“Good night,” she said, in a soft husky voice, as she picked up her two grocery bags, and he unpacked his cart.

“Night,” he answered as he watched her go, and a few minutes later, he heard a car roar off, and when he went back to his own car in the parking lot, the little MG next to his car was gone, and he wondered if that was what she had been driving. He grinned to himself then. He was obviously working too hard if he was starting to fall in love with total strangers. “Okay,Thigpen,” he muttered as he started his car with a roar of exhaust fumes, “take it easy, boy.” He chuckled as he drove out of the parking lot, and as he drove home, he wondered what Sylvia was up to in Las Vegas.





AS ADRIAN TOWNSEND DROVE AWAY FROM THE supermarket, her thoughts were full of Steven waiting for her at home. She hadn't seen him in four days. He had been stuck in meetings at a client presentation in St. Louis. Steven Townsend was the bright shining star of the ad agency where he worked, and she knew that one day, if he wanted to, he would run the L. A. office. At thirty-four, he had come a long, long way from humble beginnings in the Midwest, and she knew just how much his success meant to him. It meant everything to him. He had hated everything about poverty, his childhood, and the Midwest, and in his opinion he had been saved sixteen years ago by a scholarship to UC Berkeley. He had majored in communications, as Adrian had three years later at Stanford. Her passion had been TV, but Steven had fallen in love with advertising from the beginning. He had gone to work for an ad agency in San Francisco right out of school, and then he'd gone to business school at night and earned his MBA once he got to southern California. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that Steven Townsend was going to succeed, no matter what it took, or cost him. He was one of those people who were determined to get where they wanted to go, who planned things out in great detail. There were no accidents in Steven Townsend's life, no mistakes, no failures. He would talk to Adrian for hours sometimes about clients he was going to get, or a promotion he had set his sights on. She marveled at him sometimes, his determination, his drive, his courage. It hadn't been easy for him. His father had been an autoworker on the assembly line in Detroit, with five kids, three daughters and two sons, of which Steven had been the youngest. His older brother had died in Vietnam, and the three girls had stayed close to home, perfectly content not to go to college. Two of them had been married while still in their teens, both pregnant, of course, and his oldest sister had married at twenty-one, and had had four children before her twenty-fifth birthday. She had married an autoworker like her dad, and when there was a strike they all went on welfare. It was a life Steven still had nightmares about, and he seldom talked to anyone about his childhood. Only Adrian knew how much he had hated it, and how much he had come to hate them. He had never gone back to Detroit once he left, and Adrian also knew that it had been more than five years since he had communicated with his parents. He just couldn't talk to them anymore, he had explained it to her once when he'd had a little too much to drink and they'd come home after an office party. He had hated them so much, hated their poverty and despair, hated the look of constant sorrow in his mother's eyes over all that she could not do for, or give, her children. But she must have loved you all, Adrian had tried to explain, sensing the woman's love for them, and her sense of helplessness in the face of what they needed and she couldn't give them, in particular, her youngest child, anxious, ambitious Steven.