The Wedding Tree by Robin Wells Page A

sisters. Charlie’s older brother had died when he was two, so Charlie was an only child, and I might as well have been—my brother was twelve years older than me and away at college by the time I started school. But the sweetheart part . . .”
    â€œThat came later?”
    I hesitated. Here was where I had to turn off the road paved with illusions and steer onto the bumpy dirt path of truth. “The fact of the matter is, the sweetheart part was always pretty much one-sided.”
    Hope’s eyebrows rose in surprise.
    â€œCharlie always liked me a lot more than I liked him. In a romantic way, I mean.”
    Funny, the way you remember things. Memories don’t lie down flat like stripes on a road or photos in an album. They pop up and flap around, like those Mexican jumping beans Uncle Ronnie brought me that time he went to Tijuana.
    I wanted to tell Hope about meeting Joe, but instead, all of a sudden—
poof!
I’m viewing a mental film of the night of my first high school dance.
    My mother is at the front door, wearing a ruby shirtwaist dress with her grandmother’s pearls, and she’s opening it for Charlie. Charlie is dressed in his father’s best suit, his hair slicked back,and he’s holding a white orchid corsage. I’m excited about the dance for lots of reasons. For one, I’m wearing a new dress—it’s baby blue chiffon, with a full skirt, cap sleeves, and a lace sweetheart neckline that I’d had the dickens of a time sewing just right—and I can’t wait to show it off. Secondly, I’m eager to see everyone’s reaction to the “heavenly night” decorations I’d helped hang in the gym; and thirdly, I’ve never danced to a live band before, and Billy Bob and the Crooners are supposed to play.
    But then I see Charlie in the living room, and he’s looking at me in a way I’d never noticed before, and it hits me: he’s thinking about the dance in entirely different terms than I am. He doesn’t think I’m going with him just because he has his daddy’s car and my mother doesn’t like me out at night by myself and he always gives me a lift to group events and we’re lifelong buddies; in his mind, this is a date—a real, honest-to-goodness, boy-and-girl date. My stomach does a cold, funny flip, like a fish trying to get free from a hook. The thought of being romantic with Charlie just, well . . . it makes me kind of squirm inside my skin. I don’t think of him that way. Maybe I’m not ready for it. Maybe I just don’t want to change the easygoing way we get along.
    And then—
poof!
again.
    I’m seven or eight years old, and Charlie and I are playing tag with a group of other kids on the school playground. When Charlie is “it,” he always, always chases me. It annoys the dickens out of me, because I don’t like being caught.
    â€œYou never chase me back,” he complains.
    â€œI used to, but you just turn around and make me ‘it’ again. And the other kids get mad because we’re leaving them out and it’s like only the two of us are playing.”
    â€œI like it that way,” Charlie says.
    And then—another
poof!
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    We’re four or five, and playing doctor. Charlie wants to listen to my heart. I unbutton my shirt, and he puts his ear on my chest. Even back then, when our chests look just the same, he’s fascinated with mine. He wants to see under my skirt, and I might have let him, but my mother walks in, and . . . oh mercy, does she get into a dither!
    I have to confess, I never felt any curiosity at all about Charlie’s private parts. Junk, they call it now. Junk—what a hilariously terrible name for something they’re all so proud of.
    â€¢Â Â Â â€¢Â Â Â â€¢
    â€œAre you okay, Gran?”
    I realized I’d closed my eyes.