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from
behind the counter,” I said. “Then you can go ahead upstairs if you want.”
    Jessie looked to Estelle for official
permission.
    “Help yourself,” Estelle said.
    Jessie walked around the counter and slid
open one of the glass cabinet doors. She surveyed the array of
candy bars for a moment, put her hand into the cabinet, almost took
a Hershey’s Bar, hovered briefly over a Nestle’s Crunch, and
finally landed on a Three Musketeers. She grabbed it and ran
upstairs calling “Granddaddy! Glady!” “Glady” was her name for my
mother.
    “I’ve been excited all day!” Estelle clapped
her hands several times.
    “I didn’t know you cared so much
about the courthouse,” I said.
    “That’s not all that’s happening today,” she
said.
    “Oh, no! There’s more? What else, Estelle?”
Eddie loosened his tie and scowled. “I can’t take much more.”
    “Can’t tell,” she teased. “’Til come
upstairs in a while and visit with y’all.”
    She went back to the cash register to ring
up the long line of customers filing out of the back dining room.
They were mostly women in their fifties and sixties, who, I
assumed, were passengers from the tour bus outside on their way to
the Grand Old Opry in Nashville.
    I looked around the front dining room.
Several people, customers and friends from over the years, waved to
me. I waved back.
    “Hey, Chip,” I said to the short stocky man
in one of the front booths. He’d been the county prosecutor until
last year. “How’s Betty?” I shook hands with him and talked briefly
to people at four other tables, then joined Eddie, where he’d been
waiting near the cash register.
    He looked irritated as he took a few packs
of Steak House matchbooks from a countertop bowl and put them in
his pocket.
    “What is it, LuAnn? What is it with you and
this place, this town, these people?” He glared at me. “Every time
we come here, I get the feeling it’s 1968 and you’re homecoming
queen again. I thought you and Estelle might start up with one of
your cheerleading routines just now. And if you weren’t so
pregnant, I know we’d have to stop on the way out of town and watch
you ride your horse. You love this. All of it. You just can’t let
it go.”
    Before I had a chance to respond, Mother
appeared at the top of the stairs, fiddling with her American flag
pin.
    “Are you two ever coming? Your father’s
waiting, LuAnn,” she said.
    “Coming,” I said. Happy to avoid another
argument with Eddie, I turned away from him and walked up the
carpeted stairs and down the hall toward the party sounds:
laughter, talking, silver clinking against china.
    The room was full of people—at least one
hundred, maybe more. Someone, probably Estelle, had decorated the
room with red, white, and blue helium balloons.
    The room dividers were pushed into the wall,
leaving one large open area. Straight ahead, the buffet lunch was
being served off four banquet tables pushed together and covered
with tablecloths. The centerpiece was a bouquet of white gladiolus
in a crystal vase. On each of the fifteen round tables placed every
few feet and surrounded by six chrome and leatherette chairs was a
single red rose in a stem vase. Near the doorway was the bar.
    To my right, at the far end of the room, was
the speaker’s dais. Above and behind it hung a huge photograph of
my father’s face. Ever since Buck and a few state Democratic party
officials decided to push him as the next governor, any event
involving my father resembled a political rally.
    I’d heard about, but never before seen,
Daddy’s new campaign picture. I studied it, trying to see him as a
voter might. Honest but not dull. Attractive but not vain.
Self-assured but not too cocky. Governor Newell Hagerdorn. That
sounded good to me.
    Standing with Daddy and Ben Gainey near the
speaker’s dais was my high-school love, Junior. A former star of
the Tallagumsa High Tigers football team, he was six foot five and
brawny, his large