🎧 349: Ella and Buster and Bert ...

ELLA AND BUSTER AND BERT were great chums throughout their last years in high school. Ella was in love with both of the boys, and they were both in love with her, and they seemed quite content to have things stay just as they were. Herb and Lorna even thought that there was probably some safety in this arrangement, since Ella wasn’t likely to go to bed with either of them as long as she loved both of them, and no one, not Herb or Lorna or Ella or Bert or Buster, even considered her going to bed with both of them. After they graduated from high school, however, matters changed as if overnight. Apparently both Bert and Buster had been waiting for graduation day to pop the question, and when it arrived they both did. Ella faced a dilemma that would have delighted most of her girl friends — she couldn’t decide between them. But they were both asking her to marry them, and it seemed as if she must decide.
     “Mother,” she said, “do you know what I wish?”
     “What?” asked Lorna.
     “I wish neither of them had asked me.”
     “Oh. Oh, Ella — ”
     “I wish we could have just — ”
     “ — gone on the way you were going.”
     “Yes.”
     “I’m sure you’re worried about hurting them — or one of them anyway — ”
     “And me. It’s going to hurt me too. I’m going to lose one of them. And I don’t want to. I don’t want to lose either of them.”
     “Oh, Ella — ”
     “Do I have to choose? Do I have to? I’ve been thinking. Imagining is more like it. I’ve been imagining what it might be like if we — if all three of us — ”
     “Ella. Ella. You can’t do that. You know you can’t do that.”
     “Ohhhh!”
     “I’m afraid you do have to choose. You really do have to choose.”
     And so she chose. She chose Buster. Bert took it gracefully. Buster was the obvious choice, and Bert had been losing to his quicker, brighter brother for so many years that he was almost used to it. Buster and Ella had an engagement party, the first among their friends. It was small and restrained; Buster and Ella didn’t want Bert to feel that they were celebrating his elimination. They planned to be married the next spring.

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