Chapter 32

"So tell me about this 'Del' business." Perry settled back against the Impala's seat after having twisted himself in knots to get the best view of the mill's sawdust pile from atop D Avenue hill. It was a phenomenal sight, the sawdust pile readily recognizable towering above the tops of green trees.

"'Del' business?"

"Patsy, Miranda, Michael, June, and Jeff all call you 'Del'. And they all say it the same way, hitting the 'D' hard and drawing out the 'L'."

Della turned briefly toward him with a wistful smile. "They're mimicking Danny," she said softly, so softly he had to lean in to hear her. "His first word was 'Del'. It almost broke June's heart. I worked with the little stinker for a week to say 'mama' so she wouldn't be so upset. He used to follow me around and say 'But Dellll', whenever I said no to him. All my friends started to call me 'Del' in the way he did."

"I'm glad you have such good memories of him."

She turned her head toward him once again. "I love you."

"I'm glad of that, too."

She drove in silence for several seconds. "We'll be all right, won't we?"

"Yes."

"There won't be marriage and children."

"Perhaps not."

She frowned slightly. "I'm on my own in this conversation, aren't I?"

"I've told you how I feel, Della. There's nothing else I can say that I haven't already said."

"I – I don't want you to be cheated in life, Perry."

"You've known me for five years. Have I ever allowed myself to be cheated in life?"

"N-no," she replied, still uncertain. "Tell me one more time and I promise I'll never bring it up again."

His hand slid over the upholstery and settled at the apex of her hip and thigh. "It's you and me, kid," he told her. "No second thoughts, no regrets."

"Are you disappointed we won't get to the lake for a few days?"

He smiled at her abrupt switch in topics. "Not in the least. Firstly, I'm beside myself that you bought a car. Secondly, the prospect of seeing the heartland of America with you is very appealing."

"You don't think it was selfish of me to buy a car?"

Perry sat up straighter in the seat. "Selfish? I think you more than proved this week there isn't a selfish bone in your body. You were much more charitable to those people than I would have been."

"I'm beginning to feel guilty," she admitted. "I wanted to do something with the money that would please you, and since you're always harping on me to get a car…"

"I harp because I don't like you taking taxis and busses to work," Perry reminded her a bit sternly. "I'm very pleased. I'll be much more relaxed knowing that you can drive yourself around town."

She gave a little snort. "We'll see about that."

Perry stared at the swiftly passing landscape, forming a question that he had not yet asked. "Why did you give it all away, Della? You could have taken everything and been a very wealthy woman."

Della didn't answer right away as she pondered what words would best convey her frame of mind about the wealth she was born into. "My family may not be impressed by what I've accomplished in my life so far," she began slowly, "but I'm proud of myself and happier than I thought I ever could be. I did nothing to earn Grandmother's estate. The only way I could possibly keep my pride and happiness was to give everything away."

"You could have taken some of it for a rainy day."

She shook her head. "I have a rainy day fund. I also have a retirement fund. The funds may barely contain three digits, but what money is in them I earned."

"Integrity, thy name is Della Street."

"The pupil is only as good as the teacher."

Perry's eyebrows shot up in surprise. "You've got that bass ackwards, my dear."

She shook her head again. "There are times you teeter dangerously on the line between legality and illicitness, but at the core of everything you do is integrity and loyalty and a sense of justice not many attorneys – hell, not many men, period – possess. Not everyone understands that about you because your undisguised glee in besting the police, Hamilton Burger, and especially the guilty party detracts from your motives. It drives me nuts, by the way, but it's who you are, and I wouldn't have you any other way."

"Whatever good you see in me is a reflection of you," Perry insisted.

Perry noticed suddenly that she had taken an exit and steered the brand-new Impala onto a partially concealed dirt two-track. She put the car in park, turned off the engine, and turned fully to face him. "What I see in you was always there," she disagreed tremulously. "I saw it the instant we met."

Perry locked eyes with Della, the woman no other could possibly hope to equal, the one woman who truly loved him for him, blatant deficiencies included. What could he possibly say to her that would live up to her words? "And yet you waited two years before you slept with me."

Her response was one of the reasons he loved her up, down, and inside out, and possibly the reason they would most certainly be all right: she laughed.

Della drove until dusk that night, refusing Perry's offer to take over the driving chore. When she spied a sign advertising 'clean, secluded' cabins, she veered onto the road and followed it several miles to cabins that were freshly painted and decidedly secluded. Perry rented only one cabin, under the names of Carter and Henrietta Vander Velde, which Della found incredibly humorous, dissolving into a fit of giggles that Perry was afraid might arouse suspicion in the proprietors of the cabins as they watched the couple unload their luggage (Perry was thankful it all matched and that the sour-faced husband and wife couldn't see the 'DM' stamped on each piece). But Della covered her fit beautifully by calling out that she was unaccustomed to hearing her full first name, preferring to be called 'Henny'. Perry had to bite his lip to keep from grinning. The last items out of the trunk were the teal metal Coleman cooler they had bought and the blanket Perry had appropriated from the rented Galaxie as a surprise for Della, and when he swung away from the Impala, he caught her looking at him with a tender, wondrous expression. The extra five dollars he had given to Jeff Kuiper as compensation for the car rental company was definitely well-spent for that expression alone.

