CRYSTAL ON THE CREEK: A Small Town Labor Day Rom-Com

Dear Roena County Residents, Happy Labor Day! Today's story was inspired by a couple of my grocery store runs, lol. There's truly inspiration everywhere, and for some reason I get a lot of mine in the supermarket. Probably because that's my main source of consistent interaction with the general public these days, since I don't have an office to go to every morning. Today we're checking in with our boy Luke Kincaid. Y'all know Luke, Roena County's go-to handyman, who first showed up inThe Pipe Dream inside Everyone Falls in Love. Based on that erotic comedy, we already know Luke is an ass man, and well, it appears nothing has changed. I've had this in drafts all summer (decided this morning to re-work to fit Labor Day) but, I've been on the fence about whether or not I want to keep sharing my shorts here based on some changes Substack has made. I've been going back and forth with it but, the other idea I had well…people keep pirating my shit off Amazon. So I gotta figure something out. Anyway, enjoy today's short, and let's gossip in the comments. THE WESTONBERRY TIMES: Small Town. Big Feelings. Deep Roots. is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. I was born and raised in Juniper. Smaller than Westonberry, fewer people, more dirt roads than paved ones, farmland stretching out flat and green until it met the treeline and gave up. Outside the Jubilee, and the fact that it made D-Truth, wasn't a soul outside Roena County who could point to Juniper on a map or tell you why they should. Folks liked to laugh about how nothing ever happened here, how the only reason to slow your car down passing through was the Juniper Juneteenth Jubilee. That's easy to say when you don't live here. If you did, you'd know we had our own kind of fun, and the Big Creek Cookout on Labor Day sat at the top of the list. Every summer we hauled our grills and our coolers and our folding chairs down to the water and set up like one big raggedy family. We talked shit, we danced, we slapped dominoes until the table legs shook loose from the joints. If you hadn't laid eyes on somebody since last Labor Day, you'd find them at the creek with a greasy paper plate in one hand and twelve months of gossip in the other, ready to catch up like no time passed at all. The General Store wasn't gon' have half what my mama needed, so I drove out to the Winn-Dixie sitting on the borderline of Caldwell Crossing. Looked like every last soul in Juniper had the same idea that morning. Lot was packed tight, not a cart left in the corral. I shook my head, grabbed one of them little hand baskets, and went on in, nodding at faces the whole way down the first aisle. That's what comes from being a handyman round here. I'd fixed something for damn near everybody from Caldwell clean up through Westonberry, a leaky faucet here, a busted porch step there. People remember the man who fixed things round their house. 'Luke Kincaid!' The voice came booming from clear across the store. I looked up and there was Roderick, both arms thrown in the air like he was flagging down a rescue chopper in open water. 'Roderick, what's going on, man?' I stopped and let a smile spread. 'Ain't shit! You finna head down to the creek?' 'Yeah, just grabbing a few things first!' 'How ya mama doing?' 'She good! She'll be round there! Yo cousin Daphne all right? I know she been off since Diane passed!' 'She still a fucking drunk! Same shit, different toilet!' Everybody in Juniper knew Daphne had buried her older sister Diane and hadn't been right since. Matter fact, thinking on it standing there, I wasn't sure Daphne had ever been right to begin with. Diane's husband, Housel, he'd gone quiet after. Didn't leave that farm of his much except to drop his daughter at school or pick her up, though he'd show up at her track meets without fail. I'd catch him out there sometimes, standing off by the fence with his hat pulled low, watching her run like she was the only thing left worth watching. I hoped him and Keisha were doing all right out there by themselves. 'You know,' said an old lady rolling by on a motorized scooter, not even slowing to say it, 'if you'd just walk over to your friend, the whole store wouldn't have to hear your business.' She delivered that sentence like a preacher closing a verse and kept right on rolling. 'Old people need to mind they damn business,' Roderick said, shaking his head. 'Got bout two summers left and tryna ruin ours.' He never saw the second one coming. Another old lady eased up behind him quiet as a church mouse and clipped him dead behind the knees with her scooter. Roderick folded up in sections, like a lawn chair somebody forgot to latch. Knees first, then hips, then whatever pride he walked in with. His groceries scattered across the linoleum. A can of biscuits rolled off toward the freezer case, taking its time, like they didn't want no parts of what just happened. 'Talk shit now, chump!' the old woman cackled, and scooted off at a top speed of maybe three miles an hour while half the store lost it laughing. 'Y'all seen that?' Roderick hollered from the floor, craning his neck for a witness. 'Police! POLICE! Somebody call somebody!' Grown man laid out flat in front of the Faygo display, hollering for law enforcement on a woman with a handicap placard and a church fan riding in her basket. Wasn't even a getaway. She was still in plain sight, easing down the cereal aisle with her turn signal blinking like she had all day and nothing to answer for. 'I'll get up with ya!' I said, and kept it moving. Because if I didn't finish my mama's list quick, another grown man in this store was fixing to get assaulted by the elderly today, and I wasn't in the mood to be the second victim. I made my way to the poultry section, and Lord, it looked like the last helicopter out of Saigon. Folks crowded three deep around the case, elbows out, reaching over each other for chicken like they'd never eaten before in their lives. Mama's list said two ten pound bags of leg quarters and the bin was looking sparse, picked over the way a cornfield looks in November. I found my opening between a big fella in a Cowboys jersey and a woman with rollers under her bonnet, still in her house shoes like she'd rolled straight out the bed and into the Winn-Dixie. ''Scuse me now. 'Scuse me.' First bag came up easy. Ten pounds of frozen leg quarters, cold as a debt collector's heart. I dropped it in my basket and it bent sideways under the weight. Then I reached for the second bag, and that's when the bonnet lady's hand landed on the other end of it. We locked eyes over ten pounds of chicken. Neither one of us let go. Somewhere behind us a buggy wheel squeaked, lonesome as a harmonica in a western. 'Baby, I had my eye on this one,' she said, sweet as pie crust, grip like a bear trap. 'Yes ma'am, but my hand's on it.' 'Your hand's onmychicken.' 'With respect, ma'am, this chicken don't know you.' Her eyes went small. She leaned in close and I caught a whiff of Bengay and bad intentions. I'd already watched one grown man go down in this store today. Grown women were undefeated as a rule, and this one couldn't have been more than 65, still on her feet under her own power. 'Tell you what,' I said, easing my tone down to the one I use negotiating with a mad customer. 'There's a whole 'nother bin of thighs right there, barely touched. Thighs got more flavor anyway. Everybody know that.' She didn't blink. 