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little foreign, like nothing more than a town I once saw on a television show.
    According to the clock on the courthouse tower, it’s just past noon, which means Bradley will be eating his lunch. He’s probably unpacking an egg salad sandwich he brought from home right now and sitting down at the picnic table behind the rusted yellow tin building that holds his family’s business. It doesn’t look like much, but Ainsworth Paving and Concrete is enough to make his family royalty in this small realm, or at least raise them high enough that when Bradley asked me to marry him, my mother said, “You’ll never do any better.”
    You’ll never do any better . Quite a thing to say to a girl not even a full day out of high school. And when I told Bradley no, thank you so very much, but no, Mama went to bed with a sick headache and didn’t get up for a week.
    I think being a preacher’s wife must have been a mixed blessing for my mama. She liked the title, but she didn’t like being poor. She found it humiliating when an Avon Lady from the congregation gave her samples, little tiny white plastic tubes that looked more like cigarette butts than lipsticks, or when a plumber brought somebody’s cast-off toilet over to the manse and installed it, saying he knew for a fact that it was better than the one we had, since he’d donated that one too. And then wehad to all come into the bathroom and watch him flush and say a prayer of gratitude right then and there, gathered in a semi­circle and looking down into the swirling bowl. So I guess it’s not surprising that Mama pushed me toward the kind of security she’d never had. She wanted nothing more than to get me into a house that was cool in the summer and warm in the winter and where all the appliances worked. Once a woman is married and stuck—and nobody’s more stuck than a South Carolina preacher’s wife—then all that’s really left for her to do is to pray that her daughter makes a totally different kind of mistake.
    â€œBut I can’t marry Bradley Ainsworth, Mama,” I said. It was the morning after graduation. She was adjusting the blinds, trying to shut out all the light, which I knew was a sign that one of her sick headaches was coming on. “He’s a good person, but I just don’t love him.”
    She hesitated for such a long time that I knew she was thinking I had completely missed the point. Then she said, “Laura, honey, just tell me this. Have you really tried to love him?”
    â€œI’ve tried real hard,” I said, which was more or less true. “I know Bradley’s the answer to everything I need, but I can’t make myself feel what I don’t.”
    She sighed. It was the sigh of a woman who’d spent a lifetime praying over secondhand toilets. “Well,” she said, dropping the last blind so that the room sank into total darkness. “There’s always the chance that someday you’ll change your mind. The human heart is a mysterious thing.”
    I nodded and said, “Yes, ma’am,” but what she didn’t know is that I already had a bus ticket in my pocketbook, along withan ad ripped from the back pages of Billboard magazine. So let Mama talk all she wanted about compromise, and sensible choices, and what a bird in the hand was worth. I figured that in three days’ time, I’d be in Graceland.
    The bus trip to Memphis was hell. Felt like it lasted forever. Like North Carolina alone was long and flat enough to kill a girl, like every worthless man in America was waiting for me in every station where I’d get out to stretch my legs, all of them asking me what my name was and where I was going. I arrived in Memphis sweaty and tired, smelling like cigarettes. So I spent half the money in my pocketbook at the YWCA just so I could take a shower, and then I put on my only clean dress and walked eighteen blocks to the