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all that trash?” Mildred closed the book, laid it on the coffee table, and answered, “When are you going to stop eating all that candy?”
    Frances never could get the best of Mildred. As girls they had both attended one of the finest finishing schools in Chattanooga, but even then Mildred had always been somewhat of a maverick. She had been the first girl in town to ever wear a pants suit inside the Chattanooga Country Club: too independent, long before it was fashionable. Frances thought it was probably the reason that the boy Mildred had been engaged to ran off and married someone else. It could also account for the fact that you never knew what color Mildred’s hair was going to be the next time you saw her. She dyed her hair on a whim and according to how she felt from day to day. Today it was some sort of plaid. Frances hoped that by the time Mr. Campbell arrived it would be at least close to the color of something natural. But she did not say anything. If Mildred knew she was trying to fix her up with a man she would do something crazy for sure. Frances worried about her sister. Mildred had retired after twenty-five years of work, had good insurance, owned her own home, and had plenty of friends, but she did not seem happy. Frances worried that Mildred was getting bitter as she aged and turning into an old curmudgeon right before her eyes. It was one of the many reasons that Frances was holding such high hopes for Mr. Campbell. Mildred needed to get over that boy who had left her, and move on with her life before it was too late.

Dreamy Alabama

    A S THE DOCTOR had suggested, Oswald tied up all loose ends and settled his estate, a task that took him no more than five minutes. It consisted of throwing away three pairs of old shoes and giving away one of his two overcoats. He packed the one baseball he had caught at a game and all his other belongings into a single suitcase. That night a few of his friends from AA took him out for a farewell cup of coffee. He told them he would most probably be back in the spring. No point in getting anyone upset.
    The next morning he took a cab to the L&N railroad station at LaSalle Street. He found his seat, and the train pulled out of the station at 12:45 P.M. As the familiar buildings passed by his window, he knew he was seeing Chicago for the last time and he thought about going to the club car for a drink right then and there, but the “One Day at a Time” chip his friends had given him last night was still in his pocket. He felt he should probably wait until they got farther away from Chicago and his AA group, so he just sat and looked out the window and soon became preoccupied with the scenery passing by. As they traveled south, through Cincinnati and Louisville to Nashville, the landscape slowly began to change. The deeper south they went, the more the brown land started to turn a different color, and by the time he woke up the next morning the barren black trees that lined the tracks the day before had been replaced with thick evergreens and tall pines. He had gone to sleep in one world and awakened in another. Overnight, the gray gloomy winter sky had turned a bright blue with huge white cumulus clouds so big that Oswald’s first thought was, You’ve got to be kidding!
    When they reached Mobile late that afternoon, the moment he stepped off the train, a tall thin man with a small head, who looked to Oswald exactly like a praying mantis wearing a baseball cap, stepped up. “Are you Mr. Campbell?” He said he was, and the man took his bag and said, “Welcome to Alabama! I’m Butch Mannich, but you can call me Stick; everybody else does.” As they walked along he added, “Yeah, I’m so skinny that when I was a child my parents wouldn’t let me have a dog because it would keep burying me in the yard.” Then he laughed uproariously at his own joke.
    When they came out of the station, the warm air of Mobile was moist and fragrant and a surprise to Oswald. To see it