'Then you take the thighs.' We stood there a while, sizing each other up. I looked down in her cart. Collards, a pack of neckbones, a bottle of Welch's passion fruit, a watermelon by the handle. She smiled, gold flashing on her bottom row of teeth. Any other day I'd have made friends with her right there and worked my way to an invitation, because I just knew that woman could cook and I would've gone. Wasn't nothing in that cart headed to the creek, though. Collards and neckbones like that meant Sunday dinner on a Monday, somebody's husband at the table or a house full of grandbabies she'd already promised to feed. She had her own Labor Day to run, same as me. I sighed and let go of the bag. You don't stay alive in Juniper by winning every fight. You stay alive by knowing which chicken is worth dying over, and this wasn't it. 'Have a blessed day, ma'am.' 'Mmhmm.' She dropped the bag in her cart and rolled off victorious, house shoes shuffling across the tile like a champion leaving the ring. I stood there a second, then leaned over the bin, and way in the back corner, tucked behind some turkey necks like the Lord hid it there Himself, sat one last bag of leg quarters. Frost on it thick as mercy. I looked left. I looked right. Then I snatched it quick and walked off like a man who done stole something. 'Is there a holiday I don't know about? Why everybody down to the Winn-Dixie today?' The voice came from the next aisle over, warm and honey-slow, and my feet started following it before my brain had signed off on the trip. I turned the corner and stopped dead. There it was… A big ol' juicy booty in a white sundress, bent over the bottom shelf like an answered prayer I hadn't even finished praying. Time stopped. And then, I swear on my granddaddy's toolbox, the store speakers crackled and the Backstreet Boys came on. 'I Want It That Way.' Now understand me. I'm a country man. I was raised on Frankie Beverly, Johnnie Taylor, and whatever my mama hummed while she snapped beans. But every man my age got that one boy band song installed in him at the factory, and when them opening notes floated down over the poultry section, it wasn't a song no more. It was a prophecy. Whoever was working the speakers up in that little office deserved a raise and a church nod, because the Lord was DJing now, and He was speaking directly to me about them gray leggings. I did want it that way. Baby, I wanted it every way. That way. This way. The scenic route. 'Please let the face match the ass,' I whispered over the music. 'Please let the face match the ass, Father.' I'd been let down before. Every man has. You see the back of a masterpiece and then she turns around looking like she bites through electrical wire for fun. So I stood there, twenty pounds of chicken pulling my arm out the socket, praying over a sundress in a Winn-Dixie while five white boys from the nineties harmonized behind my prayer like a choir. 'Girl, I couldn't even get a cart,' she went on, phone tucked between her ear and shoulder. 'A basket, nothing! Oh it's Labor Day? Hell, I ain't even know the way my schedule been runnin' me ragged, chile.' 'Please, Jesus,' I begged, low. 'I don't ask for much. I fixed Miss Odessa's water heater for free. I'm owed this.' She stood up and turned around. Father God in Heaven. Gorgeous wasn't even the word. Gorgeous was the word's little cousin. This woman had a face like Sunday morning after a Saturday night you'd lie to your pastor about. Deep brown skin catching the fluorescent light like even the Winn-Dixie bulbs knew to act right. Full lips moving a mile a minute into that phone, and eyes that hadn't landed on me yet, which was fine, because I needed the extra seconds to remember how breathing worked. The face matched the ass. The face exceeded the ass. The face made the ass look lazy. My prayer had been answered so hard I almost dropped my chicken. I caught myself mouthing along to a Backstreet Boys song, head tilted, one arm going numb. That's when her eyes landed on me. 'What you looking at?' she asked. Shit. Words. I had words. I'd been using them my whole life. I was known throughout three towns for my mouth. Say something smooth, Luke. Say anything. 'Big Creek Crookout,' I spit out. Crookout.Thirty-four years of talking, and my mouth chose today to hand in its two weeks' notice. She blinked slow. Then she went back to her phone without taking her eyes off me. 'Girl, lemme call you back. I think this man need help. He standing here sweating, holding chicken, mouthing white boy songs, talking 'bout some crookout.' A pause. 'Mmhmm. Like Uncle Junebug. Mmmhhhmmm. Before the medication.' Who was Uncle Junebug? 'Alright girl, bye.' She hung up and looked at me with the kind of pity usually reserved for dogs on the ASPCA commercials. All I needed was the sad Sarah McLachlan song and a phone number at the bottom of my chest. 'Do you know where you are, baby? You want me to call somebody? Blink twice.' I made a point of not blinking at all. Held my eyes open till they burned. Now I was a man holding chicken, not blinking, tears forming, which made things worse. 'I know where I'm at,' I said, and my voice came out an octave too high, so I coughed and brought it back down to grown man. 'I'm at the Winn-Dixie.' 'Okay, that's good.' She slowly nodded, encouraging me, like I'd spelled my first word and was fixing to dig in her purse and find me a sticker. 'And what year is it?' 'Cookout. Big Creek Cookout. It's a cookout. At Big Creek.' Every word made it worse. I was a man standing in a hole, asking for a bigger shovel. She'd asked me the year and I'd answered with a cookout. If they gave out degrees for fumbling, I'd have been walking the stage right then in a cap and gown. 'You got somebody I can call for you?' Yeah, a surgeon to remove this foot from my mouth. My mama, so she could come get her son, because he was not going to make it home under his own power. I cleared my throat. 'Ain't nothin' wrong with me.' She looked at me for a long second. 'No there's not.' She smiled. 'You is kind. You is special. You is smart.' She took my hand when she said it. Held it in both of hers, thumb rubbing the back of it, gazing up at me. There I stood, getting comforted for a condition I did not have, holding twenty pounds of leg quarters like an emotional support animal. I just nodded along. Lord help me, her hands was soft and I was enjoying it. 'What's your name?' I asked her. Somewhere in the back of my skull, my brain stood up and slow clapped. 'Crystal.' Crystal.Of course it was. The kind of name you hold up to the light and admire, cause it look so good. 'I'm Luke.' 'Hi Luke.' She smiled at me and I almost got lost in it. 'You real pretty.' 'Thank you.' 'Ain't nothing wrong with me for real,' I said, trying to get my feet back under me. 'You was asking why it's so full today. It's the Big Creek Cookout, for Labor Day.' There it go. Good job, Luke.My brain gave me the nod you give a rookie after his first catch. 'Ohhh... oooohh!' She started putting two and two together, and I watched the math land on her face piece by piece. She slapped her forehead. 'Not me out here doing a wellness check. That's so rude.' 'It's ok,' I chuckled. 'That's why the state won't pass me, prolly.' She said it more to herself than to me, gazing off toward the frozen foods like her whole career was over there thawing next to the peas. Then she caught my face watching her and snapped back. 'I'm in school for nursing,' she explained, waving a hand like that cleared everything up. 