Uncle Lyman had more than a month to hear about his marriage. Austin didn’t have the stomach for a confrontation he was sure would come. In no way was he prepared for their unexpected meeting.

Leaving his office on his way to pick up Jenny at the end of their work day, he spotted his uncle’s battered farm truck cruising in the parking lot. His jaw tightened, dreading a string of verbal garbage he must sift, deciphering what it meant. No time for games, impatiently, he waited while the truck pulled up beside him. Slouched behind the steering wheel, his uncle, glared through a bug-spattered windshield.

“Hey, Uncle Lyme.” Austin forced an upbeat greeting, as he approached the open window. “I’ve been meaning to call you.”

Glowering steely-eyed, Uncle Lyme snorted. “Szat so, boy?”

Burr under his saddle, Austin surmised, hoping the burr wouldn’t be a need for money. “Is there a problem at the farm?”

“I’ll handle the farm, BOY!” Lyman snapped.

Boy being used in a most repulsive manner, his uncle neither greeted him nor looked in his direction. Get this over with, fast, Austin decided. “Why did you want to see me?”

Fire in his eyes, his uncle turned on him. “I’ll be tellin’ ya a thing or three.”

The impulse was to walk away. Uncle Lyme had hunted him down; he wouldn’t let a prey escape. Employees were streaming from the buildings, heading for their cars. Could he avoid an ugly, public scene? He shifted footing, glanced at his watch. “Okay. ... Shoot.”

“One,” Lyman began, a pudgy index finger jabbing perilously close to Austin’s face. “Urd bout yur nuptils from some otha’ parties.”

“Sorry about that,” Austin commented crisply. “It was sudden, you know.”

“Boy!” his uncle flared, face twisted in a scowl. “Where ta hell’s yur head at? Thought ya waz too smart ta knock up some young slut. An ingin’ slut ta boot!” He slammed the wheel with his fist.

Slut!! Austin’s fists were clenched prepared to punch his uncle square in his filthy mouth. What held him back, he didn’t know. Saliva, hot and briny, sprayed from his mouth. “You just wait a damned min—”

“Ta run off ‘n git yurself hitched.” Like a hammer blow, a fist smacked the steering wheel with a bone-crushing thud. The tirade continued. “Damned, downright stupid!!”

Austin swallowed, found a stone-cold tone. “Hold it, right there!” he growled. “You don’t talk to me like that!” Shouting attracted attention.

“‘er this, boy,” Lyman shot back. “No dirty ingin squaw’s ever comin’ on my place. We shoot ‘em varmits.”

Before Austin could react, Lyman gunned the engine. A backfire like a cannon going off, he jumped back.

“Un I ain’t comin’ ta no party in yur honor!” Lyman yelled as he hurled a rolled-up missile through his window. A parting shot, he stomped the gas. Wheels spun. The truck lurched forward in a hail of dirt and gravel. Trailing an acrid stench of burning rubber and exhaust, he roared from the parking lot.

Narrowed, smarting, Austin’s eyes followed. Onlookers couldn’t help but notice the ruckus. Their eyes diverted, they went about their business. Fuming and embarrassed, he did the same. Swatting up the missile he’d deflected, he crushed paper in his hand as he made his way to his Vette.

Uncle Lyman could be crude in the way he expressed his opinions. Austin kept Jenny out of his uncle’s way for just that reason. This! This was off the wall ... warped. And unforgivable.

He turned the key, gunned the engine. A drive would clear his head—no time. Jenny would be waiting, and all that week she’d been apprehensive. They’d been invited up to Evermore for dinner—command performance. He had to put this ugly incident behind him.

Always predictable—dinner at the Welborne’s: Cocktails at seven, clear soup at eight, followed by rare leg of lamb, mint sauce; desert, coffee. Brandy in the parlor. Out the door before nine thirty. The servant’s left soon after. The well-to-do lived on a schedule dictated by the hired help.

The skirmish with Uncle Lyme, ugly as it was, Austin moved to the back burner while he and Jenny were at Evermore. She thanked the Welbornes for the coffee service ... and for the evening when they left. In between, when queried, she responded with a stiff, short sentence or two; her natural charm submerged. He swallowed his outrage, schmoozed. With the Welbornes he’d become adept at faking it.

A dinner table conversation that had lapsed into a business meeting earned Aunt Audra’s rebuke. AJ had been gracious with Jenny, parental, as he’d be with his daughter, Elizabeth, whose name and active social life came up in conversation, as did Meredith’s social connections.

The apartment was stuffy when they got home. Separately, they went from room to room raising the windows to cool, night breezes. He finished in the alcove off the kitchen, taking in a full, deep breath—the first he’d drawn for hours. “You were quiet tonight,” he observed.

Her face a mask, Jenny stood in the doorway acknowledging his remark without a word.

It bothered him the space she sometimes put between them. He couldn’t tell her about Uncle Lyme—another wedge between them. His work was complicated; she knew that. Her work, a sore subject. The silence made him edgy. “Soooo. What do you think of Evermore?” The first time she’d been inside.

She drew a long, pensive breath. “Elegant!” Releasing the breath, she slumped, as though the stuffing went out of her. Dinner had been draining.

“Yeah! Aunt Audra has her ostentatious side,” a dismissive wave. “And, she has her social causes.”

