“What did she say?”
Peggy sighed. “She said, ‘I didn’t think it would hurt him that bad.’ And I said, ‘You never think, Cindy. That’s the problem.’”
On the first Saturday in July, three weeks after the reunion, I drove over to Dad’s house to help him clean out his gutters. He insists on doing it himself every summer, and I insist on holding the ladder.
When I pulled into his driveway, there was a white Buick Enclave parked out front.
My stomach dropped.
I parked behind it and walked around to the backyard. Dad was sitting in one of his old green metal lawn chairs on the patio, wearing his new hearing aids, with Duke asleep at his feet.
Across from him, in the other lawn chair, sat Cindy.
She wasn’t wearing the turquoise sundress. She was wearing jeans and an old Rogersville Wildcats sweatshirt, with hardly any makeup on. Her hair wasn’t done. There was a pecan pie on the little patio table between them, in a store container from the same bakery in Ozark where Dad buys his.
