Chapter 18: Not a Proposal

On Thursday morning I handed my husband a white envelope on the porch and watched what he did.

He looked at it for a while.

It had his name on the front, in my handwriting, and no tape on the flap.

Then he ran his thumb under the flap and tore it open right there in front of me.

"Read it out loud," I said.

He unfolded the card inside. His eyebrows went up.

"Spring picnic. Saturday, eleven o'clock, school field." He cleared his throat. "Sit at my table."

"You opened it."

"You handed it to me."

"Yes. I did."

He understood then what the test had been, and he did not say anything clever about it.

"I'll bring lemonade," Floyd said.

"Bring ice. The lemonade's covered."

On Saturday the school field was full of folding tables and children who had been fed sugar since breakfast.

Floyd came across the grass in a clean shirt with a bag of ice on his shoulder.

Every mother at the long table watched him do it.

The mother who was a nurse, the one who had called her sister about the rumor, looked him up and down.

"You walked off the Stallworth ranch and left the company truck, I heard."

"I left the keys, ma'am."

"Mm." She slid a plastic cup across to him. "Sit down before I change my mind."

He sat on a bench beside my aide, in the shade, and nobody told him he was in the wrong seat.

I went to run the three-legged race.

I had twenty-two five-year-olds in a line on the grass, and one dad short, so I called him over.

"You're the second leg," I told him. "Your partner is the girl in the green shirt. She bites."

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