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“YOU’RE FROM WHERE, CAL?” Claudia shouted across the table, knotting her face into a frown that rolled lines of pink powder from wrinkle to wrinkle.
“OHIO,” he shouted back, unsure whether to correct Claudia’s pronunciation of his name.
“And then I told her, ‘Hon, I’m not going to any shower for the daughter of a woman who cut me dead when Skeeter and I had to get married,’” Voncille was telling Dixie.
“Can I have more chicken?” asked Paul, and Voncille forked a drumstick onto his plate without losing a beat in her monologue.
“You ever heard of Linda Lovelace?” Jackson asked Estill, who remained bowed over his plate and kept spooning mashed potatoes into his mouth, which appeared deficient in teeth.
“And your mother’s maiden name was what?” Frances asked Kyle with interest.
“Oh, you wouldn’t know his people, Memaw,” Dixie volunteered hastily. “By the way, this is the best cranberry relish you’ve ever made.”
“Let me tell you how I make it so you can do it yourself. I take my food grinder—that’s the old crank one that Mama had when she first married—and I wash the cranberries real good, getting all the dirt and leaves off. Then I—”
“I intended to send a present, but right off I changed my mind, money being tight and Skeeter being jobless again,” Voncille said. “Maybe I’ll just mail a card after the baby’s born, whether Jenny gets married or not.”
“Listen, dumbhead, stop kicking me under the table,” Liddy told her brother, who reached for the creamed corn and managed to spill it down the front of his shirt, whereupon Skeeter, his father, sent him to the bathroom to clean it off.
“You grind up the nuts medium-coarse, and pecans are best,” Frances went on. “Lord knows I’ve got enough pecans from my trees, that is, if the squirrels don’t get them all.”
“Did you say you were from Iowa?” Voncille asked Kyle politely.
“Get all the little pieces of shell off the nuts before you grind them. You could break a tooth otherwise.”
Kyle kept munching on his third piece of fried chicken. He’d heard that Southerners really had a way with fried chicken, but he wouldn’t have believed it could be so light and crispy.
“They’ve got this back room at the video store, it’s for adults only,” Jackson was telling Skeeter enthusiastically.
Voncille shot a warning glance in his direction and addressed him in an undertone that everyone heard anyway. “Jackson, there are children present. Please talk about something else.”
“I didn’t get any mashed potatoes, Mom. Can you put gravy on? Who’s Linda Lovelace?” Paul asked.
“Kyle shoes horses. It’s what he does for a living,” Dixie explained to someone, Kyle wasn’t sure who.
“HE SHOOTS HORSES? WHAT KIND OF JOB IS THAT?” Claudia asked, and Kyle almost choked on a mouthful of iced tea.
“Kyle shoes horses, Aunt Claudia,” Liddy said in her loudest voice.
Frances blinked off into the distance for a moment. “I had a horse when I was a child. His name was Booster. Now, how come I can remember that horse’s name when I can’t even recall where I put the pickled okra?”
“I carry everything I need for shoeing a horse around in my truck,” Kyle told Liddy who stared at him entranced.
“The horse, too?”
“No, not the horse, the horseshoes and the equipment I use to attach the shoes to their hooves.”
“Daddy, when can I have a Tootsie Roll?” Amelia chimed in.
“Hush up, Amelia.”
“You use big long nails, right?”
“Does it hurt the horse?” Paul asked.
“And then I fold in the cranberries, just so.”
“Uncle Estill, would you like to go to the video store with me sometime? Next week, maybe?” Jackson asked despite a glare from Voncille. Still gumming mashed potatoes, Estill gave no sign that he’d heard.
“I KNEW SOME KALBS OVER NEAR LAURENS,” Claudia shouted. “A BIG FAMILY. THEY OWNED A CAR DEALERSHIP.”
“No relation,” Kyle said.
“And then all you have to do is put it in the refrigerator and eat it,” Frances said, though Kyle was sure that by this time, no one was listening.
It went on like this until all the fried chicken and mashed potatoes were gone, which was when Voncille pushed back her chair. “Well, I guess we’re all finished eating. Is anyone ready for fudge cake? I brought one along.”
Estill raised his head and spoke for the first time. “I’d like some cake, Vonnie, but first I’ll have some of that pickled okra. Can you mash it up real good?”
“I told you, Estill, I couldn’t find the pickled okra,” Frances said with great patience.
“Come on out to the kitchen, Memaw, I’ll help you search for it,” Liddy said comfortably as she slid off her chair. She took Frances’s hand and the two of them disappeared.
Kyle caught Dixie’s eye and was surprised to recognize an amused glint there. He smiled back, and she shrugged lightly as if to say she couldn’t help it, this was her family and she loved them.
Though he was lacking in family himself, her attitude struck Kyle as really important. Some people would be embarrassed by the carryings on and eccentricities of the people involved. However, Dixie had made it plain that she was not. Maybe more than anything else, Kyle liked this about her.
WHEN THE TWO OF THEM arrived back at Dixie’s place after dinner, Kyle wished she wouldn’t go inside right away. He had no desire to spend the rest of the evening alone contemplating the sexual sparks that seemed to fly between them.
“I had a good time,” he said. “Thanks for inviting me.”
“Oh, we’re a fun bunch, all right,” Dixie said with an amused laugh. “Life wouldn’t be the same without my family especially now that my sister’s moved away.” She seemed pensive as she pulled a jacket closer around her in order to fend off the cool night wind that soughed through the pine trees.
Impulse took over, making him bolder. “Let’s walk out on the dock and you can tell me how your sister happened to marry Luke Mason,” he said. He liked Luke Mason’s movies, which generally consisted of snappy dialogue, an attractive cast and a couple of improbable car chases. Plus, a discussion down on the dock might lead to something far more interesting.
