In Broken Places

16




NOTHING MUCH HAD CHANGED in the house. It still smelled of fried onions and laundry soap, and it still seemed cluttered with the overflow of too many lives lived in too small a space. Mom sat in her La-Z-Boy, her feet propped up and a glass of water within reach. She hadn’t moved much from this position since her return. We’d made her as comfortable as we could, and I’d spent a couple of nights in the overwhelming perkiness of my old room just to make sure she was really all right. The doctors had called it a ministroke, which sounded a little too cheerful for something that had left Mom temporarily without a memory, weak, and confined to a hospital bed.

But she was feeling better now. Her eyes weren’t as scared and her skin looked a little less like Marcel Marceau’s. She’d called me earlier and asked me to come by, so I’d swung over after my day of student-teaching and found her sitting there, Oprah blaring from the TV set and a book open on her lap. I had to agree—Oprah was a lot more bearable diluted with some reading. It crossed my mind that Mom had her own version of Oprah’s Book Club going on.

“Sit down, Shell,” she instructed, her voice as rice-paper thin as her skin. “And hand me that box, will you?”

I fetched a small, ornately decorated wooden box from the coffee table and laid it in her lap. Mom turned watery eyes on me and seemed to dig into her brain for a prepared speech she’d stored there. “My . . . episode . . .” She halted, reaching for her glass with unsteady fingers.

I wanted to say, “Your episode was a stroke, Mom. ‘Episodes’ are what make incredibly obtuse shows like Dynasty into palatable televisual bites. ‘Strokes’ are what nearly kill people. Get it right.” But she appeared to be gathering courage, so I didn’t interfere. A lifetime in the Davis household had taught me that courage was rare and precious. It got us through the tough stuff. Like Rolos and wit.

“My episode,” she resumed, “made me remember this box.”

Strange—it had made her forget everything else, at least for those first couple of hours.

I observed in silence as she lifted the lid off the box and rummaged around inside. It struck me that her hair had gotten grayer—much grayer—and I wondered when that had happened. She seemed older than her years, and for a very brief moment, I couldn’t remember what had caused her premature aging. A framed photograph on the mantel slammed me with the answer. Jim Davis. Absent husband. Abusive father. Immortalized in a pewter frame. But Mom was unaware of the bitter nostalgia in my mind. She pulled from the box a stack of envelopes tied with a red ribbon, their edges yellowed by time but still intact.

“I want you to have these,” she said.

“Mom . . .”

“Hush, Shelby.”

Mom wasn’t prone to giving orders, so I obeyed.

“While I was in the hospital . . .”

There was a strength to her voice, a purposefulness I’d seldom heard before. She was trying to be bold, for one of the few times in her life. I found it disconcerting.

“While I was in the hospital, I had a lot of time to think.”

What with the being catatonic and all.

“And I remembered this box. And . . .” She blinked hard to disarm her tears. “Shelby, I want you to have these. And the rest of the things in here.” She put down the letters and took from the box a dried rose, a blue garter, and a handful of dog-eared pictures. “I need you to promise me that you’ll keep them.”

“Mom, what are they?”

“Even if I die, you promise me you’ll keep them.”

There was something in her eyes that frightened me. Where they had been a bit befuddled moments before, they were now laser clear—focused and demanding and damning.

I pulled my chair closer to hers and took the stack of letters from her lap. The ribbon gave easily, like it had been undone before, and I glanced through the envelopes. They were addressed alternately to Jim Davis and Gail Sanders. As I fanned through them, the scent of White Shoulders, like wisps of memory, drifted up to me. It was the aroma of young love and middle-aged heartbreak, of tentative hope and obliterated dreams.

“You and Dad?”

“Five months of correspondence while he was still in the Navy.”

“And the pictures?”

“The two of us when we were young. Dancing at the prom, waterskiing, our engagement party . . .”

She held the stack of pictures out to me, but I shook my head and moved back in my chair. “Mom, I’m not sure I’m the right—”

“He was your father, Shelby. And the man I loved. And if you don’t keep these, no one will know him after I’m dead.”

There was a stubborn set to her chin and, again, that obstinacy in her gaze. This meant enough to her that she was willing to fight for it—and I’d never really seen my mother fight for anything before. It made me angry.

“Why do you want to keep these, Mom? What difference does it make if everyone forgets him?”

“He was my husband.”

“He was a jerk.”

