A Dance With The Devil Ch. 2

         The summer after Jack graduated was a hot one. Sweltering days and humid nights seemed to put the town to sleep. The lethargic casualness that accompanies such a summer was driving Jack crazy. Days spent working at the hardware store and evenings hanging out at Johnson’s Ice Cream Parlor with Beth. Any teenage boy would have envied Jack’s life, a little extra spending money and a girl to spend it on. Meanwhile, while Jack suffered through a hell of his own creation and the heat to go with it, the town was content to wile away the weeks and wait for the cooler days of autumn.
         It was a still Friday night, the kind where the air is so humid the very evening seems to stick to your skin along with your clothes. Jack and Beth were sharing a sundae at Johnson’s. As Beth rambled on about college in fall, the latest going-ons of the town girls and nothing in particular, Jack gradually floated farther into a daydream.
         “It’s gonna be wonderful. No, it’s gonna be perfect. Don’t you think Jack? Jack?” Beth said as she smiled at Jack with her clear blue eyes.
         “Huh?”
         “God, were you even listening to me?”
         “I’m sorry honey, I was daydreaming.”
         “You’re always daydreaming, what are thinking about so much?”
         “Everything, everything else, the world I guess.
         “I just keep wondering what else is out there.”
         “What are you talking about? What more could you want?”
         “I don’t know, that’s just it, I don’t know. I don’t know what else I could want because I don’t know what else is out there.”
         “You’re not making any sense Jack.”
         “Aren’t I? How do you know that there isn’t something else, something better? How do you know that this is so perfect?”
         “Cold ice cream on a hot day with the man I’m gonna marry. What more could a girl ask for?”
         That one caught him off guard. He knew that for the most part he was happy with Beth, or at least happy to be with her. In a very cliché way they were the perfect couple and marriage may have been what everyone expected of them.