Carnal Innocence

trying to give herthat. Then I had to take a hard look and admit that I couldn’t give her that anymore.”
    “People get comfortable with the way things are.” He sat beside her. With the oil lamp flickering on the table between them. “It might take her a while longer to accept that you’ve changed the rules.”
    “Or she might never accept it. That’s something else I have to understand.” Cradling the glass in both hands. Caroline looked around the room. The old refrigerator thudded, then began its whining hum. Rain was dripping musically from the gutter.
    Worn linoleum and faded curtains, she thought. The lamplight was kind to the room, as it would have been to a tired woman. Caroline found that incredibly comforting.
    “I love this place,” she murmured. “Despite everything that’s happened, I feel right here. And I need …”
    “What?”
    “I need to belong somewhere. I need the simplicity, the continuity.”
    “That doesn’t sound like something you should apologize for.”
    So he’d heard it, she thought with a grim little smile. It was still there, that habitual tone of apology whenever she took something for herself.
    “No, it’s not. I’m working on that. You see, she’d never understand what I’m saying to you, what I’m feeling. And she certainly can’t understand what I need.”
    “Then I guess it comes down to pleasing her, or pleasing yourself.”
    “I’ve come to that conclusion myself. But it’s difficult, when pleasing myself alienates her so completely. She grew up in this house, Tucker. She’s ashamed of that. She’s ashamed that her father chopped cotton for a living and that her mother canned jellies. Ashamed of where she came from, and of the two people who gave her life, and did the best they could to make that life a good one.”
    “That’s something for her to deal with, not you.”
    “But it’s because of that shame that I’m here at all.It connects us. I guess that’s what families do, and you don’t really have any choice about your link in the chain.”
    “Maybe not, but you can choose what comes after you.”
    “And what comes after is still bound with what came before. She never gave me a chance to know my grandparents. They did without a lot of things so that she could go to college in Philadelphia. I didn’t hear that from my mother,” she added, and there was bitter regret in her voice. “I heard it from Happy Fuller. My grandmother took in laundry, sewing, did what the ladies call fancy work to sell. All to scrape together pennies for tuition. They didn’t have to pay it long, which was a blessing, I suppose. She met my father during the first semester. He’s often told me how he’d tried to weasel out of the blind date his roommate had hooked him into. And how, the moment he set eyes on my mother, he fell in love. Do you ever picture your parents that way? On their first date, falling in love?”
    “My father set his sights on Mama when she was barely twelve years old. She made him wait six years.”
    “Mine moved quicker. They were married before my mother finished her first year of college. The Waverlys were an old, established family in Philadelphia. My father was already destined for corporate law. I know it must have been difficult for her, trying to fit into that niche of society. But for as long as I can remember, she’s been more of a snob than any of the Waverlys. A house in the best part of town, clothes from the most exclusive designers, the proper vacations at the proper resorts in the proper season.”
    “Most people tend to overcompensate when they’ve got something to prove.”
    “Oh, she had a lot to prove. And in short order, she produced a child to help her prove it. I had a nanny to deal with the messier aspects of child rearing, but Mother took care of decorum, behavior, attitudes. She used to send for me, and I’d go into her sitting room. It always smelled of hothouse roses and Chanel. She wouldinstruct me, patiently, on what was expected of a Waverly.”
    Tucker reached out to touch her hair. “What was expected of a Waverly?”
    “Perfection.”
    “That’s a tough one. Being a Longstreet, my daddy just expected me to ‘be a man.’ ’Course, that was in big, tall capital letters, and his ideas and mine veered apart after a while. He didn’t use the parlor either,” Tucker remembered. “The woodshed was his style.”
    “Oh, Mother never raised a hand to me. She didn’t have to. It was her