“He—was—my—husband.”

I was stunned. “Yes, Mom, your abusive husband. Your screaming, offensive, and brutal husband. I should know—he was my father too.”

“But he was a good man once,” she said, pleading. She shoved the sheaf of letters toward me. “Read these, Shelby. Read them and tell me that he wasn’t once kind and romantic and—”

“I don’t want to read them, Mom.”

“Then look at the pictures. They’re—”

“Mom, no.”

“He was another person once. He was good enough for me to love him, Shelby. He was funny and engaging and . . .”

The lights seemed to dim as the walls around me regurgitated their embedded memories. My dad’s voice crashed across the stillness, his words slashing at my fragility with sadistic precision. His savagery overwhelmed my defenses and annihilated the child in me once more, reducing her to an empty shell, swollen with bravado but translucent in her pain and helplessness. I felt the room tilt a little as my mind fell deeper into the remembered vortex of a merciless destruction, a calculated obliteration of all that was strong and soft and yearning in me.

When my mom pushed up to the edge of her chair and covered my hand with her own, it was all I could do not to fling it away along with the letters I still held and the nauseating powerlessness crushing the resolve from my courage.

I rose and moved to the window across the room, the letters falling like dead leaves from my hand to the blue carpet. I stared at the tree where Trey and I had swung as children, and I tried to remember the happy moments but found them all marred by my father’s contempt. I breathed—and in breathing found solace. I was still alive, despite his murderous rages. He hadn’t destroyed me.

“It wasn’t entirely his fault—the way he was,” my mom said quietly, her voice a little raspy. “His father was a drunk who abandoned the family when he was nine. How was he supposed to know how to be a good parent to you?”

I shrugged. There were no valid excuses.

“He grew up poor. Had to work hard—too hard for a boy his age. But he made it to college, got a good job, started his own business. . . . He made sure you and Trey would never be as poor as he was.”

“Hurray for Dad.”

“He tried, Shelby. It . . . it just wasn’t in him to be sensitive.”

“His problems went well beyond insensitivity, Mom.”

“Yes,” she conceded. “They did. But—”

“And whether he was raised by a drunk or by a pack of wolves, it was still him shoving me into the wall of that kitchen,” I said, pointing at the kitchen door, “his hands around Trey’s neck, and his voice reducing you to . . . to this!”

She lowered her gaze as I motioned toward her with my arm, presenting the human incarnation of my father’s degradation. She was a fragile woman, broken by age and devastated by her marriage to a tyrant, yet as toxic as the memories were, she wouldn’t allow them to alter her devotion to the man who had destroyed her. Her willingness to look past my father’s sins was revolting to me. I’d tried that too, even long after he left, but I was beyond it now. He deserved no mercy or extenuation from me.

I turned to the window and tried to wrestle my mind back into the present, away from the images and sensations suffusing the air of this house that still smelled of my father’s maleficence.

I stayed there, looking out, until the chaos in my mind receded, saying nothing until I was sure I could speak without harm to the woman whose life had been as scarred as mine, but whose heart didn’t appear to have been as hardened.

“Sit down, Shelby. Please.”

I turned reluctantly and went back to my mother. She held the letters I had discarded, her knuckles white with strain, her eyes overflowing with tears.

“I know how much he hurt you,” she said, grasping my hand with her birdlike fingers and leaning close to look into my face. “And I know he nearly killed your brother. . . .”

“Then why remember him, Mom? For a stack of letters that only prove that he used to be able to fake being human? For a bunch of pictures that only prove that you used to be beautiful and feminine and . . . and strong before he broke you?” I reached into the box and pulled out the dried rose, dusty and brown and impossibly weightless. “For this, Mom? For a dead flower? Why should I want to remember the man whose imprint on my life has been nothing but shame—and pain—and brokenness?”

I wasn’t sure when I’d crushed the rose. I hadn’t meant to. One minute it was in my hand, held up for my mom to see, and the next . . . the next it was reduced to splinters on my palm. Disintegrated. Dust.

My mom took my hand and brushed the remains into hers, holding them like fragile flakes of all of us. “This flower,” she said, “this rose—your father gave it to me the day Trey was born.” She took a feeble, uneven breath and said, “Your father gave me you, Shelby. He gave me you and Trey. And to erase him—” she looked at the letters and pictures and garter—“to erase him would be to erase you.”

I nodded. She leaned forward to brush a tear from my cheek.

