I can’t think of anything I’d rather do than stay at your aunt’s apartment. I want to be in a place where someone in your family has lived. I want there to be ions and atoms of your gene pool everywhere. I want there to be artifacts and pictures and clothes and furniture and memories of all the life you had before me. I am jealous of every day on the earth you spent and I wasn’t there to watch you and love you. I love you, did I remember to tell you that? I want to reach down into your mother’s womb and caress you in your beginnings. I was conceived in a tent on the banks of the Mississippi River when my father worked for the Corps of Engineers. Where were you conceived? I want to visit the room and bless it and be blessed by being there. See, this is what you get if you let a poet love you.

I love you,
Rhoda

Chapter

14

It wasn’t easy to get permission to go to Atlanta alone to see a boy. But it was possible. First his aunt wrote the Chi Omega housemother and asked if I could stay with her. Then the housemother called my mother. Then my mother called me.

“You can trust me, Mother,” I told her. “You can trust me. You can trust me.”

“You’re flying to Atlanta all alone? Why don’t you stay with Irise? Why do you want to stay with some aunt of his you don’t even know? We’ve never even met this boy, Rhoda. Your father isn’t going to like this.”

“He’s from a nice family, Momma. He used to go with Pepper Allen who went to camp with me. He used to be Charles William’s roommate. My God.”

“Why can’t you find someone to go out with in Tuscaloosa? Why do you always have to be running all over the country? I thought you had all that work to do for the newspaper there. You told me you couldn’t come home for the weekend because you had all that work.”

“Momma, it’s for Easter. They have all these dogwood trees I want to see.”

“Rhoda.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Don’t chase men, Rhoda. Let him come to see you.”

“I don’t want him to come here. I want to go to Atlanta.”

“All right. All right. I give up. If your father says it’s okay. How much money do you need?”

“A hundred dollars will be enough. The airplane ticket cost twenty-six.”

“I’m trusting you, Rhoda. Remember that.”

“I will. You can. Well, thanks, goodbye.”