“I want you to go with me. I can’t leave you. All I do is leave you. All you do is go away.” I was starting to cry. I was crying so hard I could hardly talk. It was always the same thing. He always went away. He was always leaving. It was all so sad. All he did was leave. It was never long enough. The days went by too fast, the moments, hours, minutes.

“We’ll be together all the time as soon as we find a place to live,” he said. “We’ll see each other every night. We’re married, Rhoda. What else do you want?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I want. Why is it so terrible? Why is everything so hard?”

We got back to the hotel at five o’clock. We had left our parents without a car for five hours. We hadn’t even called to tell them where we were. But they weren’t mad at us. They had drunk a fifth of scotch whiskey and told each other their genealogies and decided they were good enough for each other and moved on to the problem of where we would live and how much they hoped I wasn’t going to get pregnant. “Oh, Rhoda,” Miss Rose said. “We love Ariane and Dudley so much.” “Oh, Malcolm,” my mother said. “We love Rose and Percy like they were our own. Now you’re our very own, our own little son-in-law.” “And Rhoda’s my daughter,” Miss Rose added. “Not my daughter-in-law, but my very own daughter. The daughter I dreamed of. The one I never had.”

“Can Malcolm sleep here with me?” I asked. “Can he spend the night?”

“Of course he can,” my father decreed.

“How will he get home?” Mr. Percy put in.

“You all spend the night,” Daddy said. “Tomorrow we’ll drive down and see this town your ancestors built. I want you to come to Aberdeen and see our town, Miss Rose. You’ll have to come in the fall when we have our Aberdeen stew parties. Or come up to the field trials. That’s the ticket. You need to see the field trials my daddy started.”