“You mean you and Mr. Whitshank?”
“Just like Romeo and Juliet,” Mrs. Whitshank said. She laughed, but then she sobered and said, “Now, here is something you might not know. Guess how old Juliet was when she fell in love with Romeo.”
“Thirteen,” Abby said promptly.
“Oh.”
“They taught us that in school.”
“They taught Merrick that, too, in tenth grade,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “She came home and told me. She said, ‘Isn’t that ridiculous?’ She said that after she heard that, she couldn’t take Shakespeare seriously.”
“Well, I don’t know why not,” Abby said. “A person can fall in love at thirteen.”
“Yes! A person can! Like me.”
“You?”
“I was thirteen when I fell in love with Junior,” Mrs. Whitshank said. “That’s what I’m trying to tell you.”
“Oh, goodness, and here you are now, married to him!” Abby said. “That’s amazing! How old was Mr. Whitshank?”
“Twenty-six.”
Abby took a moment to absorb this. “He was twenty-six when you were thirteen?”
“Twenty-six years old,” Mrs. Whitshank said.
Abby said, “Oh.”
“Isn’t that something?”
“Yes, it is,” Abby said.
“He was this real good-looking guy, a little bit wild, worked at the lumberyard but only just sometimes. Rest of the time he was off hunting and fishing and trapping and getting himself into trouble. Well, you see the attraction. Who could resist a boy like that? Especially when you’re thirteen. And I was a kind of developed thirteen; I developed real early. I met him at a church picnic when he came with another girl, and it was love at first sight for both of us. He started up with me right then and there. After that, we would sneak off together every chance we got. Oh, we couldn’t keep our hands off each other! But one night my daddy found us.”
“Found you where?” Abby asked.
“Well, in the hay barn. But he found us … you know.” Mrs. Whitshank fluttered a hand in the air. “Oh, it was awful!” she said merrily. “It was like something out of a movie. My daddy held a gun to his neck. Then Daddy and my brothers ran him out of Yancey County. Can you believe it? Law, I think back on that now and it feels like it happened to somebody else. ‘Was that me?’ I say to myself. I didn’t lay eyes on him again for close onto five years.”
Abby had slacked off on the biscuit cutting. She was just standing there staring at Mrs. Whitshank, so Mrs. Whitshank took the glass from her and stepped in to finish up, making short work of it: clamp-clamp.
“But you kept in touch,” Abby said.
“Oh, no! I had no idea where he was.” Mrs. Whitshank was laying the biscuits in the greased skillet, edge to edge in concentric circles. “I stayed faithful to him, though. I never forgot him for one minute. Oh, we had one of the world’s great love stories, in our little way! And once we got back together again, it was like we’d never parted. You know how that happens, sometimes. We took up right where we left off, the same as ever.”
Abby said, “But—”
Had it never crossed Mrs. Whitshank’s mind that what she was describing was … well, a crime?
Mrs. Whitshank said, “I don’t know why I’m telling you, though. It’s supposed to be a secret. I’ve never even told my own children! Oh, especially my own children. Merrick would make fun of me. Promise you won’t tell them, Abby. Swear it on your life.”
“I won’t tell a soul,” Abby said.
She wouldn’t have known what words to use, even. It was all too extreme and disturbing.
Mr. and Mrs. Whitshank and Red, Earl and Landis, Ward, Dane and Abby: eight people for lunch. (Merrick would not be eating with them, Mrs. Whitshank said.) Abby traveled around the table doling out knives and forks. The Whitshanks’ silverware was real sterling, embossed with an Old English W. She wondered when they had acquired it. Not at the time of their wedding, presumably.
Her parents just had dime-store cutlery, not all of it even matching.
Suddenly she felt homesick for her bustling, sensible mother and her kindly father with his shirt pocket full of ballpoint pens and mechanical pencils.