I could think of about 9,000 reasons why I need to be in the comfort of my kitchen adding at least two cups of sugar to a recipe, but none more pressing than what was sitting in Seat 10E. She’s blonde, thin, impeccably manicured, and dressed in a crisp and wrinkle-free linen number that I have coveted for months in the McRae’s department store window. And she’s trying to steal my husband.
I’m getting way ahead of myself here, so let me start from the beginning. First and most important, I am not fat. If you asked 20 of my friends, not one of them would say I was fat. Except Annette. It came from a little game we played back in grammar school that if you ate all your Jell-O in the cafeteria then you’d be called “fat girl” all day. Hate me, I love Jell-O.
Sara Wiley smiled back at me from the first class cabin. She’d always had a thing for my husband. The day he first walked into Miss Hearn’s French class, his sparkling blue eyes had cast a spell on her. Now, we were not what you would call friends, but Yazoo City, Mississippi was such a small place, everybody knew everybody else and their business. I had never liked her, though I’d always admired her tenacity. When this woman wanted something, she went for it. When the cheerleader squad tryouts required a standing back flip, Sara spent every waking moment when she wasn’t in school tied to this contraption her dad had hanging in the ancient oak tree in front of their house. Three long ropes were suspended from the biggest branch; two were fastened to a board covered in foam. The other one was manned by Earl, an elderly blind man, who had been working for the Wileys for as long as anyone could remember. She would stand, close her eyes, count to three and then with all her might, throw herself into a backward contortion. What kept her from splattering her brains all over the St. Augustine grass was Earl’s rope, fastened around her waist. Every day after school she was out there under that tree, drawing a small crowd of football players, who waited patiently for her skirt to fly up around her waist. She cemented her place on the squad the day she decided not to wear her underwear. Blind Earl never saw a thing.
After securing captain of the squad, she set her sights on my future husband, Vincent Grady Vaughan. We had not even said hello yet, and I was just as sure as everybody else at Yazoo High that Sara and he would make a fine couple. He was handsome, disturbingly nice, and didn’t have a girlfriend. He was studying hard with hopes of becoming a chemical engineer. He was planning on spending the rest of his life working at the local fertilizer plant, just like his father, who had been transferred recently to Yazoo City. Vincent was a simple man. That was just fine with me at the time, but I later learned that the world did not stop at the Yazoo county line. Yes, I will admit, I lived a very sheltered life.
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