“
So…,” I began. Was it just a high school thing? Or worse, I imagined, is it just that I’m not and never will be a country girl? Is it that country girls have some wild sense of abandon that I wasn’t born with? A reckless side, a fun, adventurous side that makes them worthy of riding next to boys in pickups? Am I untouchable? Am I too prim? Too proper? I’m not! I’m really not! I’m fun and adventurous. Reckless, too! I have a pair of jeans: Anne Kleins! And I want to be Middle Seat Worthy. Please, Marlboro Man…please. I’ve never wanted anything this much. “So, um…why don’t you do it anymore?” I asked.
“Bucket seats,” Marlboro Man answered, his hand still resting on my leg.
Made sense. I settled in and relaxed a bit.
But I had another question I’d been mulling over.
“Mind if I ask you another question?” I said.
“Go ahead,” he replied.
I cleared my throat and sat up straight in my seat. “How come…how come it took you so long to call me?” I couldn’t help but grin. It was one of the most direct questions I’d ever asked him.
He looked in my direction, then back toward the road.
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. And he didn’t. But I’d wondered more than a handful of times, and as long as he was coming clean about bucket seats and other important matters, I thought it would be a good time to ask him why four months had passed between the first night we’d met in the smoky bar and the night he’d finally called to invite me to dinner. I remembered being knocked over by his magnetism that night during Christmas vacation. What had he thought of me? Had he forgotten me instantly, then remembered me in a flash that April night after my brother’s wedding? Or had he intentionally waited four months to call? Was it some kind of country boy protocol I didn’t know about?
I was a girl. I simply had to know.
“I was…,” he began. “Well, I was dating someone else.”
I’ll kill her with my bare hands. “Oh,” I said in return. It was all I could muster.
“Plus, I was running a herd of cows in Nebraska and having to drive up there every week,” he continued. “I just wasn’t here enough to break things off with her in the right way…and I didn’t want to call you and ask you out until that was all resolved.”
I repeated myself. “Oh.” What was her name? She’s dead to me.
“I liked you, though,” he said, flashing me a smile. “I thought about you.”
I couldn’t help but smile back. “You did?” I asked quietly, still wondering what the girl’s name was. I wouldn’t rest till I knew.
“I did,” he said sweetly, stroking my leg with his hand. “You were different.”
I stopped short of interrogating him further, of asking him to specify what he meant by “different.” And it didn’t take much imagination to figure it out. As he drove me around his familiar homeland, it was obvious what he would have considered “different” about me.
I didn’t know anything about the country.
”
”