This is what one phone call becomes.

I met her at the 4-H fair, and I want to be honest about it: I was not there for the livestock. I was seventeen and I had a 1953 Ford that I had painted myself, badly, in my father’s barn. The paint had run on the driver’s door and left a stripe like a tear. I parked it where the girls walked.

She was working the pie table for her church. Lorraine. She had a little tin cash box and she wouldn’t make change until you said please. I bought a slice of cherry pie I did not want. Then I bought another one. By the third slice she looked at me over the top of that cash box and said, “You don’t even like cherry.” And I said no ma’am, I don’t. And she laughed at me. That was the whole thing right there. That was it.

You have to understand what the fair was to us. There was no place else to go. The whole county came through in four days — the hog barn, the tractor pull, the smell of diesel and funnel cake and animals all together, which is a smell I could still pick out of a hundred. They strung lights over the midway and when it got dark it was the brightest thing for twenty miles. My mother used to say the fair was the only week of the year Henry County stayed up past nine.

I walked her home that Friday. It was about a mile and a half out on the Wilkinson road and we took our time about it. I remember the gravel, and the corn on both sides of us being taller than we were, and how quiet it got once we were past the lights — just the bugs and our shoes. I didn’t hold her hand. I thought about it the whole way and I did not do it. I have had sixty-one years to be embarrassed about that and I still am.

Her father was on the porch when we got there. He didn’t say much. He asked me whose boy I was, and I told him, and he thought about it a while and then he nodded, which I took to mean my father was not a horse thief. Then he said, “It’s late,” and that was the end of the evening.

We were married two years later in the same church that sold that pie. She wore her sister’s dress because there wasn’t money for a new one, and she was not one bit sorry about it — Lorraine never once in her life wanted a thing she couldn’t have. Fifty-four years. Three kids, seven grandkids, one bad year in ’79 that we don’t need to get into today.

She passed in the spring. I still go to the fair. I go on the Friday, and I walk the midway once, and I don’t buy anything.