'Failed my boards twice, and now look. Man tries to tell me about a cookout and I'm out here checking his pupils in the Winn-Dixie. No wonder I failed. Patient says he's fine, Crystal. Believe the patient, Crystal.' 'In your defense, I did say crookout.' I chuckled. 'And you did look like you was going through some kind of malfunction.' I laughed. 'I know. It's just your booty, I mean —' Somewhere behind my ribs a record scratched clean across, and my brain took off sprinting down a long hallway holleringno no no NO, don't you dare,too slow, already gone. She tilted her head. 'Your beauty,' I tried again, working hard to sound smooth, landing somewhere closer to a man reading his own confession off a cue card. Sweat found the sides of my face like it had been waiting on an invitation too. 'Oh!' She let go and laughed with me, shaking her head. 'Well, you ain't too bad looking yourself there.' 'Thank you.' I rubbed the back of my neck and set the basket down between us. My arm, free for the first time in twenty minutes, didn't know what to do with its new freedom. It just hung there useless at my side like it had never once in its life belonged to me. I had no idea what a normal man did with his arms. Never once thought about it before this exact moment, and now it was the only thing I could think about. 'So ummmm... you here by yourself, or...' 'Down to the Winn-Dixie? Yeah!' She smiled, bright and confused. 'Oh, ok...' Shit. What else?The silence rolled in like fog. I nodded. She waited. I nodded again, deeper this time, like nodding was a hobby of mine. A man walked past us with a buggy full of ice and I almost asked him to stay. Just say it, Luke. She's standing right there. She quoted The Help to you. She held your hand. The hard part's over. Say it. 'If you ain't got plans later, you should come to the cookout.' It came out fast, all one word almost, like ripping off a Band-Aid, and then I couldn't stop the rest from following. 'It's usually Juniper folk, like a big family reunion type thing. Eat, drink, dance, talk, swim in the creek if you want. It's a little vibe. Unofficial, on the calendar, but folk from the town proper know about it.' She didn't answer right away, so I heard myself keep going. 'You ain't gotta swim. If you don't. Swim, I mean. Some folk just put they feet in. The feet part is optional too. All of it's optional, really. It's a free country. It's a creek.' Somewhere my daddy, God rest him, turned his face away from Heaven's window, because he couldn't watch no more. 'Ok, I'm down!' she smiled. 'Aight well thanks for letting me know, it was nice —-' I started reaching for my basket then stopped when I realized what she said as I looked up at her. 'you said yea?' 'Yea!' she said all bubbly. I looked around tryna make sure this wasn't a joke, dug my nails in my palms to make sure I wasn't dreaming. 'What time?' she asked. 'Well, I'm finna grab this stuff and head out now but we'll be out there way past dark. Come when you ready, I'll give you the address and lot.' 'I'll ride with you now then,' she said with a shrug and started putting her stuff back on the shelf. When she bent over to do it I had to grab my own heart like an old church deacon as I tried to process what was happening. What did she mean by that? 'You can take me there, then just bring me back here to my car afterward.' She continued, like she heard the question in my head. She had the whole itinerary planned in four seconds. Meanwhile it had taken me two full conversations to ask her one question. That's the difference between men and women right there. We out here practicing in mirrors, and they just decide things. Then she stood up and turned back around. 'You ain't no serial killer, is you?' she asked me, dead serious with her eyes squinting at me. 'Me?' I pointed at myself. 'Nah!' 'You got any references?' 'A lot of people in here from Juniper headed out to the creek too. You can ask 'em. I'm they handyman, I —' 'Old bitch! Bet I knock yo ass off that fucking scooter next time!' Roderick came down the aisle hot, walking in our direction, yelling the other, pointing back toward the front of the store. 'My son gon' come in here and whoop yo ass!' came floating back over the shelves, from a woman doing three miles an hour somewhere near the greeting cards if my calculations was correct. 'Tell him I be right here in aisle 8!' Roderick kept walking, chest out. Then he spotted me, stopped, and yelled back toward the front one more time, loud enough for the whole store, 'wit my homeboy LUKE! LUKE KINCAID!' And there it was. My reference had arrived. Crystal turned to me slow with one eyebrow up. 'That's your character witness?' She asked me. 'I ain't say him specifically.' 'You a co-defendant now.' 'I don't even know what happened up there!' 'Mm.' She looked at Roderick, who was rolling his shoulders like a man warming up to lose to a grandmother twice in one day. Then she looked back at me. 'You know what? A serial killer would have better friends. Let's go before you end up in a fight.' She grabbed my hand and we got the hell out of there. Let me say that again. She grabbedmyhand. I ain't reach for hers. This woman took my hand like it was already hers, like she'd left it at the store last week and come back for it, and pulled me down the aisle while I floated along behind her like a balloon at a birthday party. Behind me I could hear Roderick calling out, 'Aye, Luke! LUKE! You got me, right? Where you going?' And that's a sad sound, a grown man's voice cracking as he realizes his backup done left the building. I ain't look back. Lot's wife looked back and she was more established than me. Look what happened to her. Whatever happened to Roderick in aisle 8 was between him, that scooter, and God. I'd known that man since third grade. I loved him like a brother. And I would light a candle for him at the cookout, next to the potato salad, where he'd have wanted it. Crystal followed me while I grabbed everything else on my mama's list, and let me tell you, I have never shopped like that in my life. Man on a mission like an episode of Supermarket Sweep. Foil, off the shelf, in the basket, gone. Lawry's, gone. I was moving through that Winn-Dixie like the building was on fire, because every aisle we cleared without incident was a miracle, and I'd done used up my miracles for the month. My luck was running on fumes and I knew it. We scanned it quick at the self-checkout, and the machine, hand to God, only hollered 'unexpected item in the bagging area' one time, which for me was a personal best. Then we pushed through them automatic doors and got the fuck up outta there. The heat hit us like an open oven, and Crystal put her sunglasses on, walking beside me across that packed parking lot like this was normal. Like she rode off with country boys from the supermarket every day of her life. I'd walked into that Winn-Dixie a regular man with his mama's list, and I was walking out with the finest woman in three counties on my arm and a story wasn't nobody gonna believe. Best trip to the store I ever took in my life. And my mama ain't even know it yet, but her list was about to bring home one item that wasn't on it. You heard Big Creek before you saw it. We came down the gravel road with the windows half down, and the bass found us first, Method Man and Mary J., "You're All I Need," rolling up through the pines like thunder that had learned to keep a beat. Then the smell hit, charcoal and lighter fluid and somebody's ribs already talking, and Crystal sat up in my passenger seat like a bloodhound. 