“Is that how Emmett felt about you?”
“He was the exception that proved the rule.”
“I’m not too worried about my untimely decapitation, so I don’t see why you should be.”
“Okay, I finally understand why you’re being so persistent about this. You want to make me fall so desperately in love with you that I can’t think of anything else. Then, when I’ve turned into a big bowl of mush, and I’m begging for a few crumbs of your affection, you’ll laugh in my face and walk away. This is what you’ve been planning from the beginning, isn’t it? Your ultimate revenge for what I did to you in high school?”
He sighed. “Sugar Beth. The romance novels . . .”
“Well, it’s not going to happen, bucko, because I’ve spent way too much class time in the school of hard knocks. I’m past my obsessive need to center my life around another piece of beefcake.”
“As much as I appreciate the description, I think you’re just afraid.”
Something snapped inside her. “Of course I’m afraid! Relationships do bad things to me.” He started to respond, but the pain had gone on long enough, and she didn’t want to hear it. “You know what I want? I want peace. I want a good job and a decent place to live. I want to read books and listen to music and have time to make some female friendships that are going to last. When I wake up in the morning, I want to know that I have a decent shot at being happy. And here’s what’s really sad. Until I met you, I was almost there.”
His face set in hard lines. She knew she’d hurt him, but better this sharp, quick pain than a dull ache that never stopped. “I’m sick of this,” she forced herself to say. “I told you I didn’t want to see you anymore, but you wouldn’t listen. Well, it’s time to pay attention. I’m tired of you stalking me. Now get the message and leave me alone.”
His face paled, and his eyes emptied of all expression. “My apologies. It wasn’t my intention to stalk.” He snatched up a manila envelope from behind one of the columns and thrust it at her. “I know you’ve been looking for this, and now you have your very own copy.”
She watched him walk away, proud and haughty, his powerful stride devouring Faulkner’s lawn. “Gordon! Come back here,” she cried.
But her dog had a new master, and he paid no attention.
She heard the sound of his car driving away. Finally, she gazed down at the envelope and drew out what he’d brought her.
A copy of Reflections.
Colin was thirty miles outside Oxford when he heard the siren. He glanced at his speedometer and saw he was going eighty. Brilliant. He backed off and pulled over. Gordon sat up on the seat. The perfect ending to a miserable day.
A stalker. Was that how she saw him?
As he handed over his license, he thought about how much differently the evening had unfolded than what he’d planned. Getting Sugar Beth out of Parrish had seemed like a good idea, and Rowan Oak a convenient choice. He’d tried to impress her with a private tour, and he’d imagined the combination of a romantic setting and his personal charm would lull her enough so he could talk to her about Reflections, so he could explain. But he’d forgotten personal charm wasn’t his long suit, and she’d undoubtedly grown immune to contrived romantic settings before her twenty-first birthday. He hadn’t planned on throwing the book at her, that was for certain. He’d intended to lead up to it gradually, to explain how he’d felt when he’d been working on it and point out that he’d finished writing it months before she’d come back. Most of all, he’d planned to warn her. And then he was going to tell her about the painting.
“You’re the author,” the trooper said, gazing at Colin’s license. “The one who wrote that book about Parrish.”
Colin nodded but didn’t try to strike up a conversation. He saw no honor in attempting to talk himself out of a ticket he deserved. But the trooper had a book-loving wife and a basset hound, and he sent him on with only a warning.
Colin reached the edge of town, but instead of heading directly for Frenchman’s Bride, he drove aimlessly through the quiet streets. There’d been a fierceness about her tonight that scared him. She wasn’t playing games. She’d meant every word she’d said. And he’d fallen in love with her.
The knowledge felt old and familiar, as though it had been part of him for a very long time. With his lifelong appreciation of the ironic, he should be amused, but he couldn’t find a laugh anywhere. He’d misjudged, misplayed, and misbehaved. In the process, he’d lost something unbearably precious.
Sugar Beth wanted to be alone when she read Reflections, so she declined Winnie’s invitation to join her for church on Sunday morning. As soon as her car pulled away, she threw on a pair of jeans, grabbed an old blanket, and set off for the lake. She’d have liked to bring Gordon with her, but he hadn’t come back. It was beginning to look as though he never would.
She laid out the blanket in a sunny spot not far from the deserted boat launch and gazed down at the cover of the book. It was marked “Uncorrected Proof Not for Sale,” which meant he’d given her one of the editions printed up for reviewers and booksellers before the real book came out in another month. She ran her hand over the cover and braced herself for what she was fairly certain he’d written about her mother. Diddie might have been high-handed, but she’d also been a force for progress, and if Colin hadn’t acknowledged that, she’d never forgive him.
A church bell tolled in the distance, and she began to read:
I came to Parrish twice, the first time to write a great novel, and more than a decade later, because I needed to make my way back home.
He’d put himself in the book. She was startled. He hadn’t done that in Last Whistle-stop. She rushed through the opening chapter, which told of his first days in Parrish. In the second chapter he used an encounter with Tallulah—Your hair is far too long, young man, even for a foreigner—to take the story back to the late 1960s, when the town’s economy had begun to fall apart. His account of the near bankruptcy of the window factory read like a thriller, the tension heightened by funny, hometown tales such as the Great Potato Salad rivalry at Christ the Redeemer Church. As he moved into the 1970s, he personalized the human cost of the town’s racial politics through Aaron Leary’s family. And, as she’d suspected he would, he wrote of Diddie and Griffin. She didn’t care so much about the portrait he’d painted of her father, but her cheeks burned with anger as he showed her beautiful, high-handed mother marching through town trailing cigarette ash and condescension. Although he didn’t neglect her accomplishments, it was still a devastating portrayal.
With nearly a hundred pages left, she closed the book and wandered down to the water. She’d assumed he’d end the story in 1982 when the new factory had opened, but there were three chapters still to go, and apprehension had begun to form a knot in her stomach. Maybe Diddie wasn’t the only person she should have worried about.
She returned to the blanket, picked up the book again, and began the next chapter.
In 1986, I was twenty-two years old and Parrish was my nirvana. The townspeople accepted my oddness, my staggering shortcomings in the classroom, my strange accent and haughty pretensions. I was writing a novel, and Mississippi loves a writer more than anyone else. I felt accepted for the first time in my life. I was completely, blissfully happy . . . until my Southern Eden was destroyed by a girl named Valentine.
At eighteen, she was the most beautiful creature anyone had ever seen. Watching her saunter up the sidewalk to the front doors of Parrish High was watching sexual artistry in motion . . .
Sugar Beth finished the page, read the next, kept reading as her breathing grew shallow and her skin hot with rage. She was Valentine. He’d changed her name, changed the names of all of them who’d been teenagers at the time, but no one would be fooled for a moment.