Travel Agent, Avalon Travel
Enid Griffin peers into the pot of Gerbera daisies and wrinkles her nose. The brown streaks on the once-red petals are a dead giveaway.
“I knew it,” she huffs, pulling herself upright. She’s formidable, almost six feet, and full-figured to boot. At fifty-six she’s a fair blonde with only a hint of gray, her hair perfectly coiffed and sprayed into place. “Thrips!”
She marches around to her desk, which was custom-made to accommodate her large frame. She sits down, indignant, and starts rapidly typing on her keyboard.
“I know you said Napa Valley but I am telling you, wine country is overrated,” she says to the young couple sitting across from her. “You want your honeymoon to be memorable, don’t you?”
“Well, yes …”
“And these days, with divorce rates so high, I think you can’t NOT afford to invest in your marriage. New experiences, new adventures!”
The young couple looks skeptical. “All of our friends who went to California said it was wonderful, and that Napa was so romantic …” the girl begins.
Enid dismisses this with a wave of her hand. “California has an allure, but I’m looking at you two and thinking …” Her eyes twinkle as her voice drops into a low, conspiratorial whisper. “Texas.”
“Texas?”
“Texas! Here we are. South Padre Island.” Enid turns her computer screen toward them. “Turtle hatchlings! Palm trees! Orange groves! Wonderful fishing, too—some of the restaurants will even cook your catch. Plus you’re close to Mexico so you could cross over for a little day trip. You’ll save money and bring home lots of memories. Your own, not some cookie cutter memory downloaded from a website. I mean, do you two even drink wine?”
The young woman says uncertainly, “Well, I drink Chardonnay sometimes …” as her fiancé says, “I’m more of a Budweiser kind of guy.”
They turn to stare at each other, surprised. “You said you wanted to go to Napa Valley,” the young woman accuses her fiancé.
“I said I would go,” he clarifies. “But I mean, yeah, if a bottle of wine costs the same as a six pack …”
“More,” Enid says.
“Yeah, if it costs more and doesn’t even taste as good …”
The young woman’s voice is shrill. “That’s why we’re going! So we can learn to appreciate these things!”
“Why? What’s the point? I’m not going to be buying the stuff when we come back. We can’t even afford it now.”
“Maybe we will!”
“Massages,” Enid interjects. “With the money you’ll save you’ll be able to do lots of fun things. Dance clubs, windsurfing, kiteboarding, parasailing. You kids are young, you should be doing fun things together. You have the rest of your lives to be gargling fermented grape juice.” She sends a document to the printer and readies a travel folder for them. They aren’t going to make a decision today—she knew that when they first walked in. In fact, Enid is willing to wager that this will be the first of many decisions they won’t be able to agree on. “Is there any wiggle room in your budget?” she asks.
The woman says, “Yes,” as the young man says, “No.”
Enid’s right hand hovers over her drawer. She knows what this young couple needs, and it’s not wine country or heading to the gulf coast. Still, she was planning on saving it for herself, for her own trip later this year. She finally decided to bite the bullet and take that cruise to Greece, something she always wanted to do but hasn’t, because she was waiting. Waiting, perhaps, for someone to come along that would be a good companion, a husband even, but that hasn’t happened. There are plenty of nice men in Avalon but none of them are Enid’s type, and she’s not getting any younger. When Bettie Shelton showed her the selection of new page kits, Enid decided, this is it. She marched back to her office and booked her ticket, and for the first time in her thirty years of being a travel agent she made up a travel folder for herself.
But as she watches this young couple tripping their way to the altar, she thinks, God bless ’em. She also thinks, Good luck. She knows she missed this part, this supposed happily ever after, but watching it unfold in front of her, it doesn’t always look so happy. In fact, it looks like a lot of stress and anxiety and argument and tears. The people who come to her are supposed to be going on vacation, but to see how worked up they get, you’d think you were dragging them to the dentist for a root canal. Enid thinks of Mac and Judy Mullins, regular customers of hers. They saved all their money to travel when Mac retired, but when that time came, it turned out he didn’t have any interest in leaving his Barcalounger. Each trip requires hours of cajoling on both her and Judy’s part and, boy, is it exhausting. Mac always ends up acquiescing in the end, but it’s never without a fight. Why, Enid often wonders, do people sometimes want to make things harder than they need to be?
“Look,” Enid says, sliding open her drawer. She pulls out a thick cellophane packet and pushes it toward them. “Here. An early wedding present.”
The couple stops arguing long enough to look at the cellophane packet with a frown. “What is it?” the young woman asks, her nose wrinkled as if in disgust.
“It’s a scrapbooking kit. A starter kit, actually, but you can get more pages and doodads from Bettie Shelton if you want to do a whole album.” She taps a label affixed to the corner of the packet with Bettie’s contact information in large, bold letters. “When you’re older, even a year from now, this will be the place you’ll go to relive the moment.”
“We have digital cameras on our phones,” the girl says smartly. “With video.” She glances at her fiancé as if to say, Can you believe this?
Enid is undaunted. “Pictures are only one part of it,” she tells them. “And these days people take hundreds of pictures and none of them get printed or put into a photo album. This is different—when you scrapbook, you’re evoking the memory of the feeling and the experience by the colors you choose. The little mementos you paste to the page.” Enid breaks the seal of the packet and spreads the contents onto the table. “You take your favorite pictures, you look at all of this, and you think, what fits? What goes together? Not just aesthetically, but emotionally. Scrapbook pages capture all of it. For example—how did the two of you meet?”
The couple grins shyly and Enid sees both of them soften. She thinks, Yes. This is what it’s about, isn’t it?
“Bowling alley,” the young man says. “Her ball jumped the gutter into my lane.”
“It was heavier than I thought,” his fiancée protests in her defense, but she’s finally relaxed, happy. She reaches for his hand and beams at him.
“Wonderful! So look …” Enid shuffles through the loose alphabet letters and quickly spells out at the top of the page, YOU BOWLED ME OVER. “You pick up a coaster or something with the name of the bowling alley and stick it on here, along with some of your earliest pictures.”
“I still have that scorecard somewhere,” he says. “I bowled a two-fifty that day.”
“Perfect!” Enid exclaims.
The girl chooses a thin black border and slides it to the top of the page. “We could even make the whole page look like a scorecard,” she says. “What about this?” She rearranges Enid’s letters and adds a few others to read SPARES AND STRIKES. “If you get a spare or strike, it’s still a perfect ten,” she explains.
“Ah,” Enid says with an approving nod. She watches them as they pick through random die cuts and trims, reminiscing about that day and talking about the amateur league they’re both in. Then the lightbulb goes off.
“Say,” she says. “What do you think about a bowling honeymoon? Playing different bowling alleys? Choose some that might be close to other points of interest, with a nice B&B nearby? Do you have any interest in that?”
The couple looks at her blankly, then a slow smile spreads across both of their faces. They gaze at each other and then at Enid, all aglow.
“Yes,” they say in unison, their bodies leaning toward each other. “We do.”