Page 1 of Fox
1
LOVES ME NOT
LUCY
Some marriages are made in heaven.
Mine was made in my friend’s diner—where I work as a cook—on one of the back tables after closing time, when Fox and I had sex one too many times without protection, and I got knocked up.
Here are a few truths.
Archibald “Fox” Bennett is out of my league.
That’s not self-pity talking—it’s geography.
I grew up in Antioch, southeast of Nashville, in a neighborhood where the dollar store was the nicest building on the block, and everybody’s daddy worked a trade or didn’t work at all.
Mine laid tile. He was good at it, too, until his knees gave out. Then he drove for a delivery service until the route supervisor gave him a hard time, and he went all in on the gig economy, delivering groceries and takeout. He’s still at it and has decided he will keep working until they take his driver’s license away.
Someone, please take my seventy-year-old father’s driver’s license away!
My mama waitressed. Now, she’s retired and goes to hot yoga classes.
My brother Milo fixes cars and has his own garage, a wife, two kids, and a dog. They still live in Antioch in a two-bedroom, two-bath house with a yard.
They throw the best Thanksgiving spread known to mankind, with two kinds of stuffing—one with spicy sausage and one without.
We weren’t poor in any way that left a mark, but we weren’t the kind of people who named their sons Archibald and meant it as a compliment, either.
Fox is from Belle Meade, where the trees look like they’ve been hired and the driveways are longer than my childhood street. Here, people don’t live in houses so much as they live in legacies—all that old Tennessee money gone wide, spread out behind iron gates and boxwood hedges.
The Bennetts have a home (mansion?) that has been in the family since before anyone currently living was born.
Fox’s mother calls itthe house, like it’s a concept—an idea you’re meant to be humbled by.
Whatever!
My parents have a house in Antioch.
Two bedrooms, two baths, and a garage door that sticks. They call itthe house, too, just not with my mother-in-law’s gravitas.
The first time Fox brought me tothe house, I wore my nicest jeans.
I didn’t know. He didn’t tell me, and like a moron, I never Googled him.
I should’ve, but a man who is interested in me and has a name like Fox, I didn’t think he was one ofthoseBennetts.
That wasthen, nearly two years ago. Things are different now.
I now know to wear a dress forthehouse.
I know to call his mother Margaret, never Maggie, and never, under any circumstances, Mrs. Bennett, which she considers an insult to her first marriage and a reminder of her second.
I know that his sister Caroline will find something wrong with whatever we bring to dinner—the wine too sweet, the flowers too fragrant, “the dessert store-bought, Lucy, honestly,”even if Fox is the one who did the buying.
I know his brother David, whose wife is on drugs (hand to God, she is), will be friendly to my face (read as tits). He makes my skin feel like it needs washing every time he looks at me.
Fox says David is who he is, and that’s that, like it’s written in the family Bible:David is a lecherous pig, and we’re okay with it.
