True was upstairs with a pink velvet ribbon that would weave a veil of white and a lilt in her throat humming love songs. Cozy was downstairs in a snit that her daughter was in a pet about a half-brother she thought was a cousin. And Mawz? He was coming up the walk coming up the steps stepping to the front door to call on a girl with an abundance of jack-in-the-pulpits he had picked for her, his arms overflowing with pinks and purples bowing shyly in their sheaths of green, he would give them to her and she would love him for them and they would dance and they would wed and they would bed.
Cozy’s fury opened the vestibule door before Mawz had a chance to tap on the opaque glass (and before he even withdrew his knocking knuckle), her heat was enough to blast his blue eye brown and his brown eye straight. She said to him in a killing whisper, You’re not going to see her, stay away from her, and she gave him a moment to let the threat absorb. He had a smile on his face that was a fresh peach turning, and as soon as the fuzz of him darkened, she drew her knife to peel the spoiling skin. Ask your father, she said, if he hasn’t already told you, she hissed, it’s time that he told you, she said, the rumor is true.
If Mawz was in a saddle, say, and the horse stopped abruptly, his body would continue forward an extra split second and then the pommel would crotch him. A split second before he was a boy with an armful of flowers for a girl he was taking to a dance and a split second later still in motion he was on the threshold of not breathing, ever again. The jack-in-the-pulpits in his arm were all the sweeter to Cozy in their wasted, wilting way. Leave now, she told him then, stealing the air and taking it back inside behind the closing door. What Mawz did on the other side of that opaque glass Cozy wasn’t concerned with. She was waiting now for her daughter to come downstairs, her sensible daughter who needed to come to her senses where boys were concerned.
True bounded down the stairs two at a hop, her braid with its pink velvet ribbon clippety-clop on her back. She hadn’t heard the door, the exchange, the air sucking into a void; it was the double ting-ting of the clock’s 8:15 that brought her excitement down to ground level. He’s late, she said to her mother, and Cozy shook her head in mute oh well. True got herself a glass of water, she smoothed her braid over her right shoulder then her left, she sat down, she stood up, she pulled back the lace curtain on the parlor’s front oriel and peered out to the gate for a sign in the dark. She perched on the edge of a hassock and smoothed her skirt and smoothed it again. Cozy took up her knitting on the davenport in silence; the only commentary she’d let loose was the click of her needles. She could see on True’s face, around her mouth, around her eyes, what True had seen in the looking glass upstairs when she allowed herself that bit of annoyance: the tight skin, the pinch of disappointment—men do that to a woman’s face, Cozy’s smile seemed to say. The clock’s ting-tong said it was 8:30 and ting-ting at 8:45 and nine times tong-tong it was nine.
Was it a ghost, a riff of effluvium in the breeze, a moth against the opaque glass of the front vestibule door that caught True’s attention at that moment and said to her go to the door, girl, your boy’s been here? Whatever came over her, her sensible self knew to obey, and to Cozy’s silent thrill True flew to the front vestibule door and rattled its opaque glass as she pulled it open in a rush. There was no one there, there was no air, no moth, no Mawz, nothing to grab hold of in the dark, nothing she thought, until she looked down at her feet and saw a mound of jack-in-the-pulpits on the porch, he had dropped them in a heap, a heap as high as her boots, and they were curling in the summer night, hundreds of them, rotting to slime. So, True slammed the door shut. She slammed it shut for good. Cozy never said a word. And True was left to hate the only boy she might have loved.