“So I have to remember him, Shelby. I have to remember that the person who created you was not all bad—not all cruel. He was a troubled man. I know that. But he was part of you. I can’t deny his legacy without denying you.” She replaced the letters and pictures in the box, then sprinkled the rose’s ashes over them. “Will you remember him, Shelby, please? Please remember him—for me.”



Shayla and I spent our first Christmas morning together opening the presents we’d wrapped and set under our hideously decorated tree. The tree had become something of a bone of contention, as Shayla was of a more contemporary-slash-chaotic decorating school and I had graduated summa cum laude from the International School of Anal-Retentive Christmas Tree Design. I liked things symmetrical and matching. Shayla liked things random and clashing. I liked things classy and she liked them homemade with a pair of kitchen scissors and a bunch of out-of-ink markers. We were polar opposites when it came to trimming trees, and the end result proved it.

Every night when Shayla went to bed, I’d sneak around the tree and rearrange things just so, and every morning when she got out of bed, Shayla would boldly march up to the tree and put things back exactly as they’d been. Which led me to conclude that there had to be some kind of rhyme and reason to her artistic deviance.

When we opened the presents—my gift from Shayla was a clothespin hot pad she had made at kindergarten—I gathered up my courage and talked with Shay about her dad. It wasn’t the first conversation we’d had about him, but he had died just before Christmas last year, and it felt important to acknowledge him that day.

“Do you remember what you used to do for Christmas with your dad?”

She squinted a little, trying to remember. “We had a twee,” she said.

“Did he give you presents?”

Vigorous nod. “My blue wabbit.”

“That’s right! That came from him, didn’t it.”

“It used to be pwettier, but it’s still soft.”

“It’s really soft, Shayla. Because you’ve loved it so much, probably.” Her eyes veiled with melancholy, and I drew her in, planting a kiss on her temple and holding her close. “What else do you remember about your dad?”

“He was funny,” she said.

Funny. The man I had known had been anything but funny. But I was thankful all the way down to the bottom of my emotional scars that Shayla had been loved by this father I couldn’t imagine, this man who had given her bunnies and made her laugh.

“Do you still miss him a lot?” I asked a little reluctantly.

“I miss his Wondoh Bwead,” she said, and I could tell by the unsteady breath she took that she missed more than that.

“It feels sad to not have your daddy anymore, doesn’t it?” I tried to picture another man when I said daddy so the images of Jim Davis in my mind wouldn’t interfere with my compassion.

“Uh-huh.” Her chin puckered a little bit and her eyes welled with tears.

“Maybe we should draw a picture and leave it under the tree for him. Would you like that?”

She turned her watery blue gaze on me and nodded eagerly—gratefully.

“It can be your Christmas present for him, okay?”

She was already heading for the dining room table, where she liked to draw.

“What do you want to draw for him?” I asked, going to the box next to the couch where we kept her paper and crayons.

“A volcano,” she said without hesitation. And she did just that in the minutes that followed, giving special care to the lava that flowed from the mountain’s red peak. When she’d finished the drawing, she recruited my help to write For Daddy at the top. My hand shook as I spelled out the words in green block letters. D-a-d-d-y.

We hung the drawing from the lowest branch of the tree and propped Shayla’s blue rabbit next to it. It was her way of thanking him, I guessed. For the rabbit. For the Wonder Bread. For the love.



Christmas afternoon at the Johnsons’ was a down-home family affair, complete with a perfectly prepared meal, an exquisitely decorated tree, and the kind of general cheer that radiated a warm glow. Scott, who had been invited to the celebration long before our falling-out, arrived shortly after we did. We’d met a couple of times in the intervening days, always with polite reserve. The first time had been at church on the day following our Christmas tree purchase, and Scott had deliberately approached me, concern on his face.

“Are you okay, Shelby?”

“I’m okay, Scott. Thank you.”

He’d turned to leave but changed his mind. “If you need anything—you know, like your tree falls over or something—just give me a call.”

I’d thanked him again and watched him go. Shayla, on her way back from her Sunday school class, had launched herself at him, showing him her Noah’s ark drawing with pride. He’d smiled and complimented her, then kissed the top of her head and walked into the sunlight, headed home.

And now, we both sat in the Johnsons’ living room nursing glasses of Christmas punch as Shayla played with her new German-speaking doll and Bev and Gus scurried around the kitchen putting the final touches on our meal.

