“But if you knew them. Uncle Carswall’s a deacon at the church. And Mama’s not exactly…” He wanted to say something like she was not given to passion, that she was an unsentimental woman, that he had never seen her hold Carswall’s hand, much less kiss him, that she might conceivably have married him purely for practical reasons, but as with most thoughts concerning his mother, it was too big and complicated to articulate succinctly. “I guess they weren’t always the way they are now,” he said instead. “My aunt Nicky—that’s Mama’s sister—she once called it an ‘Old Testament arrangement.’” To his delight, this made Alma laugh. “But to me, it’s just my family. It never seemed strange.”

Alma wanted to know more, about his mother and stepfather, his sister, his life in Signal Creek, and her interest in him was intoxicating. The words poured out of him. He told her about the ponds he liked to fish in, about the red color of the High Falls Road, about the old abandoned house where he and Hoke would camp sometimes. He told her about Hoke, who’d been a star pitcher in the farm league, and how, if she ever met him, if she was like other girls, she would fall instantly in love with him. “I don’t know,” she said. “I never liked watching boys play sports.” He told her he’d wanted to play baseball himself, but that he lived too far out to make the practices and work the farm both. He told her Carswall was stern but fair, a good father overall, except that he loved Emily more. Emily was fifteen and a princess. He didn’t describe in any detail his home life, though she asked about it—the old house, the paint peeling from the boards, the sagging front porch, the yard that Smokey had trampled to dust—because she wouldn’t understand that it wasn’t poor, that they were a family of means and he had never wanted for anything except broader horizons. He admitted he’d tried and failed to win a scholarship to Emory, but that he was going to try again in the fall. He didn’t want to work on the farm. He said he might go work for the railroad instead, like his father, while he waited for college. He didn’t say that Effie was opposed to this idea.

“Do you think you’ll stay in Georgia?” she asked. She’d lit another cigarette and given him one too.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” he said. “Not in Signal Creek, anyway.” He asked her what Los Angeles was like. “That’s something I can’t even imagine,” he said. “What it must be like to grow up in a place like that, a place you only see in the movies.”