“Okay. Never mind. It’s okay. Take me back to Emory then. What difference does it make.” I stared out the window at the ugly midsummer road. I looked down at my ugly wedding ring. I was married. Well, I wasn’t giving up. I would keep on trying. I wanted to be happy so much I would do anything, even keep on looking out the window, even keep from crying.

Chapter

17

My mother went crazy when she found out. She went upstairs and shut the door to her room and wouldn’t talk to anybody. “I can’t believe it,” she kept saying later. “I can’t believe you’d do this to me.”

“I had to do it. I wanted to marry him. I didn’t have time to talk to you. I was too busy talking him into it.”

“Calm down, Ariane,” my father said. “We’ll fix it. We’ll send them to school. Come on, Sister, tell us how to call his parents. We have to call his parents.”

“He’s telling them right now,” I said. “We said we’d both tell you at ten this morning. Here’s the number.” I handed my father a piece of paper with Malcolm’s parents’ phone number on it. My father dialed the phone and began to talk. In five minutes he and Malcolm’s mother had found a common ancestor on my paternal grandmother’s side and a meeting had been arranged in Atlanta. “Oh, God in heaven,” my mother sobbed, coming back into the room with her tear-stained face. “Oh, Dudley, how did we ever have this child?”

“Ariane, calm down. She fell in love with this kid and she married him. He’s from good people. My grandmother’s sister married a Percy Martin from Monroe, Georgia. It’s some of this boy’s people. Now stop that goddamn crying. Come on, Sister, you come with me.” He winked at me. Winked and smiled the old smile that meant, Don’t pay any attention to her. She’s too weak and silly to be involved in the real work of the world, making money, being headstrong and passionate, winning, running away to marry whoever you damn well please.

“It’s just like Little Dudley,” Momma cried. “First Little Dudley and now her. I think you do this, Dudley. I think you put them up to this.”

On Saturday we flew to Atlanta and got into a taxi and went to a hotel and sat around the room waiting for Malcolm to arrive with his parents. The hotel had given us a suite with a balcony overlooking a parking lot and my mother had set up a table so we could have lunch when they arrived.

“Just try to keep your mouth shut, Sister,” my father said. “Just let me do the talking.”

“It’s my marriage, Daddy. It’s my husband that I married who’s coming here.”