“Maybe you should hang around the emergency wards,” Marty suggested.
“That wouldn’t do any good,” Lorraine said, unaware of his sarcasm. “You see, you’ll meet Mr. Wonderful in a certain way that you can’t make happen. And you won’t be able to avoid it either. It’s just bound to happen, like the sun’s supposed to come up tomorrow morning.”
All the metaphysics did not impress Linda. “I still don’t understand what Dad was doing in the middle of the street,” she said.
Dad, oblivious to the entire conversation, did not look up from his work, so Mom raised her voice to get his attention. “What was it, George?” she asked. “What were you doing there—bird-watching?”
George shook his head like a person coming out of a coma. “Huh?” he muttered thickly. “Did you say something, Lorraine?”
“Never mind.”
“He was probably just a very incompetent hitchhiker,” Marty offered. He really wasn’t interested in hearing how his parents had met.
Lorraine was interested in telling the story, however. “Anyway,” she went on, “Grandpa hit him with the car and brought him into the house. He was completely unconscious…”
“Like now,” Marty interrupted.
Lorraine shot a chiding glance
at him. “He seemed so helpless…like a little lost puppy. And my heart just went out to him.”
“Yeah, Mom,” Linda smiled. “You’ve told us a million times. It was ‘Florence Nightingale to the rescue.’“
Lorraine leaned back in her chair, her eyes dreamy with nostalgic thoughts and pictures. “The very next weekend,” she continued, “we went on our first date. The ‘Enchantment Under the Sea’ School Dance.”
“Under the sea?” Marty interrupted again. “You mean everybody came dressed as a clam or an oyster?”
His mother ignored him.
“I’ll never forget it,” she said. “It was the night of that terrible thunderstorm. Remember, George?”
“What’s that, dear?” George McFly mumbled.
“The night of our first date.”
“Mmm. It was raining.”
“Worst thunderstorm before or since,” Lorraine elaborated. “People still talk about it. Anyway, your father kissed me for the first time on the dance floor…and that was when I realized I was going to spend the rest of my life with him.”
“That really must have been some thunderstorm,” Marty smiled.
“I can’t believe Dad actually got up enough nerve to kiss you in public,” Linda said.
Lorraine flushed. “Well,” she said coyly. “I may have encouraged him a little…”
“I’ll bet you had to practically jump on his bones,” Marty offered.
With that, he finished eating, declining a piece of the convict’s non-homecoming cake, wiped his mouth and stood up.
Lorraine scarcely noticed, so lost was she in thought. “Thinking back on it,” she reminisced, “I did. I practically had to—”
Not wishing to fall into contemporary “obscene talk,” as she called it, she let the rest of the sentence die in her throat. It was an appropriate ending, anyway. Marty was halfway out of the kitchen, Linda was looking out the window at something happening next door and George was still lost in his papers. Lorraine shrugged and reached for the nearest knife. If no one was going to have a piece of Uncle Joey’s cake, she would give it a try.
Smiling in anticipation, she carved herself a four-inch wedge, shoved it onto her coffee saucer, and began to attack it. As the creamy icing melted in her mouth, so evaporated any feelings that the past thirty years had been anything but glorious.
? Chapter Three ?
Doc Brown eased the venerable step-van onto the Twin Pines Mall parking lot shortly after midnight. There were more cars than he expected so he pulled to the far rim of the asphalt area and waited.