Scott was trying his hardest to diffuse the tension by making conversation, but I could tell it was putting a strain on him. I’d hurt him, and I wasn’t sure he understood why. But I wanted him to know that I hadn’t dismissed him—erased him from our lives. I glanced at Shayla, who was so engrossed with her doll that she was oblivious to anything else, and gathered some courage.

“We’ve missed you around.” As conversation starters went, it was pretty lame. I rolled my eyes and saw his smile deepen. “What I’m trying to say is that I’m sorry we’ve seen less of you.”

“Yeah? I am too.”

I felt a sigh shoving its way to the surface and held it down. “I don’t know how to do this,” I said earnestly, searching for the right words. “What I said the other night—it’s true. And I can’t change any of it. But . . . but I don’t know how to do this anymore.”

“How to do what?”

“How to go back to being friends after . . . after what you said—and what I said.”

His eyes connected more intently with mine. “You still want to be friends?”

“I . . .” I hesitated. There would be safety in cutting off all contact, and yet . . . “Yes—of course I do.”

He looked at me consideringly, weighing his response. “After what happened the other night,” he finally said, “it might be hard to go back to the way things were.”

“Scott, if I could . . . If I could, I’d—”

I saw traces of frustration in his expression when he interrupted. “Why can’t you?”

“It’s . . . complicated.”

I tried to say with my eyes what I couldn’t articulate, but he was looking away, lost in his own thoughts.

A silence stretched thin before he spoke again. “I should have waited—been more sure we were both on the same page before I—”

“Wait. Scott, you can’t take the blame for this—”

“I should have given it more thought before just blurting it out.”

“It’s my fault too. I should have been . . . I should have been clearer—sooner.”

He didn’t contradict my statement. “Well . . .” He paused. “At least we know what we’re dealing with now.”

“Yes.”

“And I guess that’s a good thing,” he said, expelling a breath.

“I hope so.”

He rubbed his hands over his face and shifted in his chair, leaning forward with his elbows on his knees. “And since we’re the same people we were a week ago—and those people were friends . . .”

“Maybe we can still be?” I offered hopefully.

He stretched his neck, side to side, and I heard two pops. “We can try,” he said. “I mean, we’re both grown-ups, right?”

I hesitated on that one. “Sure. We’re both grown-ups.”

“So we just . . . try to make it happen, I guess. I put the lid back on what I talked about, and—”

“Can you?”

The look he gave me teemed with emotions I didn’t dare identify. He sighed and shook his head. “I’m not sure,” he said, “but I’ll give it a shot.”

I bit my lip and looked at Shayla, grateful for this man who saw beyond his own pain and embarrassment enough to stay our friend. “Okay,” I said with a smile, and there was relief in the word—more than I’d expected.

The smile he returned was kind and sincere and slightly strained. It tore a little at my resolve. “So, here we are,” he said. “How do we start this thing?”

I shook my head in amazement at his kindness. “First, we thank God that people like you don’t hold grudges.”

“He’ll be happy to hear about it. It’s a new skill I’m working on.”

I realized at that moment how difficult this was for him. For a man as confident and driven as he was to admit defeat and allow ongoing contact was a testament to the goodness of his heart.

“And then what?” he asked, sitting up straighter as if preparing for a challenge.

“Well . . .” I racked my brain. “I tell you about my David Hasselhoff fantasies and you tell me about . . . I don’t know. What kind of skeletons do you have in your closet?”

He thought hard and I could see a lightness coming back into his expression. “Well, there’s the high school prom where I stage-dived into a crowd of adoring fans without warning and they all moved out of my way. I broke a tooth.”

“What were you doing diving off a stage?”

“I was in the band.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Guitarist. For—” he made a gesture like he was reading a marquee—“the Raging Atoms.”

“The Raging Atoms.”

“We were science geeks. And my parents threatened to ground me if we went with our first choice for a name.”

“The Raging Test Tubes?”

“The Raging Hormones.”

“That would probably have been more accurate.”

“Probably.”

I smiled at him and felt new buoyancy attenuating the bleakness in my mind. “So—now that we’ve emptied out our closets, wanna go see if Bev and Gus need help?”

“You haven’t told me about David Hasselhoff yet,” he said as we headed out of the living room.

“That’s a conversation best had after a couple mugs of well-spiked eggnog.”

“Cheater.”

