The Darling Dahlias and the Cucumber Tree

She nodded, perplexed, and felt the prickles of apprehension on the back of her neck. Something serious was going on. She didn’t know what it was, or why it ought to involve her, but— “And don’t worry,” he said, and gave her a lopsided grin. “Just do what I say and you won’t have anything to regret”


Which perplexed her even more. But she had never questioned Mr. Moseley and she wasn’t about to start now. She got her purse out of her bottom desk drawer and went down the stairs to the street, thinking that she’d better go next door to Hancock’s and buy some sugar. She’d stop at Mrs. Freeman’s house and pick up some eggs, too. Mrs. Freeman had a dozen laying hens that produced more eggs than she could use, so she traded the extras to the neighbors. Lizzy was already in debt to her for three quarts of raspberries, to be paid off when the berries were ripe.

But just as she stepped onto the street, a blue Ford coupe pulled up in front of the building and Grady Alexander jumped out. He was wearing his working clothes—blue shirt with the sleeves rolled above the elbows on tanned, strong arms, dark twill wash pants, sweat-stained felt fedora. He had what Lizzy thought of as that “Grady look” on his face, the intent look he wore when he had his mind on something serious.

Seeing him, she felt herself flushing, remembering Saturday night, when things between them had almost gotten out of hand. After the picture show, they had driven out to the bluff just beyond the Cypress County fairgrounds, where they parked under the shadowy trees. The flickering stars seemed brighter in the absence of the moon, and the languid music of the frogs and night birds drifted through the open windows of Grady’s Ford. Maybe it was the romantic scenes in the picture show that pushed him into that restless, urgent mood. Or maybe it was just what he said, that they had been seeing each other long enough and it was high time they made up their minds to get married—meaning that it was high time that Lizzy made up her mind, because Grady had already made up his.

Whatever it was, things had definitely gotten a little steamy between them in the humid, breathless dark, certainly a lot steamier than she had intended. She had pushed his hands away and made him stop at the point when she knew that if she didn’t make him stop right that very second, she would stop wanting him to stop and— It wasn’t that she was a prude, or that she was saving herself for marriage, as her mother insisted she should. No. And it wasn’t that she didn’t want it, too, because she did, probably more than she was willing to admit. And she might’ve, if the question of doing it weren’t so tangled up with the puzzle of love and marriage. Grady seemed to have the idea that you only did it with someone you loved and meant to marry, either soon or someday. If they did it, he was bound to think she loved him and meant to marry him, and she didn’t want him to think that. Not yet, anyway. The days when she knew she didn’t mean to marry Grady still outnumbered the days she thought she might want to, someday.

“Hello, Grady,” she said, as casually as she could.

“Hullo, Lizzy,” Grady replied brusquely, and strode past her. Then he stopped and turned and snatched off his hat, and the sternness in his high-cheekboned face softened. Somewhere in his family, far enough back so that nobody quite remembered where or when or who, there had been an Indian—Creek maybe, or Choctaw. The lineage might be forgotten, but the lines on his face were clear enough. “Sorry. It’s not you, doll. I’m in a hurry. I gotta talk to Charlie.”

Doll. She wished he wouldn’t call her that, but there was no point in saying so—again. “What is it?” she asked, caught by the intensity of his expression.

“Come inside,” he said, and pushed open the door, standing back so she could go first. Grady had graduated from ag school at Auburn and was educated in the latest farming methods, but he was still a Southern gendeman. Or at least he had been, until Saturday night.

The Dispatch office was the size of Moseley & Moseley upstairs, but was just one large, tin-ceilinged room, with a wooden counter built across the space about ten feet from the front door. Behind it, Charlie Dickens was typing at his battered old desk, wearing his usual green eyeshade, a white shirt and tie, and a sleeveless gray vest. A cigarette dangled from one corner of his mouth. Behind him, at the back of the room, the newspaper press sat silent—he wouldn’t crank it up and start printing until Thursday evening, after Lizzy and Mr. Moseley had quit for the day. It made a lot of noise.

“Charlie,” Grady said urgendy. “Hey, Charlie.”

Charlie glanced over his shoulder. He was a large man, past middle age, fleshy and half-bald, with hard, penetrating eyes that didn’t seem to go with the plump softness of the rest of him.