He got a lotta nerve. Last night, right after we did it, he says, “Oh, baby, I forgot to tell you. Me and Smitty going ice fishing for three days. I took a vacation day. We leave Friday.” And that was it. I pushed him all the way over to the edge of the bed and put a pillow in between us in case he didn’t get the point. He told me I was being childish. “You can go to hell,” was all I said, and this morning, when he did not get his grits and eggs and bacon and wasn’t no coffee waiting for him, he knew what the deal was. And now he’s home, and, like always, he probably in there making hisself a gin and tonic, then he’ll take it upstairs and sip on it while he take his shower. I sit here and pat my feet till I hear the water come on, and then, before I know it, I’m standing up in that bathroom, watching him undress.

“If I came home from work one day and just told you I was taking a few days off to go gallivanting with one of my girlfriends, can you stand there and tell me you wouldn’t be mad?”

“First of all, Charlotte, you don’t have no girlfriends,” he says, getting out of his clothes. He don’t know what he talking about.

“I do have some girlfriends. But that ain’t the point. Why you gotta go ice fishing with Smitty all of a sudden? Why’s it so important?”

“First of all, it ain’t that it’s important, Charlotte. I wanna go. It don’t hurt to do something with your friends every now and then. Smitty’s wife ain’t mad. And I can’t for the life of me see why you making such a big to-do about this.”

At first, I don’t say a word. I know he just trying to make me feel guilty. Well, just fuck you, Al, I’m thinking as I look at his long hard body through the shower door. His skin is the color of straw, his eyes a piercing gray-green, his lips thick, he’s got good hair—thick and wavy—and a quarter-inch gap between his two front teeth. He’s still pretty, a luscious Louisiana Bayou man, and sometimes I wish to hell I didn’t love him as much as I do, which is exactly why I don’t want nobody else to have no part of him. “How do I know you going with Smitty and not meeting some woman at a motel for three days?”

“You really ought to quit it. Right now. I’m going fishing. When I get back I should have some fish. If I really wanted to go off with some other woman I think I could come up with a much better lie. So stop it, would you? Could we just not have the melodrama for once?”

“Why didn’t you ask me to go?”

“I just told you! It’s a man thing. As a matter of fact, it’s a whole group of us going. Union guys. And since you already mad, I might as well tell you, next month we going hunting, so get it all out your system now.”