What If?

Stewart Green felt quite grand as he emerged from his Rolls-Royce, dressed to the nines in a top hat, navy-blue double-breasted suit with pinstripe slacks. With his ornate walking stick, he took a quick moment to adjust his hat, casting a sneering glance toward frowning pedestrians who had stopped to watch him.

Ordinarily, bystanders were excited to see the star receiver of the Twin City Bears, but the once adoring residents of Rockwell had grown resentful ever since he had begun buying up land. Stewart did not care what they thought, as long as they left him and his people alone.

Tweaking his fashionable mustache, he turned back to help his companion out of the car, brushing aside his chauffeur who had been about to lend her a nonexistent hand. The red-haired rhubarb gave a charming smile of thanks. She was not as well dressed as her companion, wearing a second-hand blue coat over a modest pink dress with a peeling pink purse, but to Stewart, she was the loveliest sight for miles. Donna had been his high-school sweetheart and later his college girlfriend, the one who got away.

He was not about to make the same mistake twice.

After a sumptuous lunch, he had asked her for a stroll through the snowscape of old Rockwell Park (now Stewart Park). Donna stuck close beside him as they visited their old favorites: the shore where they used to skip stones as kids, the tree where he had carved their initials after the homecoming dance, the footbridge where they used to meet after supper when their families wouldn't miss them.

"A lotta great memories here," he said slyly as they leaned against the side of the bridge, admiring the frozen patterns of the narrow creek. "Maybe you can help me remember some...?"

"Too cold for that," she smiled, giving his top hat a playful flick.

Stewart gave her a look of pretend surprise. "Is it cold? I hadn't noticed."

She let out a girlish giggle and gave his double-breasted suit a gentle tug. "C'mon, Green Machine."

Stewart normally did not allow anyone to pull or push him along, not even his teammates from the Twin City Bears, but he only smiled as he followed Donna's lead. He felt a wonderful peace around her which he had not felt since his college days, and he had laughed more in the past two weeks than he had in the last fifteen years.

I'm going to marry that woman, he promised himself, already making plans.

xxx

Two weeks earlier, Stewart had done something he had not ever expected to do again. He returned to Rockwell.

Despite owning the whole town's land, which now bore his image, he had had little recourse to return to his old home, preferring the life of a football star with a mansion in the wealthier part of Twin City. All his business deals regarding Rockwell were handled through his personal assistant, Jim Gourdly, and Stewart was content to reap the profits and punish his former neighbors at a distance. But with the acquiring of his father's toy-train factory, Stewart deigned to return to his roots in order to savor his delicious vengeance.

"They should have given this back to me when they had the chance," Stewart said under his breath as he hopped through the familiar old building. "It would have saved them all tears, but now they have to learn a lesson."

"Don't mess with the Green Machine," Jim supplied, his usually pleasant orange face now wearing a sinister smile. Stewart had met Jim when he had first started doing celebrity endorsements at the Twin City television studio. Although originally aspiring to be a news anchor for Wide World of Spores, Jim had eventually become Stewart's PR agent and personal assistant.

Standing in the center of the factory, Stewart slowly turned, taking in the high ceiling, the tall windows, the silent conveyor belt, and the hut-like structure against the back wall which had served as his late father's office. For Stewart, this was sweet revenge. By rights, he ought to have inherited the factory after his father passed, but the old man had left it to the town of Rockwell. When Stewart had offered to buy it, the town council had refused to sell. It had taken Stewart years of quietly buying up the town's real estate (and some back-alley deals) before he finally got what he wanted. To rub salt into the wounds, he would replace the workers with robots — which would also turn him a nice profit with how much he saved.