just not something you can do very quickly with a 10,000-pound piece of machinery behind you. I groan and pull over. I have to go check. Remarkably, the cat stands up, looks around stunned, and shoots back into the woods as quickly as it came.
At three minutes to six, after doing twenty in a fifty with horns honking and teenagers hollering at me, I park down the street from Hilly’s house since Hilly’s cul-de-sac doesn’t provide adequate parking for farm equipment. I grab my bag and run inside without even knocking, all out of breath and sweaty and windblown and there they are, the three of them, including my date. Having highballs in the front living room.
I freeze in the entrance hall with all of them looking at me. William and Stuart both stand up. God, he’s tall, has at least four inches over me. Hilly’s eyes are big when she grabs my arm. “Boys, we’ll be right back. Y’all just sit tight and talk about quarterbacks or something.”
Hilly whisks me off to her dressing room and we both start groaning. It’s just so goddamn awful.
“Skeeter, you don’t even have lipstick on! Your hair looks like a rat’s nest!”
“I know, look at me!” All traces of the Shinalator’s miracle are gone. “There’s no air-conditioning in the truck. I had to ride with the damn windows down.”
I scrub my face and Hilly sits me in her dressing room chair. She starts combing my hair out the way my mother used to do, twisting it into these giant rollers, spraying it with Final Net.
“Well? What did you think of him?” she asks.
I sigh and close my unmascaraed eyes. “He looks handsome.”
I smear the makeup on, something I hardly even know how to do. Hilly looks at me and smudges it off with a tissue, reapplies it. I slip into the black dress with the deep V in the front, the black Delman flats. Hilly quickly brushes out my hair. I wash my armpits with a wet rag and she rolls her eyes at me.
“I hit a cat,” I say.
“He’s already had two drinks waiting on you.”
I stand up and smooth my dress down. “Alright,” I say, “give it to me. One to ten.”
Hilly looks me up and down, stops on the dip in the front of the dress. She raises her eyebrows. I’ve never shown cleavage before in my life; kind of forgot I had it.
“Six,” she says, like she is surprised herself.
We just look at each other a second. Hilly lets out a little squeal and I smile back. Hilly’s never given me higher than a four.
When we come back into the front living room, William’s pointing his finger at Stuart. “I’m going to run for that seat and by God, with your daddy’s—”
“Stuart Whitworth,” Hilly announces, “I’d like to introduce Skeeter Phelan.”
He stands up, and for a minute my head is perfectly quiet inside. I make myself look, like self-inflicted torture, as he takes me in.
“Stuart here went to school over at the University of Alabama,” William says, adding, “Roll Tide.”
“Nice to meet you.” Stuart flips me a brief smile. Then he takes a long slurp of his drink until I hear the ice clink against his teeth. “So where we off to?” he asks William.
We take William’s Oldsmobile to the Robert E. Lee Hotel. Stuart opens my door and sits beside me in the back, but then leans over the seat talking to William about deer season the rest of the ride.
At the table, he pulls out my chair for me and I sit, smile, say thank you.
“You want a drink?” he asks me, not looking my way.
“No, thanks. Just water, please.”
He turns to the waiter and says, “Double Old Kentucky straight with a water back.”
I guess it’s some time after his fifth bourbon, I say, “So Hilly tells me you’re in the oil business. That must be interesting.”
“The money’s good. If that’s what you really want to know.”
“Oh, I didn’t . . .” But I stop because he’s craning his neck at something. I look up and see he’s staring at a woman who’s at the door, a busty blonde with red lipstick and a tight green dress.
William turns to see what Stuart’s looking at, but he swings back around quickly. He shakes his head no, very slightly, at Stuart and I see, heading out the door, it’s Hilly’s old boyfriend, Johnny Foote, with his new wife, Celia. They leave and William and I glance at each other,