Nevertheless, there were enough neon tubes and chasing lights to put stars in children’s eyes and make their grandparents remember their own first carnivals. Barkers with hand-held cordless mikes or makeshift megaphones stood before colorfully lit stands, exhorting people to step right up to the best game around—“A winner every time, folks!”—and bluegrass music with a heavy, toe-tapping beat blared from a speaker above Dwight Bryant’s head where he was trying to knock over the milk bottles with two softballs.

There was no way he could have heard Portland’s catty remark, but she subsided anyhow. Advancing pregnancy had tied my best friend’s hormones in such knots that her normally happy disposition had degenerated into wildly erratic mood swings. Sylvia Clayton’s giggles were enough to grate on anyone’s nerves, but we all like Dwight and wouldn’t hurt his feelings for the world, even though it depressed us to think he might be getting serious about Sylvia and that we’d be stuck with her for the rest of our lives.

She’d been wished on us by my brother Andrew’s wife. April teaches sixth grade in the same school with Sylvia, and she had decided that Sylvia would be perfect for Dwight. Most of my sisters-in-law, both past and present (I have eleven older brothers, some of whom have been married more than once), have tried to fix Dwight up ever since he resigned from Army Intelligence and came back to Colleton County to be Sheriff Bo Poole’s right-hand man.

Came home to lick his wounds, my sisters-in-law decided after Jonna divorced him and got custody of their little boy. “He needs somebody to make a new home with so he can have Cal down more often,” they said as they pushed their unmarried friends at Dwight.

Hell, they even push me at him whenever I’m between men and that hasn’t worked any better than their other candidates. This time around, though, April was starting to preen herself on her success. Dwight and Sylvia had been seeing each other on a fairly regular basis since June and here it was a week away from October.

To be fair about it, Sylvia Clayton’s a perfectly nice woman.

Which is part of the problem, of course.

Ever since the two of us got kicked out of the Junior Girls’ Class at Sweetwater Missionary Baptist Church for less than sanctified behavior, Portland and I have never been real comfortable around perfect women. It’s not that we smoke like wet bonfires, drink like the crappies in my daddy’s pond, or curse like farmers trying to hitch a set of forty-year-old plows to a thirty-year-old tractor, but everybody in our crowd indulges in one or the other on occasion.

Sylvia doesn’t smoke or swear and while she’s never actually said anything about the evils of alcohol, we’re acutely aware of her awareness if any of us order a second round while she’s still toying with her first glass of wine as if it were the threshold on the doorway to hell. Not that Por orders anything stronger than ginger ale these days. (We only get rowdy, not reckless.) Rut Sylvia’s hair is always perfect, her nails look as if they’ve just been manicured, and she seems to have discovered a lipstick that never wears off because it’s usually as fresh at the end of an evening as it was at the beginning and we never see her touch it up.