'Oh,' she said. 'Y'all not playing.' 'I told you. This the real thing.' We came around the last bend and the creek opened up below us, and I watched her take it in. Trucks and cars parked nose-out in the grass, three long rows deep. Canopy tents in every color the Lord ever made, blue tarps strung between tailgates. Grills going every fifty feet, each one with its own commander standing over it, tongs in one hand, drink in the other, spinning stories with the smoke. Card tables. Domino tables. A speaker the size of a deep freezer somebody had run off a generator, and in front of it, a whole line of aunties doing a dance that had been out of style long enough to come back around. Kids running wet and screaming between the tables, and the creek itself flashing silver through the trees, full of more kids and at least two grown men who should've known better. I found a spot at the end of a row and backed the truck in, and I want it on the record that it was the smoothest piece of parking I have ever done in my life. One motion, no corrections. She didn't even notice, which is how it goes. You spend your whole life parking regular, and the one time you park like a valet at the Ritz, the woman's looking out the other window at a man deep-frying a turkey in September. Then I cut the engine, and I had about four seconds of peace before it started. 'LUUUKE KINCAIIID!' Miss Odessa. Free water heater Miss Odessa. Posted up under the first tent with a paper plate in her lap and a view of the parking area, because that's why she sat there, that was her job, she was the town's front door. Nothing came down that gravel road without passing inspection. Miss Odessa's eyes went from me, to my truck, to my passenger door, right as Crystal stepped out of it into the sunshine, sunglasses on, looking like my leading lady. Her plate stopped halfway to her mouth, before she turned toward the tents behind her, and hollered the four words that changed my whole afternoon. 'LUKE DONE BROUGHT SOMEBODY!' It moved through that cookout like current through a wire. Heads came up off dominoes. A card game paused mid-slam. One of the aunties at the speaker stopped mid-step and had to be caught by two others. Somewhere down by the water a grill man looked up so fast his glasses slid, and I swear the music itself dipped, like even the DJ wanted a look. Crystal came around the front of the truck, took in the dozens of faces now pointed our direction, and leaned toward me. 'They do this every time you bring somebody?' 'Don't know. Never brought nobody.' She looked at me over the top of her sunglasses, and smiled. 'Well,' she said, sliding her arm through mine like she'd decided something. 'Let's go say hi to your town.' Everybody said what's up like they always did, but now it came with a second look attached. Dap from the domino table. Nods from the grill line. And in between every hello, folks made appointments with me like I had my book out and not two arms full of groceries. Junior needed his bookcase looked at. Miss Pearl's ceiling fan was wobbling again, said it was gonna take flight one of these days and kill her in her sleep. Somebody's cousin's water pump. I said 'call me Monday' so many times it stopped sounding like words. And under every single appointment, the same question, asked with the eyes, asked with the eyebrows, asked straight out the mouth:who is that? 'A friend,' I kept saying. A friend. Which was technically the truth, the way a tuxedo t-shirt is technically formal. Because what was I gonna say?This a big booty gal I met down to the Winn-Dixie 'bout forty-five minutes ago, she did a wellness check on me by the poultry, then she checked my references and rode off with me?Some testimony ain't for every congregation. Then we came up on the row of grills, and I ain't even have to look for my mama, because her voice found me first, same as the bass had. 'Luke! There you go with my stuff!' She flipped her grill open in a roll of smoke, checking her coals like they owed her money, and reached for the bags without so much as a glance at me. Groceries first, son second, that's a woman with her priorities in order. Then she looked me over, and I watched it happen, the exact moment she registered there was a whole woman attached to my arm. Her head tilted as she lowered her tongs. 'You brought a friend? Who's this?' Now, on paper, them's just six words and a question. But I'd been this woman's son for 34 years, and I heard everything riding under it. You brought a FRIEND, said like the word had a trick floor in it. WHO'S THIS, said sweet, said light, said with her hand already reaching up to fix her hair, because whatever was about to happen next, Ruthie Kincaid intended to look good doing it. 'Mama, this is Crystal,' I said, putting the bags down on the fold out table and nodding for Crystal to do the same. 'She a friend of mine. Wanted to see what Big Creek Cookout was all about.' 'Oh, that's nice,' Mama said. Now. 'Oh that's nice' from my mama is not a sentence. It's a starting pistol. She set her tongs down crossways on the grill rail, wiped her hands on her apron one finger at a time, and put her hand on her hip, taking Crystal in head to toe with the thoroughness of a woman appraising a used car she might could get for a good price. I'd seen her do this to church visitors, new pastors, and one county inspector, and all three had confessed to something before it was over. 'Where yo people from, lil girl?' There it was. The first question is always the bloodline. Not your name, not your job. WHO you belong to. Because in the country, you ain't a person, you're a branch on somebody's tree, and my mama was fixin' to climb that tree limb by limb. 'Uhhh, Caldwell Crossing and Lake Magnolia mostly,' Crystal said. 'My daddy side got a little money, they out in Lavender Hill. But I'm a Caldwell Crossing girl myself.' 'Lavender Hill,' Mama repeated, in the exact voice she used for reading the fine print on a warranty. 'Mm. That's them big brick houses with the circle driveways.' 'Yes ma'am. My daddy and uncle nem own a mattress store out there.' 'Mm-hm and Caldwell Crossing.' Mama tilted her head a degree. 'Who ya mama? I know some Caldwell folk. I used to keep books for a man had a shop out that way, so go on and say the name, I'll wait.' 'Bethanny Ellis is my grandmama. I don't know my mama, met her once when I was like four. Granny raised me.' She said it the way you say a thing you've said a thousand times, smoothed down flat like a stone from the bottom of the creek, no jagged left on it. But I heard it. And my mama heard it, and I watched her eyes do something small and soft for half a second, that thing mamas do when a child hands them a hurt all casual. But this is Roena County. We don't stop and hold a wound up to the light in the middle of a cookout. We find the living thread and we pull it. 'Bethanny,' Mama said, and her whole face was changing. 'Bethanny Ellis. That used to be the manager down to the bank over there on—' 'Pixie Highway!' they said at the same time. 'YES!!' my mama hollered, and clapped her hands together with a crack that turned heads two tents over. And just like that, the interrogation was over. Case dismissed. All charges dropped. Because that's how it works out here, you're a stranger right up until the moment two names touch, and then a bridge builds itself in midair. My mama came out from behind that grill, tongs forgotten. 