One Year With Grace — Martin Mooney

Grace was a good fifteen years older than Jerry, but her arms were still soft and white, and Jerry was tired of bumming around, eating in cheap and dirty restaurants; fighting when he for the chance, working in the fisheries when he didn't. Jerry could take care of himself. He was hard. For a while it was swell. Sometimes Jerry even forgot the difference in their ages, and thought it could go on forever. But it couldn't - not after he met Shirley and heard her play that sweet, wild music that promised all the impossible things he had ever dreamed. But Grace's arms were clinging - and Shirley would never understand. It was then that circumstances took hold of Jerry - and none of his hardness not his dreams could help him a bit. He planned against it; he fought against it - but his life followed a vicious inexorable pattern which he no longer seemed able to control.