Jenny grimaced, so slightly he barely caught the look.

“Uncle AJ’s more down to earth.”

She murmured in a tone so low he barely caught the words. “She doesn’t think I’m good enough for you.”

That hurt. ... Damn, Aunt Audra! Flashing to the surface, outrage he’d suppressed throughout the evening. He took Jenny by the shoulders, sputtered, “Don’t ever let anyone make you feel that way. You’re as good as anyone. Better! Better than most.” He shook her, carried away with his anger.

The look on her face became defiant. “I know who I am, Austin.”

Get control, you’re acting crazy, Man. Aunt Audra had been condescending; made a pointed comment about a friend of his and John’s who’d made “a most unfortunate marriage.” He let Jenny go, turned away. His hand ran down his face. “We don’t have to see them anymore, unless it’s business,” he said, trying to calm the situation.

“Tonight, at Evermore,” she said, spacing her words. “I saw it clearly. ... We come from ... different worlds.”

He’d balanced on the fringes of those differences. Evermore wasn’t his world.

“Have we made a mistake?” Tears were glistening in her eyes.

He winced, feeling her pain, or his own. The question was out there. “Mistake? Not me. Right here ... with you, that’s where I want to be.” That came easy, and he meant it. “Where do you want to be?”

A light shone from her eyes when she turned to him. “With you.”

Yeah, she said it. He grinned, glanced into their bedroom. “On our magic island?”

“We can’t stay on our island forever.”

He said they could. But she was right. The outside world intruded, nosy tourists on the beaches leaving garbage on the clean, white sand, spoiling the place. He folded his arms around her. “No mistake. You and I are from the same world, Jenny.”

“I’m afraid for us.”

“Don’t be. We’re too good to split apart. I won’t let us.”

Hours later, he lay next to her, breathing as she breathed. She slept. He couldn’t. Uncle Lyman’s twisted attitude posed an obvious threat. He couldn’t see the freakin’, coward confronting Jenny. He’d cut all ties with his uncle; let the lawyers handle the estate.

The Welbornes were more subtle in their disapproval. They held his future in their hands. He’d have to deal with them, and keep his self respect as his dad had done. How he’d pull that off he hadn’t figured yet.

Morning came too soon. She decided to walk the few blocks from their apartment to her offices; needed the exercise, she said. He couldn’t talk her out of walking, so he got into his Vette and headed to his meeting in a neighboring town. On route he passed crumbling, fieldstone walls, decaying fences—remnants of the once proud home of the Burdettes. His dad’s business stood where tall weeds covered the foundation. The remnants of his mother’s gardens all that remained of the place where he was raised.

Young Loy trusted Uncle Lyme, the man who’d pulled him from lake water when he’d fallen overboard. Though he had no memory of it, he believed what others said. The Burdettes overlooked Lyman’s faults. He was family, after all. Later on, he’d come to see that Lyman had a mean streak, and a sneaky way about him.

Ironic. If not for Uncle Lyme, he might not have found the girl he’d dreamed of since that cold day in February they’d met at Welborne House—not for the first time, it turned out. He’d looked into her eyes, felt her warmth. Warmth he felt each time her image came into his head.

Austin drove up to a stop sign, turned left, away from the remains of Burdette Farms. That Warriors’ game was the last time he and Uncle Lyme had gone anywhere together. His Uncle spurted comments about the Negro players on the squad. “We gotta keep ‘em down. Ya let ‘em niggers up; they think thar good as us white folks.” A thrust of Uncle Lyman’s elbow in his ribs, making his point. “Mark my words, Boy, “em niggers is gonna be trouble.”

He’d heard others say the same, though there were few Negroes in Welborne or all of Twin Springs County to cause the sort of trouble people feared: freedom marches south of the Mason/Dixon; war-like images on TV. The Pines kept to themselves up on the mountain.

The Iroquois were feared. They stayed on the reservation, mostly, protecting their land, their way of life, so Jenny said. The tribe claimed the county as their birthright. Conflicts on occasion boiling over into violence on both sides. It wasn’t his fight: righting wrongs against the Negro, or the Iroquois. Bigotry directed towards his wife was personal, and vile. That made him mad enough to fight. Mad enough to cut his uncle completely out of his life.

Was Audra Welborne’s class prejudice any less evil? To her, Jenny could never be “one of us”—Highborn. His mother had been Highborn; Dad wasn’t. Did that make him Highborn? The Welbornes thought he was, or they wouldn’t think that Jenny was beneath him.

Highborn came with advantages, and disadvantages. By current standards, the men he worked with were middle class. He could hold his own with average Joe’s, or in any social setting. Aunt Audra lived in a time long gone—Highborn obsolete.

He turned the wheel around a sharp curve. A wad of paper rolled from under the seat. On the straight he reached down, picking up Uncle Lyman’s parting shot. Straightening crumpled paper in the fingers of one hand, he read: Please join us in our happiness for Austin and Jenny. From there he skimmed: Surprise reception, the Hamlins’; two weeks from this Sunday.

Oh, oh! Same day he had a golf date with AJ and customers from one of his major accounts. And then he remembered, Jenny told him her Mom was coming in that weekend for a family gathering, and to meet him. That’s what she’d been told—a cover story. He’d play along, keep the contents of this invitation quiet.