Mother has already agreed that I can spend another month with Birdie in Alabama this next summer. I have a job as a lifeguard at their country club pool. I didn’t mention Him to Mother, but of course He is the only reason I want to go. This need for Him has somehow turned into a river in my soul, moving and carving places inside of me that only He can fill.

Five months. That is how long until I touch His beautiful face again.

This is our secret—oh Journal. Our secret. It must stay that way. If I am only able to write in here once a year and speak my goals and my wishes, it is here that I can speak this desire and write this—This is The Year He will love me as much as I love Him. We will be together.

Eight

Eight

The restaurant, Grace, was decorated to offer the feeling of an Italian villa: clean, creamy, and calm. I waited at the bar with a sweet tea, second-guessing this lunch, myself, and my outfit (white linen pants and an Henri Beguelin silk tank top).

I’d told Rusty I was meeting Hutch to give him the information about Mother. He’d stood in the kitchen with his briefcase at his feet. “You’re serious?” he’d asked.

“Yes, I am.”

“This isn’t something you can tell him on the phone?”

“Well, I wanted to give him copies of the pages about those two years. This is about Mother, Rusty. This is about the exhibit. Not about me. Or Hutch.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Very,” I’d said.

Rusty had slammed the door on the way out, which was his way of discussing Hutch with the same contempt Mother once had. Her campaign against Hutch had begun the moment she’d met him and continued after Thanksgiving and into that spring.

It had been the weekend before finals, the coming summer whispering its humid and seductive ease into our lives. Hutch and I had come to Atlanta for the final push-through in our studies. We sat on the back porch of Mother’s house, our history books open, our pencils stuck behind our ears, as we quizzed each other. Facts I couldn’t remember now at gunpoint came easily and quickly then. We were confident in our grades, in our lives, in our desire.

I found out later that Mother had hired a private detective to unearth a remnant of Hutch O’Brien, and it was Hutch’s and my first fight. And in many ways our last, as it was what I used to explain my own betrayal.

Mother had come out onto the porch, her purse angling off the crook of her elbow. “I’m going to the garden club,” she said. “You two okay alone here?”

“Of course,” we said together, and then smiled at each other, at our identical words.