I brush my hair because I know it’s awful. I even wash the typewriter ink and correcting fluid off my hands and elbows. But I won’t change clothes, not for him.
Mother gives me a quick up and down in my dungarees and Daddy’s old button-up white shirt. “Is he a Greenwood Whitworth or a Natchez?”
“He’s the state senator’s son.”
Mother’s jaw drops so far it hits her string of pearls. I go down the stairs, past the assembly of our childhood portraits. Pictures of Carlton line the wall, taken up until about the day before yesterday. Pictures of me stop when I was twelve. “Mother, give us some privacy.” I watch as she slowly drags herself back to her room, glancing over her shoulder before she disappears.
I walk out onto the porch, and there he is. Three months after our date, there is Stuart Whitworth himself, standing on my front porch in khaki pants and a blue coat and a red tie like he’s ready for Sunday dinner.
Asshole.
“What brings you here?” I ask. I don’t smile though. I’m not smiling at him.
“I just . . . I wanted to drop by.”
“Well. Can I get you a drink?” I ask. “Or should I just get you the entire bottle of Old Kentucky?”
He frowns. His nose and forehead are pink, like he’s been working in the sun. “Look, I know it was . . . a long while back, but I came out here to say I’m sorry.”
“Who sent you—Hilly? William?” There are eight empty rocking chairs on my porch. I don’t ask him to sit in any of them.
He looks off at the west cotton field where the sun is dipping into the dirt. He shoves his hands down in his front pockets like a twelve-year-old boy. “I know I was... rude that night, and I’ve been thinking about it a lot and . . .”
I laugh then. I’m just so embarrassed that he would come out here and have me relive it.
“Now look,” he says, “I told Hilly ten times I wasn’t ready to go out on any date. I wasn’t even close to being ready . . .”
I grit my teeth. I can’t believe I feel the heat of tears; the date was months ago. But I remember how secondhand I’d felt that night, how ridiculously fixed up I’d gotten for him. “Then why’d you even show up?”
“I don’t know.” He shakes his head. “You know how Hilly can be.”
I stand there waiting for whatever it is he’s here for. He runs a hand through his light brown hair. It is almost wiry it’s so thick. He looks tired.
I look away because he’s cute in an overgrown boy kind of way and it’s not something I want to be thinking right now. I want him to leave—I don’t want to feel this awful feeling again, yet I hear myself saying, “What do you mean, not ready?”
“Just not ready. Not after what happened.”
I stare at him. “You want me to guess?”
“Me and Patricia van Devender. We got engaged last year and then . . . I thought you knew.”
He sinks down in a rocking chair. I don’t sit next to him. But I don’t tell him to leave either.
“What, she ran off with someone else?”
“Shoot.” He drops his head down into his hands, mumbles, “That’d be a goddamn Mardi Gras party compared to what happened.”
I don’t let myself say to him what I’d like to, that he probably deserved whatever she did, but he’s just too pathetic-looking. Now that all his good ole boy, tough bourbon talk has evaporated, I wonder if he’s this pathetic all the time.
“We’d been dating since we were fifteen. You know how it is, when you’ve been steady with somebody that long.”
And I don’t know why I admit this, except that I simply have nothing to lose. “Actually, I wouldn’t know,” I say. “I’ve never dated anybody.”
He looks up at me, kind of laughs. “Well, that must be it, then.”
“Be what?” I steel myself, recalling fertilizer and tractor references.
“You’re . . . different. I’ve never met anybody that said exactly what they were thinking. Not a woman, anyway.”
“Believe me, I had a lot more to say.”
He sighs. “When I saw your face, out there by the truck . . . I’m not that guy. I’m really not such a jerk.”
I look away, embarrassed. It’s just starting to hit me what he said, that even though I’m different, maybe it’s not in a strange