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shouldn’t have a boy’s name.
    When Sunny finally joined the Navy my father said, well, they’ll make a man out of him.
    He’s a man, I said, believe me. Look at him and tell me he’s not a man. Because Sunny towers over my father, has a Rambo build, and a walk, smile, and way about him that oozes confidence. Hair the color of the sun, deep blue eyes. Always tanned, always. Even my mother murmured, oh, he’s a man, Sunny is.
    But my father shook his head and said, I don’t mean that. I mean the boy has a boy’s ambition, you only have to listen to all that talk about the big waves, the surf, the beach—either he’s a boy or a fish, but he’s not someone with his eye on the future. He’s not someone thinking about a profession!
    One of the hard things about going to college in your hometown is that your family meets your dates right away. If I had the good luck to live in a dorm, my father couldn’t cross-examine all of them while I finish dressing and get myself downstairs. Even when I’m ready ahead of time, he manages to squeeze out as much information about them as he can, once he’s shaken hands with one, and while we’re standing there looking for our exit line.
    He likes Alan right away.
    After dinner is over, while Alan and I go for a walk, Alan says, “I really like your family. Did they like me, do you think?”
    â€œI know they did.”
    But my mother never once threw her head back and laughed, the way she used to when Sunny was at the table, never said, oh, you! to Alan, like someone trying hard not to love his teasing—no one ever teased her but Sunny.
    He’d tell her she looked like Princess Di (maybe … a little) and he’d often exclaim, you’ve made my day, darlin’! when he’d taste her special fried chicken. My father calls her Kate or Mama, and he can’t eat anything fried because of the cholesterol, but they’ve been rocking together on our front porch through twenty years of marriage, and he does have a profession: law. He’s a judge.
    Oh, is he a judge!
    Sunny, he said once when Sunny alluded to a future with me. Every Friday noon Marybeth’s mother comes down to my office and we go out to lunch. It’s a ritual with us: I get to show her off to my colleagues, and we stroll over to the hotel, enjoy an old-fashioned, have the special-of-the-day, and set aside that time just for us. … I hope someday my daughter will be going down to her own husband’s place of business to do the exact same thing.
    Later Sunny said, He wasn’t kidding, was he?
    Him? I said. Kid? I said.
    It was a week to the day that Sunny asked me to marry him. We were just graduated from high school. I was already planning my courses at the university when Sunny got wind of a job in Santa Monica, running a shop called Sun & Surf. Sunny’d moved from California when his folks broke up. His mom brought him back to Greenville, where she waited table in his grandfather’s diner. … I never knew what Sunny’s father did for a living, but my father, who spent a lot of time trying to worm it out of Sunny, said it sounded as though he was a “common laborer.” Can’t he be just a laborer? I said. Does he have to be a common one?
    Marybeth, said my father, I’m just looking out for you. I like the boy. He’s a nice boy. But we’re talking here about the whole picture. … Does Sunny ever mention college?
    I want to go to college, I told Sunny.
    You can go out on the coast somewhere.
    How? Daddy won’t pay for it if we get married.
    We’ll figure out something.
    It’s too vague, Sunny, and too soon.
    What’s vague about it?
    Don’t you want to go to college, Sunny? Don’t you want a profession?
    Sunny said he couldn’t believe I felt the way my father did, in the letter he left with my mother for me. He said the Navy was his best bet, and at least