It had been several weeks since she had been spoiled by him. Over months, his smile had turned to hello, then to conversation and finally laughter, then little gifts like a piece of nut caramel or peanuts from the farm where his father worked nearby. She told him she was learning to read and he told her he was learning to farm. Tea was his hope one day. Until one Friday afternoon she followed him behind Miss Mailley’s shed, nearly forty feet from the back door, across land Miss Mailley couldn’t make up her mind what to do with so the weeds just overran, facing a road where wagon wheels could announce themselves from a quarter of a mile away. His compadres always stood watch in the other directions on their breaks—when the White boys were served supper at a table and the Black boys only opened wax paper, standing and without first washing their hands. They avoided her eyes whenever she came back from behind the shed with Tuck, blank stares at an endless distance went a long way toward numbing her guilt. Perhaps Tuck had warned them, since shame would most certainly be dissuasion against a next time. It had been several weeks since Darlene had seen the boys again, and she only assumed Miss Mailley must be cutting back in time for summer when folks traveled more and brought back as much as they could from their excursions.

That last time she and Tuck’s passion had reached such a frenzy that she let him convince her to enter her, when he had pushed her tight against hard wooden heat, their legs itching from the witch hazel and spice bushes surrounding the shed, through which they cut through for the balance the shed walls provided. With pleading in his eyes he had told her, “I can’t go back like this,” referring to the bulge in his pants that seemed much larger than it had ever been. She did it not because she wanted to but because she felt sorry for him, knew he could be laughed at or worst of all found out. So she allowed him to go where she had always said no one but a husband could, and had felt like a bride ever since. She knew she was spoiled, but did not know she was pregnant. In her world, it was a near-sin to admit, announce, or question fatigue. Her mother had blamed a recent morning vomit on rancid lard; in the absence of a suitor’s visits she had no reason to suspect otherwise. Neither did Darlene, even though she noticed a light-headed feeling during her morning walk, while she wondered if Tuck had been called in for a Friday inventory day.