The Darling Dahlias and the Silver Dollar Bush

Lizzy often wondered whether she had bought the house as a way of fending off Grady’s determined courtship. True or not, she had definitely put off saying yes to him, much to her mother’s chagrin.

“The Alexanders are fine Christian people,” Mrs. Lacy frequently fretted. “I think the world of Mrs. Alexander, and Grady has a good job, and gumption. And he takes such good care of his mother, too.” She would pause to let the full implications of that sink in, then add, “You’ll never find anybody better, Elizabeth. And you’re not getting any younger, you know. Shilly-shally much longer and you’ll lose your looks, and then you’ll never find a husband. You’ll be an old maid, that’s what you’ll be. And you won’t have anybody to blame but yourself, my girl.”

Lizzy didn’t disagree with what her mother said about Grady as a prospective husband, for he had gone to college and gotten an agriculture degree and worked as the county ag agent. The job didn’t pay a lot but it was steady, and he was good at it. But while her mother seemed to feel that old maids led unhappy lives, Lizzy wasn’t so sure. Just look at Bessie Bloodworth, who had never married but who was perfectly content to look after her little family of boarders at the Magnolia Manor. And Verna, who often said that she wouldn’t have another man if somebody paid her to take him. And Fannie Champaign, who—

No, not Fannie, Lizzy thought. Fannie might be an old maid, but she wasn’t contented. Fannie wanted a husband. Actually, she wanted Charlie Dickens (or thought she did), although it didn’t look like she was going to get him.

“And Grady is extremely good-looking, Elizabeth,” Mrs. Lacy would add, in a censorious tone. “You cannot object to him in any possible way. It’s just sheer obstinacy on your part. You are every bit as stubborn and hard-hearted as your father. You never think of anybody but yourself.”

Lizzy never understood exactly how stubborn and hard-hearted that was, since her father had had the misfortune of dying when she was a baby. She only knew that whenever she fell short of her mother’s expectations, she was her father’s daughter. He apparently had never measured up, either.

Grady himself never came right out and said that Lizzy was stubborn and hard-hearted. She suspected he thought so, though—but not for the reason her mother did. He thought she was stubborn and hard-hearted because she wouldn’t . . . well, go all the way.

Now, Lizzy was no prude. She certainly enjoyed their steamy sessions in the hot, breathless dark, parked in Grady’s blue Ford on the hill above the Cypress Country Club’s eighteenth green. But she always made him stop when she knew that if she didn’t make him stop right that very second she would stop wanting him to stop, and that was dangerous. It wasn’t wrong, exactly, at least not morally wrong—at least not morally wrong in her view, since in spite of what the preacher said on Sunday mornings, it seemed to her that God had better things to do than punish his children when what they were doing didn’t hurt anybody else. And she wasn’t worried about getting pregnant, because Grady carried those rubber things in his wallet, just in case she might change her mind, which wasn’t revolting at all but rather sweet and touching. She knew, because she had found one there when he gave her his wallet to run into Jake Pritchard’s filling station and buy them each a cold soda.

But it was dangerous in a different way, for if she and Grady had sex, he would take it as a signal that she was ready to marry him. And while she cared for him—sometimes she even thought she loved him—she wasn’t ready for marriage. At least, not just yet, although she had been shaken by the intensity of the jealousy that had gnawed away at her when she’d thought that Grady was planning to take DeeDee Davis to the Kilgores’ party last summer.