He was delighted when Dixie said, “If you like,” though he cautioned himself against getting his hopes up. They walked together across the grass, past the flower bed he’d cleared earlier and onto the dock. Several loose boards could use nailing down, he noticed in the light of the full moon, and certainly one or two needed to be replaced.
When they reached the dock’s end, they leaned companionably side by side on the railing where the moon path on the water rippled toward the opposite shore. The air was fragrant with the scent of green growing things and another indefinable fragrance that Kyle suspected was Dixie’s shampoo.
“Would you really like to hear about my sister and Luke Mason?” she asked.
“Of course,” he replied easily. Suddenly it seemed as if everything about her interested him.
With a wistful half smile she said, “Carrie and Luke Mason are a love story that was meant to be. She didn’t figure it out right away, it took her a while. Oh, when she realized—well, she blossomed. Bloomed.”
Kyle was slightly uncomfortable with this topic because love had certainly never done that for him, but he’d rather not destroy Dixie’s romantic notions. He wasn’t required to comment, however, because she went on talking.
“Luke Mason was here to film a movie, Dangerous. It’ll be released next summer. It’s about our local stock-car-racing hero, Yancey Goforth, and how he came out of nowhere to become one of the greatest race-car drivers of all time.”
“I’ve read something about the movie. Doesn’t it have a more serious plot than his earlier films?”
“Carrie says he may be nominated for an Academy Award, it’s that good.”
“He’s an underrated actor, in my opinion.”
“They filmed part of the movie in Smitty’s, my sister’s garage, because it offered the ambience of the era when Yancey was getting started in stock-car racing. In fact, Yancey and my grandfather were friends. A couple of weeks before Carrie signed a contract with the movie company, I tried to talk her into converting the garage into a real estate office so we could go into business together, but she refused. Our dad left her the garage and the home place and me enough money to take a real estate course and put a down payment on my house.”
“How can your sister keep her business if she’s married to a movie star?”
“She sold Smitty’s to her mechanic. She retired so she could travel with Luke, and she wants to bear his children.” This was said dramatically, though Dixie was smiling. “Who wouldn’t?” she added wryly.
“You’ve got a point there,” he agreed.
“How about you, Kyle? Ever been married? Have any children?”
He shook his head. “No, unfortunately.” The last angry quarrel with Andrea two weeks ago still rankled; she’d informed him that even if they got married, which according to her was most unlikely, she didn’t want kids.
Dixie gazed out over the water, and he began to suspect that she didn’t discuss personal things with strangers. Why she’d chosen to so honor him, he couldn’t imagine, but something inside him opened to her.
“I’ve never been married, either,” she said. “I wish—but you don’t need to hear about that.”
In his time, Kyle had lent an ear to women who bemoaned the fact that they weren’t getting any younger but hadn’t found the right partner yet and to several others who belatedly wished they’d borne children in marriages that had ended in divorce. Usually he tried to steer them away from the topic. However, with Dixie, he was eager to learn more.
“Try me,” he said, gazing down at her.
“I could have married young, to my high-school boyfriend. I sent Milo away, and he never came back.” She seemed pensive but stoic in the manner of someone who had given a great deal of consideration to whether she’d done the right thing.
“That’s too bad,” he said automatically, but was it?
“A marriage between us would have been a disaster,” she said.
“That depends on if you’d been able to grow together,” Kyle suggested mildly.
Dixie slanted a glance up at him. “Do you consider that important? Learning and growing with a life partner, I mean?”
“Of course,” he answered, unable and unwilling to stop himself. “Shared experiences are the glue that holds two people together.”
Dixie leaned closer, which might have been by accident or design, he couldn’t tell which. Or maybe the rough railing was sticking a splinter into her arm, a distinct possibility if a person wasn’t careful.
She easily resumed the thread of conversation. “Take my cousin Voncille and her husband, Skeeter, for instance. They got married when she was seventeen, and she dropped out of school to work until their baby was born. She’ll tell you herself that when they started out, she had a lot to learn about marriage and children. Even though they don’t have much money, there’s a lot of love in that family. Together Voncille and Skeeter are both better people than they would have been apart.”
Kyle didn’t often get the chance to state his own opinions about relationships and how they worked. He usually left that to someone else. But if he had been in the habit of saying what he wanted or needed from a woman, he would have said that two people together should be halves of one whole. That each of them should help the other become the best person he or she could be. Dixie’s understanding of this principle not only surprised him, it validated his thinking. He was silent for so long that Dixie studied him out of the corner of her eye for a long moment before speaking.
“I haven’t said anything to offend you, have I?” she ventured.
He cleared his throat. “No.”
“For a while there, I wondered.”
“I, uh, well. Of course I’m not offended,” he said. Where have you been all my life? he was thinking.
He liked her way too much, and maybe she was assuming things that she shouldn’t. He wasn’t ready to enmesh himself in another situation where there was no getting out, yet he was thirty-two years old and ready to settle down.
Dixie was gazing up at him, the moon reflected in her blue, blue eyes, her eyelashes casting feathery shadows across her cheeks. He longed to run his hands under her sweet-smelling hair, press his body close to hers and whisper her name softly in her ear. Don’t do this, he told himself. Stop it. Don’t. Not that any relevant part of him was listening.
Dixie saw his intent, and she did not back away. Even though he’d known her only a bit longer than twenty-four hours, even though when they’d met, he’d been wearing a Yankee uniform, even though she knew nothing about him other than what he’d seen fit to relate.
“Oh, Kyle,” she said, exhaling his name on a long breath. Before she could tell him to stop, he did what was possibly the stupidest thing in his life, considering that he quite possibly still had a girlfriend back in Ohio. He swept Dixie Lee Smith into his arms and kissed her.
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