'How she doing?! Lord, Bethanny Ellis! That woman approved my first car note when wasn't nobody else in that bank gon' look at me twice. I had that lil Pinto!' 'Granny's doing good, she still sharp, still in the same house—' 'Still on Deacon Street?' 'Stillon Deacon Street.' 'I knew it!' Mama grabbed Crystal by both arms like she was checking her for ripeness. 'Girl, you Bethanny's grandbaby? You the one she used to bring up to the bank in them little church dresses?' Crystal's mouth fell open. 'That was me.' 'You used to sit up on that counter with them lollipops!' 'The GREEN ones! She kept the green ones in her drawer for me!' 'Well, I'll be.' Mama stepped back and looked at Crystal all over again, but this was a different scan, this one had sixty years of Deacon Street in it. Then she turned to me, and pointed one finger, and said the words that ended my bachelorhood in front of everybody. 'Luke. Get this baby a plate.' 'Yes ma'am,' I said, and walked off. A few hours later, and you would've thought Crystal was family, born and raised, the way everybody took to her. She'd been pulled into the electric slide by the aunties and held her own. Somebody's baby had fallen asleep on her shoulder for a whole half hour, and she'd just kept talking over its little head like she'd been holding babies at cookouts her whole life. Miss Odessa had already offered her cobbler, which took most folks years to earn. I kept trying to make it make sense. This lady had hopped in a truck with a stranger and come to a function full of more strangers, and she was comfortable in a way I wouldn't have been if the shoe was on the other foot. Me, I'd have been posted up by the coolers all day, nursing one drink, doing arithmetic on how soon I could leave. But Crystal moved through my whole world like a key that already knew the lock. My luck with women had never been what you'd call good. It hadn't even been what you'd call luck. But me and Crystal just... fit. Two puzzle pieces from different boxes that somehow clicked anyway. And standing there watching her, I sent up one of my quiet prayers.Lord, even if she wakes up tomorrow and decides she don't want nothing with me romantically, let me keep her some kind of way. Let her at least be my friend.That's how you know it's bad, when you're already negotiating the loss before you've even had the thing. I watched her drink from a Solo cup, laughing with my cousin Lanie like they'd known each other forever, heads tipped together. 'Where you meet that pretty ass girl wit yo ugly self?' My cousin Frankie, Lanie's twin, materialized at my shoulder the way he'd been doing since we was kids. 'You wouldn't believe me if I told you.' I chuckled and took a swig of my beer. 'What's her story?' 'Don't know yet.' 'Don't know yet.' He repeated it slow, turned it over in his mouth like a piece of gristle, then looked at me the way a teacher looks at a kid who failed a test he wrote the questions to himself. 'And you brought her to Big Creek? What if she a killer, and you done brought her down here to all these potential victims? Whole town in one spot. That's a buffet, Luke. Say she a werewolf. Soon as that sun go down we all dead, and it's on you.' I sucked my teeth. 'That girl ain't no killer.' 'Nah, you right.' He took a long pull of his drink, studying her across the yard like a man weighing evidence, nodding slow, building his case. 'Ass too big for that line of work anyway. Too much wagon for the draggin'. Know what I'm sayin'? You try to outrun 12 with a booty like that, physics gon' turn on you. You need a lil' flat booty woman for a killing spree. Somebody more aerodynamic, with a long back properly built for a getaway.' I choked on my beer, straight down the wrong pipe and this fool patted my back with one hand and kept his eyes on the cookout the whole time, calm as a pond. 'You always had a thing for big asses. Speaking of,' he tipped his cup toward nothing in particular, 'you seen that Jamaican lately? One that own the bed and breakfast?' My mind flashed to Anna-Leigh at The Sugarbird before I could stop it. Gold bangles. That laugh.That ass. I shook her out my head the way you shake water out your ear, quick and hard, before it settles somewhere and causes an infection. Since Valentine's Day I'd trained myself not to even think about another man's woman. Specially Rawlins Foster's woman. 'Nah,' I said, and left it right there. But the thought had already done its damage. It walked in and held the door for the next one behind it. I looked across the yard at Crystal, laughing with Lanie, head tipped back, not a care in the world. I didn't even know if the woman was available. Didn't ask. Just let her, and that ass, hop in my car and ride all the way down to Big Creek like I picked up random women everyday. No ring. I'd checked that at the Winn-Dixie without admitting to myself I was checking. But no ring don't mean no man. Plenty of women walking around unclaimed by paperwork and spoken for everywhere it counts. She could have somebody in Caldwell Crossing right now, somebody who called her twice a day, somebody whose t-shirt she slept in. She'd askedmeif I was a serial killer. She'd checkedmyreferences. Whole time, I hadn't checkednothing.Dammit, Luke. 'I'll be back,' I told Frankie, and started across the yard toward Crystal, a man on a mission, fixing to ask a grown question in a grown way. I got in earshot right as my mama's voice came around the corner of the conversation like a truck running a red light. 'Yeah girl, his lil pediatrician diagnosed him with something back in the day, but I don't pay them doctors no mind.' She waved her hand like she was shooing the entire medical profession off her property. 'He got some kind of ABC. But God is my doctor!' And then she quickened, hand up, head back, feet doing a little step, catching a two-second Holy Ghost right there between the folding chairs. Crystal was nodding along, I could see the questions stacking up behind her eyes like planes over Atlanta. 'You know, I was wondering—' 'HEY!' I arrived like a man sliding into home plate, smiling too wide, voice too loud, cutting Crystal off before that sentence could grow up and hurt me. Both of them turned. My mama looked at me with the pure, unbothered innocence of a woman who had just done all her damage. 'Hey. Hi. What, uh.' I clapped my hands together on nothing. 'What we talking about over here?' 'You,' Crystal said, sweet, and sipped her cup. 'That's what I was afraid of.' 'Baby, I was just telling her 'bout when you was little,' Mama said, gnawing her rib, one shoulder still shimmying with leftover Holy Ghost. 'Ain't said nothing but the truth.' 'The truth got a B in it now?' I said. 'It's ADHD, Mama.' 'That's what I said. Some kind of ABC.' She waved her rib at me like a gavel. 'And look at you. Grown, working, got your own business, your own truck, brought a pretty girl to the cookout. God handled it. Case closed.' 'The pediatrician also handled it. There was medication involved,' I said. And that part was true, though it wasn't my mama who handled it. It was my Aunt Gladys, Lanie and Frankie's mama, who'd marched me to every refill and stood over me at her kitchen counter while I took them, because my mama had spent the whole nineties convinced them pills was gonna fry my brain like an egg in a hot skillet. Said she didn't want her baby 'treated different.' So Aunt Gladys just did it quiet, the way the real work in a family always gets done. One sister prayed loud. The other one drove to the pharmacy. 