And before I could even recall the soft white scars that I am sure still line her inner thighs, Lindy clapped her hands. She grabbed my wrist.
“You’ve got to meet my husband!” she said, and pulled me a few steps toward the crowd. “He’s a sad little puppy right now. Maybe you can cheer him up. Stay right here.” Lindy then turned away from me and sort of half walked and half danced to a guy standing in a small group of people wearing Florida Gator jackets. I’d seen the ring on her finger the moment I first spotted her and so I was curious to meet the man she’d married. I watched her sneak up and slap one of the guys on the butt and give him a long and generous kiss on the cheek and it filled me with pleasure to see this. Then she whispered in his ear and led him over to me.
“This is Sean,” she said. “He is, like, the biggest Florida fan.”
We shook hands. “Sorry, man,” I said.
“It’s okay,” he said. “Who gives up five fourth-down conversions in one game?”
“Nobody,” I said. “I know.”
“What a nightmare,” he said.
“Wait!” Lindy said, and put her hands on my shoulders. “You have got to tell Sean about that time Old Man Casemore drove his boat around the neighborhood handing out Cokes and jambalaya and stuff after the street flooded. And tell him about how we used to make those huge beds of moss. He never believes any of the stuff I tell him about growing up.”
“It’s all true,” I said.
Sean laughed. He was clean cut and handsome. He looked like a pretty good guy.
“It sounds like some kind of wonderland to hear her talk about it,” he said. “I’m from Gainesville, man. All I remember is being really bored as a kid. We lived in Florida but we weren’t on the beach. We didn’t have Disney World. It was just hot. I don’t know, when she talks about Baton Rouge, it all sounds made up.”
“It gets a bad rap sometimes,” I said. “But it’s a pretty good place.”
“It is,” Lindy said, and looked at me. “I mean, it was weird, you know, and it took me a while before I started missing it. But now I think about the good times a lot. Do you keep in touch with anybody else from the neighborhood? What about Randy? The Kern boys? Artsy Julie?”
I smiled a little.
“What?” she asked. “Do you have gossip?”
“Well,” I said, and held up my left hand. “I keep in touch with Artsy Julie pretty well.”
Lindy went nuts. It was like she had won the lottery.
She jumped up and down and hugged me. She nearly knocked me over. “That’s incredible,” she said. “My God, it was so obvious even then. You two are perfect. I’m so glad you finally saw that.” She clapped her hands again. She punched her husband on the shoulder. “You don’t understand,” she told him. “That’s like some storybook shit right there. You don’t even know.”
I smiled. I was happy and embarrassed and we were all a little drunk. Plus the football game, the atmosphere, the Louisiana night, it had all been so good. “Yeah,” I said. “It turned out really great.”
Then, as if on cue, Julie and her father, who we always go to football games with, came walking toward us across the parking lot. They’d been talking to some family friends who’d wanted to feel Julie’s belly and make their predictions. I found out later that they’d also given Julie a list of names, written on a purple napkin, that we should call the child if it was a boy. The names were LSU-related things like Tiger and Geaux Boy and Charlie Mac. One person, I saw, had simply written down the date, that night of our victory on October 6, 2007, and then scribbled No, I’m serious. Name him that.
When Lindy saw Julie waddling our way, a good seven months pregnant by then, she grabbed my arm. “She looks so beautiful,” she said, and then whispered in my ear, “Don’t you dare fuck this up.”
I smiled as Lindy ran over to give Julie a hug and I could hear her complimenting Julie’s dress, telling her how she always knew we’d get together. Julie looked at me, sober and amused by this turn of events, and said, “Pish-posh. I practically had to beat him over the head with an anvil.”
As the two of them caught up, and Julie’s father wandered over to listen to the band, Lindy’s husband, Sean, handed me a beer. I had no idea where he got it from. They appear by magic in this place. “So,” he said, “tell me this. Is it true that there was this crazy giant psychiatrist guy on your block who took weird porno pictures of all the kids?”
“Yep,” I said. “Pretty much.”
“Okay,” he said. “And is it true that he experimented on all these foster kids with drugs and whatnot? And that his own son basically blew up his house trying to kill him?”
“Yeah,” I said. “It was his adopted son, but still. He’d made all these Molotov cocktails. The whole place burned to the ground. He burned down our school, too.”
“Jesus,” Sean said. “And what about the guy who tried to gather all this evidence to protect the girls in the neighborhood? Lindy said he got caught in the crossfire. She said it was kind of tragic.”
I looked at Sean. Out of all the men in the world Lindy could have ended up with, this guy seemed all right to me. I suppose this is because I knew that behind his easy smile was a man in love with a woman who had struggled in life and that he was aware of this. I knew, in other words, that Lindy had scars on her thighs that she could not hide and that, by their marriage, this man, at the very least, had made himself vulnerable enough to share them with her. I also saw that below his heavy Florida jacket Sean wore nice khaki pants that were pressed. And, below this, he wore a pair of dress shoes, not the kind you typically put on to go to a football game, and not the kind you would ever pair with sweat socks. So, we were okay from the start. He had no idea who I was, I understood, but we were okay.
“Is that what Lindy told you?” I asked him. “She said some guy was trying to protect her?”
“She’s got a million stories,” he said. “But what I don’t get is that she tells me these things like it was the most exciting stuff that ever happened, like it was a good time. No offense, but that sounds horrible to me. Floods and fires and psychopath neighbors? It sounds like a freak show.”
“Yeah,” I said. “I understand what you mean. It’s hard to explain.”
Then the two of us stood there and watched our wives laugh and talk. We watched Lindy reach down and rub Julie’s belly, and I think we both knew we were pretty lucky in life.
I raised my can of beer, and Sean toasted it without a word. We took a long gulp.
“Who even goes for it on fourth down five times in one game?” he asked me.
“Nobody,” I said. “I know.”