An Iowa Blessing
Chapter II
It was June’s habit to work each day and then go home and
prepare a small meal to eat before she took off jogging for a few miles.
Sometimes in the cold weather she chose to work out at the YWCA, but she
preferred the roadwork to the inside exercise. The way she lived kept her in
great shape, both mentally and physically. Now and then she would treat herself
to a meal in a restaurant when she wanted to splurge a little, but she rarely
ever went out with friends. She and Sara ate together less than once a month,
even though they remained good friends and both were single women.
Four months after meeting Allan for the first time,
June walked into a restaurant in town for her weekly treat of eating out and
was seated at a table near the front window. The waiter handed her a menu as he
introduced himself. “Good evening, my name is Robert. I will be your server
this evening. Can I get you something to drink?”
“Just water please.” June opened the menu and perused
through it slowly to see if anything particularly appealed to her senses. At
the top of the right page she accidentally glanced over the top and saw Allan
seated ahead of her with his back to her. He had been there when she walked in,
but June failed to notice him when she was seated. She quickly got up and
stepped over to his table. “Hey there, I just saw you. Are you eating alone,
Allan?”
Allan responded as he clumsily tried to stand and be
gentlemanly, “Hello, June. Yes, I am alone, and you?”
“Yes, alone as usual. I don’t eat out a lot, but when
I do it is usually alone,” she said. “Would you care to join me? I’m sitting
right behind you a couple of tables away.” As soon as she asked, she wondered
what had come over her. She didn’t even like the man and here she was asking
him to join her for dinner.
Allan looked warily at her and hesitated before he
answered. “Sure, I’d like that, if you’re sure. Let me catch my waiter’s
attention and let him know I’m changing seats.”
“I think you have Robert. This is his serving area. I
have him also. Here he comes now.”
Allan informed Robert where he would be sitting and
pointed to June’s table. “She is a friend of mine,” he said to the waiter.
Robert nodded that it was fine.
As Allan sat, June asked, “Have you ordered yet?”
“No, I’ve only been here a few minutes. The waiter
stopped and gave me a menu, but I haven’t really looked at it that carefully
yet. What about you?”
“Same thing. I just got here.” June handed Allan her
menu. “Here, we can share this one.”
Allan dropped the menu on the floor as she handed it
to him. “Oops, sorry,” he said as he leaned over to pick it up, June stood and
tried to grab it. In that brief instant, June saw the handle of what she
thought was a gun peeking out from behind his suit coat lapel. It momentarily
stunned her to silence. She had a blank look on her face as he straightened up
in his chair. “That was clumsy of me, sorry,” he apologized.
June just looked at him with that blank look on her
face as she sat down.
“Are you okay?” Allan asked. “You aren’t feeling ill
all of a sudden are you?”
“Me, oh sure, I’m okay, why do you ask?”
“I don’t know for sure. I guess I thought you looked
at me kind of funny when I dropped the menu. It was an accident.”
“No, actually I was thinking it was my fault it
fell,” she lied.
Robert soon returned and received their dinner
orders. “These will be separate checks please,” June told him.
“Yes, of course,” he replied as he left to place the
orders.
“I really would like to take the check, I think I
still owe you a dinner,” Allan said.
“You owe me nothing.”
“I know I at least owe you an apology. I have thought
about how I noticeably turned you off several weeks ago when I was so rude
about the introduction, and then there was the name thing between us,” he said.
“I didn’t mean to be rude, but sometimes my approach to things isn’t as
polished as it should be. I should have leveled with you, but I hardly knew you
then.”
“You hardly know me now,” she retorted.
“Well, maybe a little better. Why don’t you try me
again? Please ask your questions and I will try to be more attuned to you by
giving thoughtful answers.”
“How about truthful answers?”
“Okay, thoughtful and truthful,” he agreed.
“Really? Well, in that case,” she leaned forward and
whispered, “why do you carry a gun?”
The question caused Allan a mild surprise. “Oh, that,
well, I can answer that, but not in here. How about a short reprieve for the
answer to that question until we finish eating and can get away to the outside
away from prying ears?”
“Sure, but if you’d rather not tell me, I suppose
that’s okay too. Actually, I suppose it’s really none of my business,
especially since I don’t even know your name.”
“It’s not that, but rather part of my business that I
don’t care to broadcast to the people in a public place. I have no problem
telling you that it is due to my work. That was another question you asked at
another time, remember?”
“Yes, but that was also none of my business. I was
out-of-line asking those sorts of questions of you when we had barely met,” she
said.
The remainder of the time in the restaurant was spent
eating and making small talk. Once dinner was over, they paid their respective
tabs and left for a walk outside so Allan could respond to the question of why
he was carrying a gun. As they strolled a short distance from the restaurant,
Allan told June, “In the interest of wanting to make you my friend, I do want
to level with you on a couple of issues.”
“You don’t have to do that, really. You have a right
to your personal privacy.”
“Yes I do have to, if for no other reason than to
attempt to gain some measure of trust from you. They call me Allan in my
business, but that’s only a code name I use because of the nature of the work I
do. My real name is Ralph Owen, but I will ask that for now you please continue
to call me Allan so my identity isn’t blown. I’m a private agent at large,
basically meaning that I do a lot of traveling. That’s also the reason I carry
a weapon. For security reasons, I really can’t tell you what specific kind of
work I do. I hope you can understand that without thinking I am being less than
truthful, but that’s about as truthful as I can be right now.”
“I can accept that,” June said. “That adequately
explains what I saw back in the restaurant. So you do work that could cause you
harm if your true identity were known?”
“Yes, not only harm to me, but also to the people
close to me. That is one reason I have hesitated to make many close friends
here.”
“I need to be a little bit nosier if I may. Are you a
married man?” she inquired.
“No, I have never been married. Once I graduated from
school and went on assignment, I couldn’t stay put in one place long enough to
develop a relationship that could lead to marriage. I’m thirty-three and
single,” he volunteered.
“What school did you attend?”
“College and also the agency academy,” he responded.
“Oh, so you graduated from the FBI Academy,” she assumed. “But now you live here in town, correct?”
“I do live here, but it is more or less a transient
type of living. I do not own property or maintain any kind of property that
can’t be disposed of on short notice. The work I do demands that I be able to
leave on extremely short notice and be gone for indefinite periods of time.
That makes it difficult to own real property.”
“May I ask what college you graduated from?”
“That would be a breach of security on my part. I’m
afraid I have to beg off answering that one for the time being.”
They continued walking slowly for quite a distance as
they talked. June said to him, “I can see how all that secrecy would make
having personal relationships very difficult. But I guess I have to wonder what
kind of life that is, unless a person is resigned to a life of loneliness.”
“It is a very lonely life at times, but my wish is
that I can leave this type of work behind at some point and fall into a more
normal mode of living. Maybe I could actually settle down in one place and own
a home. Even having a family would be nice,” he said.
“The great American dream, huh? Well, I guess we all
long for that to happen to us eventually. The trick is in meeting the right
person to help it come true.”
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