Carnal Innocence

his hands in his pockets. “How come women always tell the intimate details of their life over a manicure or a permanent?”
    “It’s the same as men bragging about the size of their wangers over a bottle of beer. How’s this look?”
    He scowled. “I’m finished handing out compliments to females.”
    Josie only chuckled as he strode off to shower.
    Caroline was so stunned by Sweetwater that she stopped her car halfway up the drive to stare. The house was pearly white in the afternoon sun, all gracious curves and delicate ironwork, slender columns and glinting windows. It took no imagination at all to picture women in hoop skirts strolling across the grass, or gentlemen in frock coats sitting on the porch discussing the possibility of secession while silent black servants served cool drinks.
    Flowers grew everywhere, climbing up trellises, spilling over the borders of brick-edged beds. The heady smells of gardenia, magnolia, and roses perfumed the air.
    A Confederate flag, faded and ragged at the edges, hung from a white pole in the center of the front lawn.
    Beyond the house, she could see neat stone buildings. What once were slave quarters, smokehouse, summer kitchen—she could guess that much. The lawn stretched back to acre after acre of flat, fertile land thick with cotton. She saw a single tree in the center of one of the fields, a huge old cypress left standing either through laziness or sentiment.
    For some reason that—just that single tree—brought tears to her throat. The simple majesty of it, the endurance it symbolized, touched her in some deep corner of her heart. Surely it had stood there for more than a century, watching over the rise and fall of the South, the struggle for a way of life, and the ultimate end of it.
    How many spring plantings had it seen, how many summer harvests?
    She shifted her gaze back to the house. It, too, symbolized continuity and change, and the stately elegance of the Old South that so many from the north thought of as indolence. Babies had been born there, grown up and died there. And the rhythm of this quietspot on the delta went on. And on. The slow pulse of their culture and traditions survived.
    The proof was here, just as it was in her grandmother’s house, in those houses and farms and fields dotting the road into Innocence. And in Innocence itself.
    She wondered why she was just beginning to understand that.
    When she saw Tucker come out the front doorway to stand on the porch, she wondered if she was beginning to understand him as well. She got the car moving again, eased it around the island of peonies, and stopped.
    “The way you were sitting back there on the drive, I was beginning to think you’d changed your mind.”
    “No.” She opened the car door and stepped out. “I was just looking.”
    He was doing some looking of his own, and decided not to speak until the fingers squeezing his heart loosened up. She was wearing a thin white dress, with a full skirt he imagined would billow gloriously in a breeze. Two finger-width straps held it over her shoulders and left her arms bare. There was a necklace of polished stones around her throat. Her hair was sleeked back to set off matching stones that dangled from her ears. She’d done something mysterious and female to her face, deepening her eyes, darkening her mouth.
    As she mounted the steps toward him, he caught the first whiff of her light, tempting scent.
    He took her right hand in his left, and turned her slowly in a circle under the arch of his arm, as if in a dance. It made her laugh. When he saw how low the dress dipped in the back, he swallowed hard.
    “I’ve got to tell you something, Caroline.”
    “All right.”
    “You’re ugly.” He shook his head before she could comment. “That’s just something I had to get out of my system.”
    “It’s an interesting approach.”
    “My sister’s idea. It’s supposed to keep women from falling in love with me.”
    Why did he always make her want to smile? “It could work. Are you going to ask me in?”
    He traded her left hand for her right. “It seems like I’ve been waiting a long time to do just that.” He led her to the door, opened it. Pausing, he studied her, wanting to see how she looked in the doorway—his doorway— with flowers and magnolia trees at her back. She looked, he realized, perfect.
    “Welcome to Sweetwater.”
    The moment she stepped inside, Caroline heard the shouting.
    “If you’ve gone and asked somebody to