Nah, that’s not true. He didn’t take it. I gave it to him. I shoved it at him with both hands. There was a routine the girls went through in high school, and I’d heard about it enough to know how it went. I’d heard it once spelled out like a science experiment to a whole bench full of girls in their underwear after gym by a senior named Nancy Fuller. “You don’t let him put his tongue in your mouth for at least four dates,” she said, adjusting her breasts inside her bra to make sure they were even. “You wait at least three months before you let him get under the shirt. If he’s really your boyfriend you can let him go below the waist. But that’s it. And don’t ever take your clothes off because he won’t be able to stop.”
When the time came I felt like Nancy had missed an important part of the whole deal. I couldn’t wait to get my clothes off. I would have died if he’d stopped. I don’t know why I wasn’t embarrassed or ashamed or sorry, but I wasn’t. Sometimes I thought there was something wrong with me, that I was just bad and I’d better stay with one guy because if they let me loose there’s no telling what I’d do. Mostly I thought it was because Steven was so damn charming. He wore charm like a three-piece suit. He knew his way around a girl.
The first time he came to the house to take me out he brought a box of peanut brittle. My aunt Ruth was still a sucker for a chocolate-covered cherry, but my mother loved peanut brittle more than anything on earth. I guess Steven had gotten that out of Tom, because he sure hadn’t heard it from me. A whole pound of peanut brittle, hand-packed in a white box with a gold elastic around it and fancy gold-and-white patterned wax paper inside that looked like the wallpaper in the Ventis’ dining room. He would have been three steps ahead of any guy in Miller’s Valley if he’d just handed my mother that box, but not Steven. He had to put whipped cream on the sundae. “Maybe you haven’t had dinner yet but I sure would like it if you would try a piece and give me your opinion,” he said to my mother. “Someone told me it’s the best peanut brittle in the state, but I’d like to know what you think.”
“That boy went out of his way,” my father said next morning at breakfast.
“He is in no way a boy,” my mother said.
He was twenty-four, almost seven years older than I was. He worked construction all over the county and the map of his arms was as sharp as the contours of Miller’s Valley: bicep, tricep, shoulder muscles, all as hard as the tire on a semi. He told me he was taking me to a steak house, and I thought we were going to LaRhonda’s father’s place, but he drove for almost an hour to a place off the highway with a big aquarium in the center of the room. He told me they aged their own beef. He ordered surf and turf for the both of us. It was the first time I had lobster, and he cracked the claws for me. “So fill me in on this project you’re working on,” he said. I hadn’t told him about that, either. It was like he made a study of people. We were sitting side by side on a red-leather bench against the wall, and he put his arm along the top of the bench but he never let it touch me, which made me even more conscious of the fact that it was there.
“It’s pretty boring,” I said.
“Try me.”
He was the first person I told about what I had learned, that all the history and all the science and all the simple common sense made it pretty clear that someday the government was going to buy up all the houses in the valley, or take them if they weren’t freely sold, to extend the water storage area behind the dam and increase the size of the reservoir. He listened like he was really interested, which may or may not have been true at the time. That was the