him an answer in a month. But when April came, warm and rainy, I still hadn't decided. That's when he got the tattoo on his shoulder: ''Marry me, Lavell," on a placard like one of those gas station signs that sticks up over the interstate, except Cupid was holding the pole.
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"Don't get into one of your moods," I told him.
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Once in a while he fell into a deep quiet and refused to talk for hours. He called it "down time." He usually went home because I told him it agitated me to sit in a room with another human being and still feel alone.
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"BJ's having a miserable day," he said. The dog had tangled herself around the tree and stood softly whining, one foot lifted as if it were broken. "Marry me," he said, forcing a smile, "shut me up forever."
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Dory worked construction, but he was studying welding at the county trade school at night. He said welders could pick their jobs, work half a year, cruise the Caribbean the other half. "The world is made of metal," he kept telling me, "and it's forever coming apart at the welds."
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His mother died when he was six, the same age I was when my father left home for good. My mother never bothered to get a divorceshe knew she was finished with men. She took up gardening. When I think of my childhood, the memories are set against her bent-over back framed by shiny green vine tomatoes, bushy orange and pink cosmos. Mama and I worked quietly together in the yard, stringing up pole beans, cradling the glossy eggplants like newborns as we cultivated around the plants. I like growing things, even if they don't always turn out. When I look at garden rows, I see pure goodwill, the weeds cleared, each little plant set out like a promise. Mama and I gardened even in fall and winterpruning, mulching with cypress chips, putting the stamp of patience and expectation on the ground, telling ourselves we would be there three months, six months, down the road.
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Dory's father was a postal worker in Lake City, so it was natural for Dory to take up stamp collecting. But his real passion was fox hunting. It's against the law to kill a fox, so the men just let the dogs roam in the preserve while they sat on the tailgate drinking beer,
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