe that they'd been together any longer than they had been. So, he stayed quiet.
"So, what do I do about this?" Bob asked, but John wasn't sure whether or not the question was rhetorical. So, he waited a beat until Bob looked at him again, waiting for an answer.
"I don't know what to say. I understand that you're in a tough spot. But Maddie and I are together, and that's not going to change," John said, but he could see that this wasn't getting Bob's attention. He had turned his attentions back to the world outside the diner window. "Maybe we could disappear."
"What do you mean 'disappear'?"
Now John had his attention.
"Maybe Maddie and I could leave town for a couple weeks, at least until this all blows over. Maybe that would help. I mean, everyone already seems to know that she broke off her engagement with Henry. We can't do anything about that now. But only a tiny handful of people know about our engagement. So, maybe if we leave, we can keep the gossip at bay."
"And you'd do that?" Bob asks. "You could get away?"
"Yeah, I think so. My grandparents have a cabin up north a ways. We could go there."
"And you'd be respectful? I can't say I'm crazy about Maddie sharing a cabin with you. You're not her husband, yet."
"No, of course. I'd sleep on the couch."
"And how soon could you go?
"I could make the arrangements today, and we could leave late this afternoon, assuming everything goes alright."
"And you'll let Maddie know?"
"I'll call her and see if she's okay with it, but if she's—"
"Why wouldn't she be okay with it?"
"I don't know, but I don't want to make a habit of making plans for her. We both know how that can go."
"Well, the sooner you get out of town, the better. I may be able to stop the bleeding with Hank if she's gone, but if they find out she's engaged to someone else… Well, there won't be anything anyone could do at that point to smooth things over. But things in town should start to quiet down after a few weeks. Still, though, I'll bet it'll be at least a month before this all seems like old news."
"I don't think I could stay away that long, but—"
"You see what you can do," Bob said, standing up from the booth. He reached in his pocket, peeled a five from his wallet and threw it on the table.
"I can get my own," John said, but Bob ignored him and walked away from the booth and out of the diner.
John looks up at the computer slideshow, watches the same old pictures go by. The algorithm of this software feels eerily similar to how the brain works. He feels like the same pictures pop up all the time, and too many of them just disappear and are rarely seen. Then again, even the pictures he sees all the time, though their good pictures and dredge up good feelings, they all seem like manipulations of memories, things remembered as facsimile pasts. Whereas, for some reason, all these memories of he and Maddie's beginnings feel so fresh, like they just happened, like Maddie only recently wished him from the moonlight.
Even his conversation with Bob that day at the diner is still so vivid. It feels so real and present and not at all as is he were drifting back sixty years. Whether or not he remembers it exactly how it happened, he can't say for sure, but it feels remarkably close to a pristine remembrance.
He's sure that Bob offered him ten thousand dollars to break off the engagement. John never did tell Maddie about it, and Bob only ever mentioned it once after that day.
It was on John and Maddie's wedding day. Bob was standing next to John as Maddie was preparing to toss her bouquet, and he said something like, 'Looks like I ended up giving you that ten thousand after all. Just not in the way I expected. It's all been for the best though.' He was talking about the price of the wedding. And, though their wedding was lavish to be sure, it was almost entirely due to Bob and Helen's urging. They had luxurious tastes, and they were sensitive to the social expectations that accompanied their name. But, still, it didn't cost anywhere near ten thousand dollars. Nevertheless, John knew that this was Bob's way of acknowledging an incident that he didn't want to go unremarked on. Bob didn't want to pretend it didn't happen, and it was John's sense that he hoped they could both move on and forget the whole diner episode ever happened.
But Bob's concern that the end of Maddie and Henry would cause problems in his business partnership with Hank Hawthorne turned out to be justified.
Though the month that John and Maddie spent at his grandparents' cabin had the desired effect of keeping their engagement a secret the remainder of the summer, Hank was angry about Maddie undermining his son's reputation, and he took it out on Bob.
Soon after Maddie broke off the engagement, Hank effectively froze Bob out of any business they were doing together. Though Bob was still a partner—he had invested too much
money not to be—Hank had turned him into a de facto silent partner. He removed Bob from any of the decision-making capabilities on their development project, cut him out of the day-to-day progress meetings. He also used his influence to bar Bob from the job site once construction was under way.
Bob was proved right, Hank Hawthorne was every bit as powerful as he was petty.
But Bob still got paid, and handsomely at that.
And, though at the time Bob was frustrated by his impotence on a project he had spent so much time helping to get off the ground, it was only a few years later that Hank Hawthorne was indicted for tax fraud, wire fraud, and forgery. He was embezzling money from anybody and everybody who was connected to his development business, including Bob. He had taken a much higher salary than he reported on his taxes, and he did this by vastly over reporting what he paid contractors and other service personnel by falsifying bills and forging receipts. It caused a legal circus that had the entire town enthralled for months.
Maddie always believed that if she had stayed with Henry, and her dad had been in the loop during their development project, he could've been an unwilling accomplice in Hank's massive fraud. Bob also came to believe he could've easily gotten wrapped up in Hank's crimes. He often said during the months while Hank was on trial, after more and more reports of how widespread the fraud was, that he dodged a bullet by not being an active business partner with Hank Hawthorne.
Looking over at Maddie now, sitting in a high back chair by the window, reading a book as the soft winter sun shines on her, he is reminded of a similar image he has of her from when