'There wasprayerinvolved.' 'There was both, Mama.' 'Mm.' She took another bite, unbothered as a cat in a sunbeam. 'Well, one of 'em worked, and something tells me it was my Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. Come on somebody!' She threw that last part over her shoulder to the whole tent, hand up, fishing for an amen, and got two or three back on reflex, because you say 'come on somebody' anywhere in Roena County, somebody gonna answer, they don't even need the context. 'And my mama,' Lanie whispered into her cup, and took a sip. 'To Aunt Gladys,' I said, low, and tipped my beer toward Lanie. Then, before I could lose my nerve to another catastrophe, 'Crystal, can I talk to you for a minute?' 'Sure.' She smiled. 'I'll be back, Lanie.' 'Mm-hmm,' Lanie said, taking the baby from Crystal. I took her hand and we walked past the last of the tents, past the horseshoe pit, past two kids arguing over whose turn it was to drown the other one, down along the water till the bass faded to a heartbeat behind us and the creek got loud enough to hear. Cicadas tuned up in the trees. The light came through gold the way it does right before evening makes up its mind. We found a flat spot on the bank and sat down together. She began taking her sandals off like her feet had been waiting on this creek all day. I watched the water a second. Then I just said it. 'Your boyfriend gon' be mad you out here with me?' 'Boyfriend?' She chuckled, working the second sandal off. 'Luke, please.' 'You so pretty, though. I know you gotta have somebody.' It came out plain, almost like an argument, because to me it was one. Women who looked like her and had the brains and personality to match, did not walk around unattached. That was against nature. Somewhere there had to be a man, a situation, a 'it's complicated,'something,and I needed to know its name and address. She set her shoes side by side in the grass, neat, taking her time, and eased her feet down into the water. Then she looked over at me, and the sunset was doing things to her face that ought to be illegal in a dry county. 'You real handsome,' she said, 'and you ain't got nobody…do you?' 'No,' I said. 'I don't.' 'See.' She kicked a little water, easy. 'It happens. Pretty don't mean taken, Luke. Sometimes pretty just mean tired.' She said the last part to the creek more than to me, and there was a small story living in it somewhere, one I didn't chase yet. 'Folks think somebody like me got men lined up around the block. What I got is a granny, a nursing textbook, two jobs, and a group chat. Ain't a soul out here mad about where I'm at right now.' The water moved. The cicadas sawed on. And I sat there next to the finest woman I'd ever seen in a Winn-Dixie, both of us officially, confirmedly, out-loud unattached, and my heart was beating so hard I was worried she could hear it over the creek. 'Good,' I said finally. 'Good?' She side-eyed me, mouth curling. 'Good.' 'That's it? That's the whole speech?' 'I'm pacing myself. You seen what happens when I rush.' She laughed and bumped her shoulder into mine. 'Crookout,' she said and shook her head, smiling. I laughed at that. 'Tell me everything I need to know about you,' I said. 'Everything?' 'Much as you can. Everything I need to know.' She pulled her feet up out the water and hugged her knees, looking out at the creek like the answers was floating on it. Then she took a breath, the kind you take before lifting something. 'Okay. Crystal Renee Ellis. Twenty-nine. Taurus, and don't make it a thing.' She held up one finger before I could even open my mouth. 'I see you fixing to make it a thing.' 'I wasn't gon' say nothing.' 'You was. Everybody do.' She counted off on her fingers now, businesslike. 'Caldwell Crossing, born and raised, Deacon Street, you know that part. Granny raised me, you know that part too. I do hair on the weekends, front desk at the urgent care on weekdays, nursing school in between, which is why I smell like coffee and disinfectant most days, and why my Saturday off is precious, and why you should feel special I spent it watching your town watch me.' 'I do feel special.' 'Good.' She kept going. 'I can cook, but I don't, so don't get excited. I burn candles like the light bill free. I will fight you over the last piece of anything. I know every word to every Jeezy album. I cry at them military homecoming videos,every time,knowing full well what finna happen, and I watch 'em anyway.' She paused. 'That's probably a red flag. Doing a thing that make you cry on purpose.' 'Nah, that's just Tuesday for some folk.' I assured her. 'And I talk to myself in the car. Full conversations. Both sides.' She looked over at me, checking my face for judgment and finding none, because Lord knows I'd spent the whole afternoon talking to my own hands and sweating. 'Okay, your turn's coming, so save your laughing.' 'Ain't nobody laughing.' I was absolutely smiling. She turned back to the water, and her voice came down some, lost its list-making rhythm. 'Deep stuff... okay. My granny is my whole heart. Everything I'm doing, the school, the two jobs, all of it, that's so she can see me walk across a stage before, you know. While she still sharp enough to hold it.' She pulled a blade of grass and worked it between her fingers. 'My mama's out there somewhere. I stopped being mad about it around twenty-five. That's a rent I decided to quit paying, being mad. It wasn't never gon' give me nothing back.' The creek ran on. I didn't say nothing. Some things you don't interrupt, you just witness. 'And the boards.' She flicked the grass into the water. 'Failed 'em twice, you know that. Third time's later this month. And everybody keep saying 'you got this,' and I know they mean well, but sometimes...' She shrugged. 'Sometimes I'm the one holding everybody else up, and don't nobody think to ask if my arms tired. So.' She clapped her hands soft on her knees, closing the file, and the brightness came back up in her voice like a shade being raised. 'That's the everything. Allergic to shellfish, too. That part's important, don't kill me at no seafood boil.' 'Noted. No shrimp.' 'Now.' She turned to face me full, sunset behind her, and crossed her arms over her knees. 'Your turn, Crookout. Everything I need to know. And I already got the medical records from your mama, so don't leave out nothing, I'll know.' I blew out a breath and looked at the water, because it's easier to empty your pockets to a creek than a pretty woman. 'Luke Nathaniel Kincaid. Thirty-four. Virgo.' 'OH.' She sat up like I'd confessed to a felony. 'See, that's gon' be a thing.' 'Now who making it a thing?' 'You alphabetize something in your truck, I know it. Don't lie.' I did not answer that, because my glove box was arranged by category and she didn't need that ammunition yet. 'Moving on. Born and raised right here, ain't never lived nowhere else and ain't ashamed of it, don't wanna be nowhere outside Juniper. Handyman by trade, took over my daddy's tools and half his customers, so really I'm thirty-four years old driving around in a dead man's clientele, and I mean that in the sweet way.' She smiled soft at that, and let me keep going. 'The ABC, as my mama call it, is real. My brain got about fourteen radio stations and somebody else holding the dial. Meds help. Lists help. It's why I'm good at my job, honestly, fixing something is the only time all fourteen stations play the same song.' I counted on my fingers like she had, because fair is fair. 