“Raging Atom.” I halted him with a hand to his arm. “Thank you, Scott,” I said, my voice soft, sincere. “I . . .” Would it muddy the waters to tell him I needed him? Probably. So I shook my head and kept it to myself as I led the way into the dining room, feeling happy-sad in a mustard-yellow kind of way.

Gus had just placed the largest, most beautiful turkey in the middle of the table when we entered the room, and Bev was busy pouring the drinks.

“Don’t mind the draft,” she said, nodding toward the open window. “We’re getting rid of the burned-Tupperware smell.”

“Been helping around the kitchen again, haven’t you, Gus?” Scott said.

“She loves me for my slicing skills, but she could do without the rest.”

“No one feels sorry for you, Gus,” I said without a trace of sympathy.

“Better get Shayla in here,” Bev said. “The turkey’s getting goose bumps.”

“Shayla! We’re eating!”

“Not yet,” came a stubborn voice from the other room.

“Shayla—now.”

“Wait a minute, Mom!”

For a moment, I wasn’t sure what had happened. I’d been about to use hollow threats to get Shay into the dining room when it dawned on me that no one else was moving anymore. Bev was frozen in midpour. Gus was staring at me with his trademark Santa Claus grin, and Scott had something that looked suspiciously like deep emotion in his eyes.

“Did I miss something?”

Bev put down her pitcher and looked at me with a smile that was warmth and victory and relief and love all rolled into one. “She called you Mom,” she whispered.

My heart did a jig. “What?”

“She called you Mom.”

I looked at Scott for confirmation, and he just beamed his dimpled joy at me.

“I missed it!” I wailed.

“Call her again!” This from Gus, his twinkling eyes alight.

I cleared my throat and tried to sound convincing. “Shayla, come here now!”

And from the other room, right on cue, my sweet, strong-willed child answered, with frustration in her voice, “But Mom . . . !”

I covered my gaping mouth with my hand and looked wide-eyed at Scott. He crossed the room and whispered, “She called you Mom, Shell,” and wrapped me in a hug.

In more ways than one, I felt like I’d finally, perfectly come home.



The canopy hung too low, weighed down by time and dust. The pillows were moth-eaten and smelled of abandonment. Fibers were coming out of the rug we lay on in little tufts of red and black and gray. Our Huddle Hut was decomposing before our eyes.

“You think maybe we’ve outgrown it?” Trey lay on his side picking at a bag of peanuts, his head too close to the sagging sheet above us. Even the quality of our snacks had deteriorated. And when snacks deteriorated in my life, I knew an ending was beginning.

Trey’s legs extended well past the edges of the sheet and he looked scrunched up, somehow—a giraffe trying to fit into an African hut.

“Yeah. I think maybe we’ve outgrown it.”

I was lying on my side facing Trey, head propped on hand, trying to absorb all the fragments and nuances of this ritual that had grown out of our fear and need. There was nothing salutary in the dusty sheet above us, nor in the Christmas lights, nor in the filtered sun petering in from the single attic window. And yet . . . this place had nursed our wounds and buffered our resilience and bolstered our resistance. It had mothered our survival in ways I couldn’t fathom.

This was our last visit to the Huddle Hut. Mom had now had a series of ministrokes, and she needed to live in a smaller place, with emergency care nearby—just in case. So Trey and I had come over this afternoon to pack up the last of her things before the movers came tomorrow. The past weeks had been a slogging journey through mountains of accumulated life-fragments—shelf-fulls of LPs, and closet-fulls of outdated clothes, both hers and his, and drawer-fulls of everyday junk, and cabinet-fulls of china and silver and crystal and pewter. We’d finally had to send Mom to her new apartment, ostensibly to clean it, in order for us to box up and dispose of the inordinate amount of irrelevance—physical and metaphysical—she so desperately wanted to keep.

We’d even cleared out the attic, tossing a dumpster-load of garbage from which we’d rescued only a few old toys and a pair of fifty-year-old roller skates. Trey thought he might be able to get something for them on eBay.

