“Did I tell you the big spiel my mother told me? After I came home from college for the first time? And I was tired, but she thought I was mad at her?”

“No,” he said.

“Listen,” she said, “When I first met your father he was considered a joke. I know you think I am bossy, or that I’m a bitch, or whatever, but I liked your father, he was a good person, and his friends treated him like a mule they fed wine to. He’d do it. They would all get drunk, all older guys too, all knowing better, past their thirties, all single or married to passive women who let them roam wild, all shooting guns and guffawing and riding four wheelers and fishing. All in a state of arrested development. Country boys are told they are men at thirteen and that’s when they stop growing up too.

I don’t even know why I was there. I was older too. You start to feel a certain way, in a place like that, growing older. You don’t know now, honey, or you might. I don’t know what it’s like being a girl your age. I can imagine it’s less different than I imagine. I remember how I felt looking at my sister. She’s ten years older than me, remember? Well, people get married so young out here, she didn’t, and later on had to resort to taking a married man away from his wife. I had all that paranoia. All that anxiety. So Gail dated Jim, Jim was friends with your father, and on the weekends I would sit around your father and his friends and whatever women they had tricked into coming or liking them or loving them, and I would be very quiet and polite and stay as far away from the men who would roll around or wrestle or drink until they fell.

Your father was really sweet. I started showing up really early so I could talk to him before he got drunk. It’s hard to say that a man that got that drunk was shy but he was. I think he would drink to get the nerve to make a move on me, but by the time he was drunk I would do whatever I could to avoid him. Gail would tell me that he would drink even more after I left. Like he was holding back. But I couldn’t talk to the man with his eyes lolling and his head craned toward me in fake interest and aggressive posturing with his very plans for me visible in the back of his eyes.

His buddies were awful, too. Gail once told me that Emery fought someone over something they said about me, her eyes all beaming like that was exactly what I wanted. I didn’t want that. I hated the brutality of it.