"Maybe I’ll get enough money to send you to college."
He was quiet and then he turned to me with his dark eyes so sad and heavy.
"You won't want me to be your boyfriend if I’m not somebody big and important. Is that it, Dawn?"
"Oh, no, Jimmy. Never."
"You won't be able to help it," he predicted.
"That's not true, Jimmy," I protested.
"Maybe it's not true now, but after you've been living here a while, you'll get to feel that way. It happens. These rich, old southern families plan then daughters' lives—what they will be, who they will marry—"
"It won't happen to me," I insisted.
"We'll see," he said, convinced he was right. He could be so stubborn sometimes.
"James Gary Longchamp, don't tell me what I will and will not be like. I am my own person and nobody—not a tyrant grandmother or anybody else—is going to mold me into someone else. She can call me Eugenia until she gets red in the face."
"All right," he said, laughing. He kissed me on cheek. "Whatever you say. I don't think she's going to be a match for your temper anyhow. I wonder who you get that from? Your mother got a temper?"
"Hardly. She whines instead of yells. And she gets everything she wants anyway. She doesn't have to be mad at anyone."
"What about your father?"
"I don't think he's capable of getting angry. Nothing seems to bother him. He's as smooth as fresh butter."
"So then you inherited your grandmother's temperament. Maybe you're more like her than you think."
"I don't want to be. She's not what I imagined my grandmother would be like. She's . . ."
We heard the sets of footsteps on the cement stairway before the door was thrust open. A moment later the hideaway was illuminated, and we looked up at two policemen. I grabbed Jimmy's hand.
"See," Clara Sue said from behind them, "I told you I wasn't lying."
"Let's go, kid," one of the policemen said to Jimmy. He stood up slowly.
"I ain't going back there," he said defiantly. The policeman moved forward. Jimmy stepped to
the side. When the policeman reached out to grab him, Jimmy ducked and scooted to the side.
"Jimmy!" I cried.
The other policeman moved swiftly and seized him around the waist, lifting him off the ground. Jimmy flared out, but the second policeman joined the first, and they restrained him quickly.
"Let him go!" I screamed.
"You can come along quietly, or we'll put handcuffs on you, kid," the policeman holding him from behind said. "What's it going to be?"
"All right, all right," Jimmy said, his face red with embarrassment and anger. "Let go."
The policeman loosened his grip, and Jimmy stood by, his head lowered in defeat.
"Move on out," the other policeman commanded. I turned to Clara Sue, who stood in the doorway. "How could you do this?" I screamed. "You mean, selfish . . ."
She stepped back to let the policemen and Jimmy pass. Just as Jimmy reached the door, he turned back to me.
"I'll come back, Dawn. I promise. Someday I'll come back."