The old ladies could tell me what you were like as a little boy. You were probably a crybaby then, too.”

Great. She could meet Angela. That would be a delightful conversation.

“Just very sensitive,” I say.

“If you’re spoiled rotten, the least little thing upsets you.”

She laughs, not knowing how pampered I was the first fourteen years of my life. Th quintessential Southern male child. Waited on hand and foot. It’s a wonder I learned how to change my clothes. Is the reality of the adult male too much to deal with? Until my father started going crazy when I was eleven, I had my mother’s full attention.

According to Marty, she might as well not have existed. As a child I’d

come down the stairs into the kitchen and Mother would be waiting like my personal servant to cook my breakfast.

The sports pages of The Commercial Appeal out of Memphis would be beside my plate, and she would pour me a cup of hot tea and watch me sweeten it with three teaspoons of sugar. Then she would vacuum my room and make my bed.

No wonder I’m a crybaby. What male wouldn’t be in perpetual mourning for that kind of worship?

I persuade Amy to cook over at my house, which doesn’t take a lot of effort, now that I finally have heat. I suspect that she would prefer for Jessie to shit on my rug instead other own. We stop off at Harvest Foods and I pay for some angel-hair pasta and stuff for salad. In the store we must seem as married as any other couple, but last night during dinner and afterward I couldn’t get Angela out of my mind and was too quiet. Despite two kids, a husband, and thirty years in the Arkansas Delta, Angela’s basic personality hasn’t changed.

Circumstances and time have made her more conservative, but I put myself in the same category. I pretended I was preoccupied by the memories the trip had stirred up. My pretending didn’t prevent me from making love to Amy last night and again this morning.