They had stopped around noon in the last large city they would encounter for many miles and stocked the cooler with enough food to get them to California, an assortment of soft drinks, and two bottles of wine. Lunch had been roast beef on sourdough rolls and a cold macaroni salad washed down with icy root beer at a park in a grove of mature trees alongside a winding crik. Dinner was tuna salad on beds of garden bib lettuce with fresh cantaloupe for dessert, seated on the blanket-covered steps of the small fairly clean cabin. There were ten cabins positioned around a small patch of grass, and all but one cabin was occupied. Every occupant of each cabin was seated either on the steps or in lawn chairs enjoying the warm, dry night air and watching a few children chase fireflies on the grassy patch. Perry and Della chatted with an overly friendly elderly couple from Pennsylvania who were on their way to Washington State simply because neither had ever been there, and wasn't it fortunate that they had noticed the sign for the cabins before it got too late? After thirty minutes of pleasant chit-chat, Perry stood and pulled Della to her feet, offering their good-nights.

The bed wasn't large, and the mattress sagged, but the sheets were soft and clean and the pillows plump. They made love slowly and quietly, whispered endearments and rapturous sighs contained within the clapboard walls of the dark cabin. Afterwards, Della lay across Perry's body as they slept in the sagging middle of the mattress, replete and contentedly at peace, and deliriously happy to be out of the Street house.

Perry awoke at dawn and carefully slipped from the bed. After standing at the foot for several minutes admiring Della's sleeping form, he finally flung the covers aside, grabbed her ankles, pulled her toward him, hoisted her over his shoulder, and carried her to the bathroom for a 'buddy' shower and a bit of soap-slickened hanky-panky. They were packed and on the road by seven-thirty, Della with damp hair curling around her face and Perry with an inordinately goofy smile on his lips.

Della allowed Perry to drive her car after cautioning him about watching the speedometer and not yanking the gear shift from reverse to drive like he did when driving his own car, and she spent a half hour climbing into the back seat and then into the front seat, and back again, marveling that the beautiful car was actually hers. Perry loved seeing her so relaxed and happy, finally free of the negative effect her emotionless family and the equally cold house had on her. She vehemently denied holding any animosity toward him about the past week, pragmatically pointing out that they had learned important facts and she had put to rest the spirit of her grandmother and a childhood that had haunted her. She was ready to face the future, their future, as a whole person, solemnly promising to tell him more stories about her childhood as their life together unfolded.

There were subjects each consciously avoided, subjects that were too deep and hurtful to talk about in a car going eighty miles an hour down the highway, so they settled for turning up the radio loud, playing 'I Spy' from lists Della jotted down in her steno pad, and making up stories for the people in houses they passed as they often did when driving around Beverly Hills. Perry couldn't remember a time when he had laughed so much or felt so young and carefree. Della literally sparkled, nothing and no one escaping her alternately pithy and downright hysterical comments. After having spent an entire week with her family, he marveled at the strength it had taken to triumph over the oppressive sterility and outright hostility of her upbringing to become the wittiest, most intuitive, smartest woman he had ever known. She could be anything she wanted to be – her acuity for business and the pragmatism she must have been born with would have translated into success in the corporate world – but she had instead chosen to assist him with his practice because his world was 'more interesting'. She liked helping people, liked the excitement surrounding his cases, liked being a part of something bigger than chasing profits for the sake of the bottom line. His success as an attorney was directly linked to her, and he made sure she received every bit of credit she deserved.

She had been right: he hadn't bargained for her and what she would bring to his life when he'd hired her. He'd only known that the instant she walked into his office the world seemed a better place because of her smile. He wanted that smile, needed that smile, needed her in his life. And by some stroke of divine fortune she'd decided she needed him as well.

After splitting four games of 'I Spy', and debating the issue of lures versus live bait when fishing for blue gills, radio Gunsmoke versus television Gunsmoke, and classical economics versus Keynesian economics, they stopped for dinner at a quaint diner which led to more debates, this time the subjects being Miracle Whip versus mayonnaise and the three-tined fork versus the four-tined fork. Perry's head was spinning and his sides hurt from laughing, but the world had never been a better place. Back in the car, Della snuggled against Perry's side and fell into what he figured was the best sleep she'd had since the night Eve Wyman crossed her threshold, prompting him to pass several signs for motels and cabins long after the sun had set.

He had just passed an exit off of which a sign proclaimed the last lodging for thirty-seven miles and was approaching an exit that would eventually lead to some small town but was dark and desolate as far as the eye could see when he realized Della's hand was moving in the vicinity of his belt buckle and that her teeth were firmly grasping his earlobe. Without a word, he took the exit to nowhere, and drove between acres and acres of tall corn before finding an opening that would camouflage the Impala. Della scrambled into the back seat and had removed her blouse by the time Perry killed the engine and joined her.

There in the middle of a field permeated with the dry, pungent aroma of sweet corn, they discovered that the back seat of a Chevy Impala was more than adequate to accommodate amorous activity.