'I can cook, and Ido,so youcanget excited. I'll watch a western with anybody who'll sit still. I cannot swim good as I claim, and everybody at this creek know it, so if you see me stay where I can stand, mind your business. I sing in my truck like I got a residency, you seen the previews. And I still got a landline at my house.' 'A LANDLINE?' 'For business.' 'Luke, it's twenty-first century—' 'Old folks don't trust a man without a house phone! That landline pay for itself. You want your water heater fixed by a man Miss Odessa can't reach? Exactly.' She was laughing, hand at her chest, and I let myself enjoy it a second before I came down the hill to the other part. 'Deep stuff.' I picked up a flat rock, turned it over in my hand. 'My daddy passed six years back. Heart. He was working a job that morning, hanging a ceiling fan, and I finished it the week after the funeral because the lady still needed her fan. Folks thought that was strange. It wasn't. That was the only thing that made sense to do.' I skipped the rock. Two hops. Daddy would've got four. 'I miss him regular. Not the sad-song way. More like reaching for a tool that ain't in the box no more.' Crystal didn't say sorry. She just moved her foot in the water, slow, and listened. I appreciated that more than she knew. 'And...' I turned the next rock over a long time. This was the part I'd been deciding on since the walk over. 'Here's the thing about me. I'm good with my hands, good with a joke, but context clues?' I shook my head. 'Context clues be getting past me. My whole life. Everybody else catch the signal and I'm still waiting on the announcement.' 'Okay...' she said, slow, waiting on where this was going. 'So sometimes I'll be talking to a woman, being my regular self, thinking we vibing. And what I ain't caught is the ring turned around backwards, or the way she keep checking the door, or the fact that the man across the room done stopped playing dominoes.' I turned the rock over again. 'One time, I learned that one the hard way. Approached a woman at Skeeter's over in Oak Hill, bought her a drink, was in there grinning, doing my whole thing. Come to find out her man was not across town. Her man was walking back from the bathroom.' 'Luke.' 'In front of everybody. Whole bar. And the thing is, everybody else in Skeeter's knew. I was the only man in the building operating on bad information.' The rock left my hand harder than I meant. One hop, gone. 'Ain't nothing happen, well. Nothing much. But I felt about six inches tall walking out of there, and it wasn't even the embarrassment that stuck. It was knowing the signs was all there and I just... didn't read 'em. Again.' She was quiet a minute. The cicadas filled it in. 'So now I ask my dumb questions up front,' I said. 'Like today. 'Your boyfriend gon' be mad.' That wasn't smooth. That was me checking the label before I touch the stove. Cause my whole life I been finding out the stove hotfromthe stove.' 'That's why you checked,' she said. Not a question. 'That's why I checked. I'd rather sound country and corny for ten seconds than be the fool at Skeeter's for another six months. They still call me Cupid down there. It's not affectionate.' She tried to hold it. She really did. I watched her fight it, lips pressed, and then it broke out of her sideways. 'Cupid?' 'Cause I got struck on Valentine's Day after a long day of work that had already beat my ass,' I said, miserable. 'Roderick started it.' 'Of course he did.' 'Man can't even beat a grandmother in a fair fight, but he can hand out a nickname that sticks. Ain't no justice.' 'I don't think your questions are dumb.' She said it simple, no cushion on it, and it landed somewhere I wasn't guarding. 'Sometimes I miss things too.' She looked out at the water, and I felt something shift in her, some door she was deciding about. 'Honestly, this could be a mistake. Getting in a truck with a man I met in the supermarket. My granny would have my hide if she knew, and she'd be right. I probably shouldn't have come out here. But I don't know.' She shrugged, small. 'I feel safe with you.' I smiled. 'You safe with me.' Four words, and I meant them all the way down to my boots. Whatever else I was, the fumbling, thecrookout,all fourteen radio stations, that part of me had never once been in question. My daddy ain't leave me much, but he left me that. She put her head on my shoulder and the whole world got real simple. The creek running. The cicadas. The far-off bass line, soft now as a memory. Her hair smelled like coconut and a long day of smoke, and I sat still as a fence post, scared that if I moved wrong, the moment would spook like a deer and be gone. 'You ever been skinny dipping before, Luke Kincaid?' I looked at her like she was crazy. 'No!' I chuckled, and it came out an octave up. 'Want to?' I looked around. 'With the whole town out here?' 'You said nobody come up this way.' She lifted her head off my shoulder and looked at me, and there was a dare living in her eyes, right alongside something softer that was watching to see what I'd do with it. She had me. Ihadsaid that. Bragged about it on the walk over,this my spot, don't nobody come past the bend, been coming here since I was a boy.Ran my mouth about privacy like a man handing over the keys to his own trap. 'Yeah,' I said slow. 'You really ain't got a man.' 'Told you.' She stood up, and my heart went with her. 'Single women do what they want.' She reached back and let her hair down out the clip. It fell around her shoulders, and the last of the sun came through the trees behind her, and somewhere back at that cookout was two hundred people, my mama, a plate with my name already on it, and every reason in the world to be sensible. Lord,I thought, unbuttoning my shirt with fingers that had fixed a thousand things and suddenly couldn't work a button.All I went to do was buy chicken. By the time I got my shirt off and folded it neat, like I was back at church camp, because a Virgo is a Virgo even at the edge of glory, she was already down to skin. Her behind jiggled with every step as she made her way into the creek. I turned away quick and said a prayer before I bricked up. When I looked back she was coated in moonrise, wading in with her arms out for balance, and I made myself look at the trees for a second. Some things you want to receive in pieces, so you don't blow a fuse. Then she hit the deep part. 'OH.' Her whole voice jumped a register. 'OH, IT'S COLD. LUKE. Why is it COLD IN SEPTEMBER?' 'It's spring-fed!' I called out, cupping myself with one hand like that could hide anything from her at this distance. 'Creek come up from underground!' 'You couldn't tell me that?!' 'You ain't ask! You was busy being smooth!' I looked around to double check that no one was around since she wanted to do all that hollering. 'I'm being smooth in a ICE BATH, Luke Kincaid, get IN here.' And then I was in, and Lord, she wasn't lying. That cold grabbed me by everything I owned. The sound I made was not a grown man's sound. It was the sound of a church organ getting sat on, and it echoed off the far bank and came back to shame me twice, and Crystal laughed so hard she went under, came up sputtering, hair slicked back and shining, laughing still. I swam at her. She shrieked and kicked off, and we chased each other through that cold dark water like the two grown fools we were, splashing, hollering low so the sound stayed under the trees, and somewhere in the middle of it the chasing stopped being chasing, the way it does, and she let herself get caught. Her arms came up around my neck easy as anything as she wrapped her legs around me. My feet found the bottom, sandy and firm, thank God, because I had told her true, I stay where I can stand. The water settled around us and went smooth, holding the moon in pieces. And everything got quiet the way it had at the poultry case. But this wasn't the same quiet. That one had been all me, frozen, praying. This one belonged to both of us, and it breathed. 