In 1969, my big sister lied to the boy I loved, then married him herself. She died last spring. At her funeral, he asked why I never wrote him back. My daughter grabbed my arm. “Mama, people will talk.”
The summer I turned seventeen, Dewitt taught me to drive his daddy’s hay truck out in the valley. I’d never driven anything that big. The clutch fought me, and Dewitt laughed so hard I could barely hear his directions.
He had a laugh that started in his chest and took over his whole body. When I gave him my class ring on a shoelace, he wore it under his shirt. I thought that meant we had made a promise, though neither of us was old enough to know what kind.
That fall I left for nursing school in Sacramento. I wrote to him every week, fourteen letters in all, on pink paper from the drugstore. I’d sit at my little desk after class and tell him what I was learning, then ask about the hay and his family. I folded each letter carefully. I was sure he’d answer.
He didn’t. At Christmas, I called Madge, who worked the counter at the Yerington post office.
“Honey, I’m sorry,” she told me. “He’s seeing somebody. Let him go.”
I remember holding the phone against my ear after she said it, as though there might be more. I didn’t ask who the somebody was.
I told myself there was no point making her say it twice.
By spring, the somebody was Madge. They married in June of 1971, and I stood up front in a lavender dress and smiled until my face hurt.
Madge caught me looking at Dewitt once before the ceremony. She leaned in, still wearing her wedding lipstick.
