At home, I hesitated in front of the door. I didn’t want to go in, but I had nowhere else to go.

Inside, my mother was rustling through the hall closet. “Lottie, have you seen my umbrella?” she asked. “The good one?” Her hair was different—the stripe of gray filled in, frizzy ends rolled into glossy cigars.

“It’s not raining yet,” I told her.

“But it might rain later. And Gary’s taking me to Scotch and Sirloin after the movie. I don’t want to ruin my hair if it rains.”

“They won’t kick you out for having wet hair.”

“But I want to look nice. I think this might be the night—he’s been talking about needing to settle down. Oh God, I’m nervous. Do I look nervous? Is my hair all right?”

“Christ,” I said. For the past two months, every one of their dates had started out as an occasion for a proposal, and every one had ended with a fight.

They were a terrible match. Gary liked fly-fishing and quail hunting and had voted Republican in every election since Johnson; my mother liked the Home Shopping Network and was known for going around the neighborhood collecting VOTE BUSH signs, scraping his name from bumper stickers with a spoon. But none of this mattered because she was a lonely substitute teacher and we were poor and Gary had money and a big old empty life that needed a woman to clean it. And so she ignored his snoring and his worsening diabetes—he’d already gone blind in one eye—and the fact that one night I woke to find him at the door of my bedroom, a hand in his waistband. In the morning, he made a big production about how he’d woken up in the middle of the front yard with a hunk of deli meat in his hand—sleepwalking.

“Why are you even here?” my mother asked, still searching around the closet. “I thought you’d be at Ruby’s. There’s nothing for you to eat here.”

“It’s fine—I’ll just starve to death.”

“Eureka,” she said, and came out with an umbrella just as the doorbell buzzed.

Gary’s arrival was never a minor affair. He came to us like a prince visiting a hovel, making sure my mother and I hadn’t fallen victim to the various dangers of living alone as women. Once inside, he would perform a scan of the house, looking for things to fix—anything to prove we were living in shambles. “God almighty, Jody, this light fixture’s ancient,” he’d say, and then snap it from the wall so that a cloud of dust and dead moths would float to the floor like gothic confetti. He’d promise to bring a new one the next time he came over, but he never did, and so it would be up to my mother to replace whatever it was with money she did not have. Currently, he was fiddling with the doorbell.

“Makes a strange noise, doesn’t it? Not so much a ding-dong as an eeek-akkk.” He hailed from Kentucky and had an accent that reminded me of cornbread and grits. Doesn’t it came out duddnit. Ruby called him Colonel Sanders.