farm there a couple of times a year, she couldn’t recollect anything about it.
When Angel had turned eighteen, her great-grandpa Poppa John had died and left his twenty acres to his only child—Angel’s grandmother. After his estate had been settled, Angel and her granny had left Tishomingo and gone back to Kemp. And it hadn’t happened a minute too soon, in anyone’s opinion. Memories flooded her mind. “Don’t stay out late, Angela. We’ve got to pack in the morning,” her granny had reminded her. “Got to be out of the house before midnight or pay more rent, you know.”
“I know.” Angela had gone out the front door and walked west toward the dam. All summer she’d gone swimming every evening in Pennington Creek, and it was a good thing August had arrived, because her bikini was beginning to look as worn-out as her jeans. Most times, it seemed like just a hop, skip, and jump from her house to the swimming hole, but that evening the walk took forever.
Angel had shimmied out of her shorts and shirt, tugged the top of her bikini down and the bottoms up before she sat down on the sandbar and waited for Clancy. She picked up a twig and drew an interlocking heart in the sand. She put her initial in one heart, Clancy’s in the second one, and wrote baby in the part that interlocked. She loved him, and he loved her. The secret that they had been hiding all summer would come out as soon as she told him her news. Sure, they were young, but she had a scholarship, and he didn’t have to go to Oklahoma University. The important thing was that they would be together.
She soaked her feet in the lukewarm water while she waited. Clancy wouldn’t be there for another half hour so she thought about all the scenarios lying ahead. She’d known the first time they’d accidentally met each other in this very place that she was flirting with big trouble, but she’d been in love with Clancy Morgan since kindergarten. If he would just touch her hand or kiss her one time before she moved away, she could survive forever on the memories. That he didn’t want anyone to know they were dating stung a little, but now their secret would be out in public. Clancy was a good guy. He would do the right thing.
She was so deep in her thoughts that she didn’t even hear the car tires crunching on gravel when he drove up close to the sandbar. He sat down beside her, and she quickly ran a hand over the heart she had drawn. He was a smart guy. If he saw the secret in the sand, he would know immediately why she was smiling so big. She wanted to tell him and then feel his arms around her, and hear him telling her that everything would be fine.
Clancy plopped down on the sandbar. Usually he drew her into his arms and kissed her the minute he arrived, but not that night. “We need to talk, Angela.”
“Yes, we do,” she said as she scooted over closer to him and wrapped her arms around his neck. “I’ll go first. I’m pregnant.”
Her heart broke when he pushed her away. It shattered into a million pieces when he said, “I can’t marry you or even live with you. Billy Joe has been in love with you since first grade. He won’t care if the baby isn’t really his.”
“Go to hell, Clancy,” she’d found enough courage to say. “I don’t need you anyway. I can take care of myself. They don’t stone women for being single mamas, so just go.”
There had been a lot more to the fight, but she couldn’t bear to remember any more of the details. She wiped away a tear as that last visual of Clancy popped into her mind.
With a shrug and a relieved expression, he had turned and jogged up the bank to his car. She watched the trail of dust follow him all the way to where he turned left to cross the bridge, and when the Camaro was out of sight, Angela had buried her face in her hands and sobbed, heartbroken and alone.
Angel pulled her thoughts back to the present and wiped away the tears. She returned to the newsletter page and flipped through until she found Billy Joe’s bio. He was living in San Francisco, where he was working as a computer technician. Under Comments he