“Glad to be here.” Lily watched as Jack made a quick circuit of the room, shaking hands with Mick and Dale, giving Honey and Sue courtly kisses on the hand. To Lily’s surprise, Jack settled down on the floor next to her, making the room a study in butch/ femme pairings.
Lily knew that Jack sitting next to her shouldn’t make her nervous — after all, Jack was the only person in the room whom she’d met before tonight—but it still did, and she found herself knocking back her beer a lot quicker than was probably good for her.
“Hey, Jack,” Honey said, “you’ll never guess who I ran into over at the Piggly Wiggly the other day.”
“Oh, I bet I can guess,” Jack laughed. “Was it Sandy?”
“Sure was. She’s as pregnant as a cow, too.”
Jack shook her head. “I’m not surprised. Sandy never does anything halfway. When she decided she was straight, I knew she was gonna be squeezing out pups as soon as nature would allow it.”
“Sandy used to be a regular at these little get-togethers,” Mick explained to Lily. “Her and Jack was together for a while, but then ole Sandy kinda retreated to the enemy camps.”
“She went back to her ex-husband,” Jack added. “Decided that what she was doing with me was just an ‘experiment’ ... like I was her chemistry project or somethin’.”
Honey laughed. “I wonder what she did about that pink triangle I tattooed on her ass. I notice she ain’t had the guts to come back here and ask me to cover it up.”
“Oh, I’m sure that dumb redneck husband of hers ain’t even noticed it,” Sue drawled. “And if he has, she probably told him it’s just a birthmark he hadn’t noticed before. I’m sure he’d be stupid enough to believe it.”
Dale laughed and draped her arm around Sue’s shoulders. “Lily, I bet you think we’re awful.
You’re sitting there thinking, ‘These country dykes don’t do nothin’ but sit around and drink beer and talk bad about people.’ ”
“Hey, drinking beer and talking bad about people are two of my favorite things.” To illustrate her point, Lily popped open her second tallboy.
“Well, you’ll fit right in here, then,” Sue said.
“Actually, Lily, being from the city, you probably don’t think we’ve got any educational stuff around here,” Dale said. “But right while you’re sitting here, you’re looking at a natural history exhibit.”
Lily knew she was being teased, but played along. “And what’s that?”
Dale grinned. “Why, you’re looking right at the oldest known lesbian couple in the history of Faulkner County, Georgia.”
“That’s great,” Lily said, her insides aching as she thought of all the times she’d imagined growing old with Charlotte. “How long have you two been together?”
Sue squeezed Dale’s age-spotted hand. “We met at the WAC training base in Fort Oglethorpe in nineteen and forty-four. I had a boyfriend back home, but when I first saw Dale, I knew I was through with the boys.”