And here we lay in an attic empty save for the Huddle Hut, contemplating the shrunkenness and fragility of the structure that once had felt so grand and safe. Trey rolled onto his back and dropped a fistful of peanuts, one by one, into his mouth. I hadn’t seen him grow up, but in this intimate refuge from our childhood trauma, he suddenly seemed old and strong and calm. My sensitive, fragile brother had deepened into a prevailer who excelled as an “apprenti-chef” in a French restaurant in St. Charles, led his own support group, helped in a homeless shelter, spent time with a handful of good friends who shared his priorities and views about life, and still, somehow, found time to be with me. I was glad to see him developing relationships with so many others, mostly because he’d devoted his entire childhood to just us. And it was good to hear him talk about seeing places and living adventures and investing in people when he’d spent so many years hiding from the outside world because of the stigmas of Davishood. But on this final afternoon on Summer Lane, it was just the two of us lying uncomfortably in our deteriorating hut and contemplating life. That much hadn’t changed.

“You think she’ll be okay?”

I pictured Mom in her new, bright apartment and had no doubt. “Once she gets over having to part with, oh, a couple tons of her most treasured junk.”

“She couldn’t take it all.”

“She couldn’t take a fraction of it, Trey. This place was a Salvation Army warehouse.”

“Speaking of the Salvation Army, you need to go to your senior formal.”

“Who told you?”

“None of your business.”

“And what does the Salvation Army have to do with my formal?”

“Uh—nothing. Just trying to make a smooth segue.”

“Yeah?”

“Old dog—new trick. So tell me about the price of fried okra in Louisiana.”

I gave him my have-you-lost-your-mind? look, but he didn’t see it; he was still dropping peanuts into his mouth.

“Just joking,” he said. “Tell me about your shindig.”

“Not much to tell. I’m not going.”

“And you’re not going because . . . ?”

“Because I’m twenty-two years old and there’s more to starting a new life than dressing up like Taffeta Barbie and spending the night being cut in half by my support hose.”

“You’re not fat and your hair is fine.”

“I didn’t say anything about my hair.”

“Just covering all the bases.”

“Besides, Keith wants to take me, and I’d rather get stuck under the limo and dragged three miles.”

“Keith’s a good guy.”

“Keith’s a great guy. For someone like Kay Schuler.”

“Because . . . ?”

“Because she’d jump at the chance to be his date to the formal and his bride and the mother of his one-point-eight children.”

“One-point-eight?”

“It’s the national average. Read a little, will you?”

“See, here’s the deal. Keith asked you to the formal. Period. I’m pretty sure he didn’t have church bells and national averages in mind.”

“Yeah, but, you know. One thing leads to another and the next thing you know . . .”

“What? You’re happily married and trying to figure out how to fit a standard diaper around your point-eight child?”

“Yeah. Something like that.”

“Well, pardon my bluntness, but you’re an idiot.”

“Gee, thanks, Trey.”

“Go to the formal, Shell.”

“And then what?”

“And then come home from the formal. What’s got you so spooked?”

I marked a pause and tried to figure out how not to sound juvenile when I answered the question. “I think he likes me,” I said. Yup. Juvenile.

“Tell me where he lives and I’ll go beat him up.”

“It makes things weird.”

“Weird how?”

“Weird none-of-your-business.”

“Shell.”

“I don’t want . . . I don’t want to be liked. There. Happy?”

“Because . . . ?”

“Oh, for pete’s sake, eat a peanut.”

Trey turned to face me. “Because if he starts to like you . . .”

I sighed. “Because if he starts liking me, there’s a good chance he’ll stop—someday. Or realize he never really did. And then he might—you know—be mean to my one-point-eight children.”

“So you’d rather grow old ungracefully in a cat-infested apartment, eating donuts and watching your girdle stretch into oblivion, than maybe—just maybe—be loved by someone who isn’t going to break your heart and destroy your children.”

“Uh, you lost me a little with the girdle part, but yeah, that’s the general gist.”

“You’re an idiot.”

“You’re repeating yourself.”

“Shell . . .”

“Besides, he’s a hunter.”

“So you’re turning down his invitation to the formal because he kills rabbits?”

“No, stupid. Because he hunts on Sundays.”

“Huh?”

“I’m holding out for a guy who goes to church on Sundays, Trey.”

“You’re weird.”

“Yes.”

“Really? About the church thing, I mean.”

I nodded and looked at him with as much sincerity as I could muster. “If ever—and by ever, I mean probably never—but if ever I get relationship-tempted by a guy, I want him to be accountable to the Big Man. I’m just hedging my bets in case, you know, the church bells and national average thing.”

“You want it.”

“I do not.”

“Go to the formal, Shell.”

“Eat another peanut, Trey.”