Bright bolts sliced through the black fabric of the sky.  Lee looked at Bobbie and wondered if she saw the magic.  They had been here for three hours already and she hadn't said a word. This shower was brilliant from their spot on the country hill.

"Have you made any wishes?" Lee asked.

"Not yet," she replied.  "I don't know exactly what to wish, and I don't want to waste it."

Lee knew what he wanted. He wanted more than anything to get out of the city. He wanted clean air, like the air they were breathing now, and he wanted Bobbie to share it with him. She loved the city, wanted to be an actress. She was still a kid.

"I wish we could just build a house right here," he said.

"You always have the wrong dreams."  She looked at him and smiled. Pulling out another cigarette, she motioned for a light. He obliged.

He lit a cigarette for himself. He ought to quit smoking some time soon. He'd planned to stop a month ago, but he didn't have the will power to stop while Bobbie kept on smoking.

"Which dream is wrong?" he asked, "The house here or sharing it with you?" Maybe he should have thought of a more romantic way of telling her that he wanted to spend his life with her. The setting was perfect -- the blanket on the hill, late summer, the first meteor shower of the century.

He lay back on the blanket and stared up at the sky, waiting for the next meteor. He figured that it would probably move from right to left. Shooting stars, falling stars, he loved the randomness of their brief streak. The spaces between them were as intense as their appearance. "Bobbie," he said, "you don't seem to be enjoying this very much. Why did you agree to come out here with me tonight?"

"You think too much," she said. She took a long drag on her cigarette and flicked the ashes into the grass. "You always read into everything.  Don't you ever stop to just enjoy things?"

He watched her crush the cigarette into the small mound of damp grass next to the blanket. Her hand was delicate and slender. Her fingers looked like ruby tipped wands. She was magical in her own right.

"Yeah," he said, "I do think too much. But I'm on a mission here. Work with me."

"What do you want?"

"I want to marry you," he said. He could see a slow trickle of a tear slip from the corner of her eye. "What's wrong?"

"Everything."

"How?"

"I don't know," she said, "I thought this would be different."

Lee reached out to trace the path of the tear on Bobbie's face. At least she had thought about what she was calling "this." And if she thinks something's wrong because she had thought it would be different, that means that she had thought about being his wife and had been happy about it. And so he wasn't a complete jerk in thinking that she might have said yes. She really was right. He does think too much. "How?" he asked.

He wasn't sure he would get an answer.  He half expected her to shrug as she sometimes did when she wanted to evade him, or say, "I don’t really know," which is what she said other times, or even to kiss him, which was her evasion of last resort. If she were going to evade his question, he hoped for the kiss.

"I thought I would be happier," she said. "I've waited a long time for you to say that." Lee dropped his cigarette in the grass. He was confused. "I've waited a long time to say it, but what's wrong about the dream, then? Is it the city/country thing? We can work that out."

She shook her head no.

Lee lay back again. "Let's watch the show," he said, In a few hours the shower would be over and the sky would be getting light.

"The show's over, Lee," she said, "and I wasn't in it."

"You're only twenty," he said. "You'll have plenty of chances to hit your spot."

"That's not it."

"What is it, then?"

"Think about it," she said. She put her arms behind her head and looked at the sky.

Think about it, he thought. He would.