“Of course.” She pulled it out of the trunk of her new little Pacer. Emily wasn’t the most beautiful woman in town with her ordinary brown hair and lack of fashion sense, but she had a pretty face, a great figure, and most important, she was like him. She’d grown up in Eaton. Liked country music. And didn’t need expensive things to be happy.
She was grounded. Had a steady income.
She fastened the shiny red helmet under her chin and leaned toward him for a kiss.
Tim held his lips against hers for a long time. Enjoyed her taste.
He mounted the bike, already feeling the power between his legs. She climbed on behind him, wrapping her arms around his waist. He gunned the engine and sped off into the sunset.
Thanksgiving 1979 was a strange time.
“I can’t believe your folks still aren’t talking to you,” James said a couple of days before students began leaving campus for the four-day holiday break. Some, the ones who had too far to travel, were going to stay with friends. Most were going home. Shuttles were scheduled for the students who had to make it to Little Rock to catch a flight out.
“My dad wrote,” I told him. We were sitting in a white picket fence-type swing extended from one of the trees on the huge grassy quad in the middle of campus. Dressed in white shorts and a long-sleeve white T-shirt, James had just come from a scrimmage tennis match. I was supposed to have made it out to watch him, but I’d been writing a paper that was due the next day.
His piercing brown eyes pinned me, his dark bushy brows coming together as he frowned. “He did?”
“Yeah.” I should have told him. But . . .
Rubbing my hands along the jeans I’d changed into after class, I hugged my arms, wishing I’d added a jacket to the orange and beige sweater.
“When?”
“I don’t know. A week or two ago.” Make that three or four. The letter had come shortly after Mom’s almost daily notes had stopped.
“He wants me to come home for Thanksgiving.”
“What about the church?”
“He didn’t say anything about it.”
“He didn’t apologize? Didn’t say he was wrong?”
“No.”
“Did he tell you that you could go to church while you were there?”
“No.” Dad hadn’t mentioned church. He’d talked about love and family and duty and nothing about the rift between us. Which made me nervous.
“So he isn’t backing down.”
“I don’t know.”
“Do you think if you go it’ll be like agreeing to his dictates from the summer? Like you’ll be agreeing to choose your family over your God?”
The question irritated me. “I don’t know.”
“What are you going to do?”
I wanted to go home so badly. And yet . . . my faith in God, and in my church, had sustained me through the worst year of my life. It was only with God’s help that I could endure the loss of Tim and still be happy.
“I don’t think I can go home. Not until I know that I don’t have to give up my God to do so. Besides I haven’t heard a word from my mom in weeks. If she wanted me home, she’d have written. My dad only deals with me when I’m in trouble, which has been about once in my whole life. It’s always Mom and me who arrange everything.”
“What are you going to do then?”
“Rachel asked me to go with her. She’s going to her grandma’s in Mississippi. Her mom and little brother are meeting her there.”
Rachel Bowman was in my social club. We’d been friends since my first week on campus the year before.