'Hi,' she said. 'Hi yourself.' Water was beading on her shoulders. That mouth I'd been trying not to look at since the store was close enough now to lose my whole train of thought in. Her skin warm everywhere the water was cold, and my hands at her waist like I been holding her for years. I kissed her. Or she kissed me. To this day we argue about it, and to this day I let her win, because whoever started it, it landed like something we'd both been building toward since the Backstreet Boys came over that store speaker. Slow at first. Then not slow. Her fingers at the back of my neck, mine spread across the small of her back, pulling her through the water till there wasn't no water between us, and she made a small sound against my mouth that I will be thinking about at my own funeral. When we came up for air, her forehead dropped against mine, both of us breathing like we'd swam somewhere far. 'Luke Kincaid...' 'Yeah?' 'I know we just met, but something tells me it's ok to really like you.' She said it right against my mouth, like it was a secret between just us and the creek. 'I'm not reading it wrong?' Because I had to ask. Thirty-four years of missing signals, and here was the most important one of my life, and I needed it in writing. She knew that about me already, that's the thing, and there wasn't a drop of laughing at me in her voice when she answered. 'No sir.' I smiled. 'I got five years on you. Your granny gon' be ok with that?' Crystal pulled her head back so she could look at me proper, and there was so much tickled in her face she almost couldn't get the words out. 'Luke. I am GROWN.' 'I know that.' 'Twenty-nine whole years.' She looped her arms lazier around my neck, settling in like a porch swing finding its rhythm. 'Pay bills. Got a 401k. Little one, but it's there.' 'I'm just saying, you told me your granny your whole heart. I'm not tryna be on the wrong side of Miss Bethany before I even meet her.' 'You just met me today,' she said, chuckling, 'and you already worried about standing right with my granny.' 'Well, just met you and I got her granddaughter out here naked.' 'No.' She pointed, finger on my chest. 'Igotyouout here naked. My idea, remember?' 'You right.' I smiled at her and that witty mouth. She looked at me a long moment, moonlight on the water moving across her face, and then she shook her head slow, smiling like she'd just lost an argument with herself and didn't much mind losing it. She kissed me again, slow, like putting a stamp on something official. 'You gon' be a problem, Luke Kincaid.' She pulled back. 'A good problem?' 'The worst kind. The kind I like.' 'Ok, cause I don't wanna bring no real problems to you. Just wanna spend more time with you. Get to know you for real. Maybe cook for you too.' 'I'd like that.' She kissed me again, then started giggling right against my mouth. 'Luke, you're ummm...' She looked down, then back up at me, eyebrows doing all the talking her mouth wasn't. 'What you want me to do, Crystal? We skin to skin, you pretty as hell and nice to me and keep kissing me?' I chuckled, real bashful about my body saying what my mouth was trying not to. She bit her bottom lip. 'Maybe ummm... maybe you can cook me breakfast, in the morning. After.' She said it all mischievous, eyes cutting up at me sideways. 'After what?' 'After you put me to sleep with it.' She bit her lip again, slower this time, like she wanted him to watch her do it. I looked at her a long second, taking my time the way you take your time with something you already know you're gonna keep. 'Crystal Ellis…your granny know you out here being fast?' I asked, squeezing her behind, unable to help myself. She laughed, right into my collarbone. 'You gon' tell on me?' She pecked my lips, quick, then lingered on the second one like she just had to have another one. 'Nope.' 'Good.' We kissed again, longer this time, her hands finding the back of my neck. 'Wherever you go after this, that's where I wanna be.' I pressed my nails into my palms, made sure one more time that I wasn't dreaming. I felt it which meant it wasn't a dream, and she was real too, which meant this whole impossible day was actually happening to me and not some other, luckier Luke Kincaid in an alternate universe. Because that's the thing didn't nobody tell you about getting everything you wanted. Some part of you keeps waiting on the catch. Keeps checking the room for cameras, checking your own pulse, waiting on your mama to shake you awake and tell you supper's ready and you fell asleep in the recliner again. My life had trained me to expect the other shoe, and here I was standing waist deep in cold creek water with the finest woman in three counties wrapped around me, and no shoe was dropping. 'You wanna be with me?' 'Wherever you go.' I pulled back just enough to look at her, moonlight and creek water and all, and I needed her to see my face when I said it. 'Don't say things you don't mean with me, Crystal. I don't play about that.' 'I don't want this night to end.' She stared into my eyes like she'd found something in there she'd never come across before, something she wasn't mad about finding. And the night didn't end… She came home with me, wet clothes bundled up in the back seat, her hand resting on my leg the whole drive like she'd been doing it for years instead of hours. I don't remember unlocking my own front door. I remember her laughing, saying a handyman ought to have a nicer bed than this, and me saying the bed wasn't the problem, she just hadn't tested it proper yet. I remember us talking abouteverything, hours of it, because something told us both that everything had shifted down at Big Creek and there wasn't no sense pretending otherwise. By morning I'd gone through condoms like a man who couldn't believe his luck and wanted to use every bit of it before somebody came to take it back. Crystal Ellis hadn't left my house for real since. Not that night, and truth told, not most nights after. She kept a toothbrush at my place inside of a week. Inside of a month she had opinions about where my couch was sitting, and she wasn't wrong about it either. That's the story of how I met the love of my life in a Winn-Dixie, ass first, and had her home in my bed that night after skinny dipping, all in one Labor Day. Man can't plan a day like that. Some days just plan themselves and you the only one in the room who don't know it's happening. But if we ever have kids, I'm telling them me and their mama met in the church choir. Crystal already agreed to back me up on it. Said she'd even learn a hymn or two, just in case one of the grandbabies gets nosy and starts asking questions a man ain't got no good answer for. Folks still say ain't nothing ever happen in Juniper. I just smile and let 'em keep saying it. Everything that matter to me, happened in Juniper. Most notably, the beginning of forever that began with Crystal at the creek. THE END. PURCHASE BOOKS BY JHÉANELL WESTONBERRY