Two Shades of Morning Read Free Page B

recliner, which served as a divider between our living room and kitchen. “You reckon Her-highness thinks we just gone drop what we doing and run right over?” he said.
    Earlier, expecting a full afternoon of rain, he had left his tractor in his Daddy’s tobacco patch and rushed home to make love, and we’d started too soon, were sated before the drizzle even set in. Now we were both feeling mellow and drained, looking forward to sleeping to the pitter of rain on the metal roof. “I don’t know who she thinks she is,” he said, “bossing people around.”
    “Who does she think she is!” I laughed and sat on the arm of his chair for him to scratch my back; his hand went up automatically, scratching under my t-shirt as he gazed off. “You haven’t met Sibyl yet!” I said. “But we have to go; Robert Dale will be hurt if we don’t.”
    “Close as me and him’s been, you’d think he’d of brung her by before now. Just up and married out of the clear blue! Not a word to nobody but Miss Lettie—saying he was in love, or some such—but even she didn’t figure on him jumping the gun that quick.” He dropped his hand from my back. “Way I see it we don’t owe him nothing.”
    I got up and went to the kitchen for a drink of water. “Let’s don’t be too hard on him, P.W. He was probably afraid people around Little Town wouldn’t know how to take her. She’s different.” I didn’t know why but suddenly I wanted to go. Maybe I didn’t want to cook, maybe I was curious about P.W.’s reaction. His instincts were sharp as an Indian’s.
    “Well, still looks to me like he’d of broke the news before he brung her home.” His blue eyes looked brighter in his blistered face. “Course, he ain’t never mentioned no girl since I took you off his hands.”
    I laughed and flicked water at him, then stared out the kitchen window at the woods where dark started.
    “I ain’t kidding, sugar,” he said, “I do think he was crazy about you.”
    “No, he was not!” I hated it when P.W. turned serious. “We were friends, that’s all, probably cause y’all were.” “You sure that’s all they was to it?” He lunged and yanked up my shirt tail on my naked butt as I headed for the bedroom to get dressed.
    P.W. was really too smug in himself to suspect that I had seriously considered marrying Robert Dale. Probably wouldn’t have bothered him anyway. But I kept it to myself, believing that telling might hurt P.W.’s ego, or somehow diminish what I’d had with his best friend. Robert Dale and I had just faded, like a powdery prom corsage pressed in a book with only its colors memorized. And whatever had been among the three of us—call it friendship, call it love—ended when P.W. and I got married.
    As for Robert Dale not having brought his new bride over, that didn’t seem at all strange to me. Folks in Monroe County had little patience with formalities. If someone was born or died, folks came. They went to weddings and church and baptisms on the Withlacoochee River, to reunions and basketball games, and any other goings-on at the same high school they’d graduated from for half a century. Carting one’s bride house to house was unnecessary: Monroe Countians figured they’d meet her soon and often in the course of the long marriage. Golden wedding anniversaries were big in our little town.
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    I dressed up that night. My best pink a-line knit and black pumps. My fake pearls, I took off, then put them on again. Pleased with how I looked and Sibyl bedamned. Glad that my hair curved smoothly from a side part. Usually, in wet weather, it frizzed. We walked up the road in the dark rain, latched to one another with P.W.’s jacket over our heads. Matching strides and cozy in the peal of frogs, we shared breath with his head bent to mine. I was shorter by half a foot, but we fit like lovers chiseled into the same stone. His hand kept riding to my breast from our crisscross of arms. I shrugged it away, giggling