I knew the moment that Carolyn answered the telephone that I would have to wait until she was ready to tell me whatever it was that bothered her. Her voice had a gay and lilting manner. Her talk was the talk of chatter. As I listened, I remembered an artist friend from New York who once grumbled that he despised talking to Southerners because it took them forever to get to the point of a conversation. He recalled being in Washington and visiting a senator from South Carolina with a woman seeking federal funding for the Arts Council of Columbia. “They spent an hour talking about crops and cousins and aunts and uncles,” my friend said. “I thought I’d go crazy. I wanted to yell at her to ask for the damn money.” I tried to explain that it was important to listen to what he considered rambling. “It’s not what Southerners say,” I emphasized, “it’s how they say it, what tone they use. If you listen carefully, you can tell by the tone if what you are about to hear is serious or not.” He looked at me in disbelief.

I knew by Carolyn’s tone that she was bothered; she was much too friendly not to be. And, after a few minutes of prattle about work and about the children, she said it:

“Oh, by the way, before you get back home and hear it from some gossip, you should know that I had dinner last night with Kenny Carpenter.”

“Really?” I said.

Kenny Carpenter was a neighbor whose wife had been dead for four years. He operated the service station where we bought gasoline, and he was, as the neighborhood ladies had observed around the community swimming pool, Hollywood handsome for a man in his midfifties. Of the men I knew, Kenny Carpenter was the only one who might have coaxed Carolyn into bed. The yes was in her face, like a sign, whenever she saw him. He was like Carter in a curious way. There was something about him, a roughness, an edge, that made women blink in surprise. With Carolyn, the blink had always been an answer, a code, even if she did not know it. I had watched her many times talking to him as he worked in his backyard. Another neighbor had once joked, “You better not let old Kenny get too close to that wife of yours. Poor son of a bitch drools every time he sees her.”

Carolyn rushed her explanation. “It was totally unexpected. I was shopping at the mall—there was a sale at Rich’s—and decided to stop in at Ruby Tuesday’s for dinner. He was there, by himself at a table, and he invited me to join him.”

“I think that’s nice,” I said. “I don’t see anything wrong with that.”