Read The Little Way of Ruthie Leming: A Southern Girl, a Small Town, and the Secret of a Good Life for Free Online Page B

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    Though Daddy’s little girl had lost her heart to Mike, Ruthie and Paw grew even closer that summer. They spent many afternoons on the pond together after work, casting for bream. On Father’s Day weekend Ruthie washed and cleaned out the inside of Paw’s Bronco, as his gift. Meanwhile I had promised to mow the grass for Paw that day, but instead holed up inside the house watching the live MTV broadcast of the eleven-hour Amnesty International benefit concert from Giants Stadium, starring the Police, U2, and Peter Gabriel.
    “Rod says it’s great music, but I don’t know,” Paw wrote to Mike. “That still don’t get the grass cut. Maybe tomorrow.”
    I had no interest in going fishing with Ruthie, so she often went up to the pond with Billy Lawton, a neighbor kid. One afternoon Billy and Ruthie floated in the middle of the pond in Paw’s aluminum boat, their lines dangling in the water.
    “Ruthie, look!” Billy whispered.
    Billy thought he was looking at a cow standing at the water’s edge at the pond’s other end.
    “Billy, that’s a buck!” Ruthie gasped.
    The big deer, antlers coated in velvet, studied them closely. A fish took Billy’s cork under and ran with the line, but Ruthie quietly ordered him to ignore it. She was afraid he would scare the deer away.
    The buck dipped his head to drink, then raising it, concluded thatthe people in the boat were no threat. He ambled down the raised levee that was the pond’s west bank, marching toward them. No fear. He finally found his way into the cornfield, and was gone.
    “All I could think about was how you would have fainted,” Ruthie told Mike, in a letter. “Maybe you can get him this winter. I can’t wait!”
    She was overcome by excitement at the buck spotting. Me, I would have had to see Elvis Costello in the car next to me at the Sonic to have registered similar glee. No surprise then that I declined to accompany Paw, Mam, and Ruthie on a weekend trip to Holly Beach, a rustic Cajun coastal community in southwest Louisiana, near the Texas border. Some family friends had a camp in the remote and fairly desolate stretch of sand and invited them to make the four-hour drive down. Mosquitoes, alligators, heat, humidity, and no girls? Could there be a more dismal way to spend a weekend? I chose to take my chances at home with gin, air-conditioning, and the English Beat.
    Ruthie had a blast. She fished, sunbathed, and learned how to use a throw net to catch crabs in the surf. They ate a fish stew called court bouillon over rice, crawfish crepes, boiled crabs, T-bones, and leg of lamb. She took a drive with Mam and Paw down the Holly Beach main drag to eyeball the gators living in the ditches on either side of the road. She was shocked to see a pickup passing the other way nearly run over a four-foot gator on the asphalt. Paw stopped the Bronco to see if the gator would move. Ruthie leaped out and chased the big lizard out of the road.
    “Ruthie!” Paw said when she climbed back in. “You would have died if that thing had started chasing you!”
    “I didn’t think about that, Daddy,” she said. “I was just worried that somebody was going to run over the poor little thing.”
    On the long drive home that Sunday, Ruthie wrote to Mike to tell him about the glories of Holly Beach. “That place would make a great honeymoon spot, hint hint,” she said. “It was so relaxing and romantic.”
    Paw and Mike also grew closer that summer, despite the distance. Mike wrote a couple of letters that grabbed the older man’s heart. Mike told Paw that he was a good man, and a special one who had been like a father to him. Ruthie wrote Mike to praise him for his sincerity and thoughtfulness.
    “You couldn’t have gotten to his heart in a better way than this,” she said. “You really let your feelings flow and it really made him feel good cause he feels the same way. He loves you like a son. After he read it, he got up and went to the back because we