“So what?” I said. “You’re an interesting woman to talk to and you look great. I love the color of your hair.” This was a new role for me, building up Sister’s confidence. Berry must be an unusual man.

“It’s Marigold. You really ought to try it. Get rid of that gray.”

“You’re right. I should get rid of my gray.” I’d gone too far. Sister flipped her yogurt spoon at me. Luckily, it was empty.

The crowd of teenagers left as loudly as they had arrived, torn shirts and jeans flapping.

“How come this Berry guy’s available?” I asked in the sudden quiet.

“Pure luck. His wife died last year.”

I looked at Sister to see if she was serious. She was.

“What?” she asked when I frowned. “What?”

“It wasn’t very lucky for his wife.”

“It might have been. You don’t know.”

There was no way to answer that. I pushed my chair back and announced that I had to go home.

“To fix Fred’s supper?”

“Why not?”

Mary Alice followed me from the shop and across the street to the parking lot. “You two need a break from each other.”

“Nope.” I unlocked the door of my ’87 Cutlass Cierra. Heat rolled out to meet me. “We’re just catching on to this marriage thing.”

“Dear Lord!”

“Call me in the morning. And thanks for the movie.”

Sister nodded and headed toward her car, a new black Jaguar; I headed home happily to Fred.

Birmingham is a lovely city, never more lovely than in June when it becomes what people envision when the word South is mentioned. If spring is a riot of colors, early summer is a riot of smells. Gardenia bushes are so laden with blooms their branches brush the ground; magnolias are everywhere. Mix in the tea olive bushes and the honeysuckle vines on every fence and you have a heady mixture, one that makes a porch and a swing a thing of joy after dark.

Fred and I live in a neighborhood where most of the houses were built in the 1920s and 1930s, many of them with stucco exteriors. It’s a quiet neighborhood with sidewalks and big trees, convenient to everything. It was, and still is, a good place to raise a family.