“What’s wrong?” she asked, her face drained of its natural tan.
“Nothing,” I said as though “what could be?” and then hurried toward the kitchen. “I need a calendar.”
Mama was on my heels. “Are y’all planning a date?”
“Yes.”
“Let me get the ’78 calendar that came in the mail the other day.” She turned toward her bedroom.
“Yeah—okay—sure,” I said while snatching the ’77 calendar from the same drawer where Mama kept her address book … pens … a few pencils … some paper clips … a pair of paper-cutting scissors … and a pack of emery boards. I shoved the drawer shut, met her back in the living room, took the calendar from her extended hand, and said, “Thanks, Mama.”
“Why do you have—”
“For comparison,” I lied easily, then stepped back into the chill of the air.
I made my way to Westley, who sat languidly, a cigarette hanging casually between his fingers. The night had closed in so that I barely made him out until I reached him and slid back into my place beside him. He readjusted his jacket around me, then took one more draw before flicking what was left of the cigarette to the ground and slowly blowing the smoke from between his lips. I opened the ’77 calendar and frowned. “I can’t see a blessed thing.”
Westley dipped his hand into the pocket of his polyester pants, brought out a lighter, and “flicked” it. “Don’t overexaggerate, Allison.”
I prickled. “I’m not.”
He kissed my temple. “What is this?” he asked, looking down with a smirk. “December, you say?”
I pointed to the square marking the Saturday before Christmas. “I must be out of my mind,” I said. “But if we set the wedding for December seventeenth, the church will already be decorated, which will cut down on a large part of the … you know … stuff to do.”
“Flowers and such.”
“Yes. The Chrismon tree will be up and the poinsettias people always give in honor of or in memory of someone are always placed around the altar. I imagine that would look pretty nice.”
Westley took the calendar from my hand. “I say, let’s keep it simple. What about you?”
I stared up at him again, lost for a moment in his eyes and the twinkle that outshone the stars already popping out overhead. “The simpler the better.”
“Who needs the nonsense?”
I drew closer to him, intoxicated by the Jovan Musk cologne and the faint hint of tobacco still lingering from his occasional indulgence. “Who indeed,” I murmured, my voice dropping low and uncharacteristically sexy. What I knew about the art of seduction I had drawn from the movies I’d seen that included a modicum of forbidden or saucy romance—Romeo and Juliet, for one. Love Story, for another.
Westley cupped my chin, halting me. “Little girl, if you don’t want to embarrass you and me both on this swing, we’d best get inside and tell your mama and daddy that we’ve settled on a date.” His voice carried both a half-tease and a warning.
Heat rose in me, furiously slapping me from the inside out. “You’re right. Of course.” I stood abruptly. The calendars dropped to my feet and Westley reached for them as he unfolded himself from the swing, then took my hand in his free one.
“I must be out of my mind,” I repeated.
“Two months,” he said, then tugged me toward the front door.
My grandmother—my mother’s mother—showed up the following afternoon after church and Sunday dinner, and the dishes had been washed, dried, and put away. My sister and her bum husband had driven over from Statesboro as they always did, both acting deliriously happy and in total denial of my parents’ feelings toward him. They left shortly after cleanup, which was my cue to head back to my bedroom for a much-needed nap. I’m not sure how long I’d slept before my mother tapped lightly on the door before entering. I spent a good five seconds blinking to figure out where I was. “Mama …” I frowned at her, my eyes scrunched in protest.
“Grand is here.”
My grandmother was a marvelous woman—short in stature but commanding the attention of army generals. Despite the fact she scared me spitless at times, she was among my favorite people in the whole wide world.
“What’s this I hear?” she asked when I found her in the kitchen. “Paulina tells me that our girl is getting married?”
“Grand,” I said with a blush, then bent over to wrap her in a hug. “I am.”
My grandmother had been a widow longer than she’d ever been a wife, her husband—my grandfather—dying after being struck down by a drunk driver while walking down an old country road. My grandfather, my mother often told me, enjoyed long walks on Sunday afternoons down the dirt roads near their farm. That day had been no different. Church, followed by dinner, followed by Grand and the kids lying down for the Sunday afternoon nap, and my grandfather meandering out the front door. But by that evening, Mama said, when her father had not returned, Grand went out in search for him, finding him lying in a twisted knot, the life already gone from him.
“Something rose up in your grandmother that day,” Mama told me time and again. “Something strong and powerful. She’s never lost it.” Pride welled up in my mother’s voice when she spoke of her father’s death and of the effects it had on her mother. But she never spoke of how it had affected her. She’d been only eleven at the time. Two years younger than her sister Pearl and three years older than “the twins,” Meryl and Melvin. She never said a word about growing up during those hard years without a father … of her mother having to “go
