Free Fat Lightning by Howard Owen Page B

she sits down at the emptier end of a long table, she feels a hand on her bare shoulder and knows it’s him before he says, “Hey, sweet potato.”
    She’d been his sweet potato and he’d been her sugar bear, a long time ago. It always embarrassed him when she’d call him that in public, but he always signed Christmas and birthday cards, “Your sugar bear.”
    She swallows and just looks at him as he sits down beside her.
    â€œYou’re parting your hair on the wrong side,” she finally says, and he laughs. He seems to have changed hardly at all. He’s just as handsome to her as he was the day they got married, she realizes with a jolt. He hasn’t lost the strong Irish lines on his face to fat or age, and he still wears his black hair straight back, the way she always liked it. Not that many people have faces worth showing off, she used to tell him. Don’t hide your light.
    Nancy has gained 10 pounds since the last time Buddy saw her, but she feels she has hidden it well. She still has the same ash-blond hair that they call “dirty blond” in Monacan, still has the soft, sleepy look that was known as bedroom eyes when she was in high school, still has a nice tan that hasn’t started to crack and dry her skin.
    They ask about each other’s families, talk about and to old friends, dance around what they don’t feel like talking about. Buddy’s a foreman in the pressroom now, hardly even gets dirty any more, he tells Nancy, and they both remember the arguments they used to have about his neglecting to wash up before he came back to their little apartment. He’s bought a townhouse in the Fan and is taking management courses at Virginia Commonwealth University.
    Nancy shows him the latest picture of Wade, and Buddy says he looks just like her, which she knows isn’t true.
    They dance the old dances, the band alternating beach music with “Go Away, Little Girl,” and, late in the evening, “Moon River,” which reminds them both of beach weekends at his uncle’s place at Sandbridge. Nancy is struck with how a smell stays with you. She recognized Buddy right away, of course, and she knew his touch. But it’s the smell, some combination of skin and hair because Buddy never did use after-shave, that really rocks her. She is all too aware that whatever senses Sam stir in her are somewhat diminished by his being second.
    â€œI see you haven’t changed your name,” he says as they’re dancing, and Nancy looks up in puzzlement, thinking he means her last one, but he makes a motion with his head toward Sandy and Skip dancing nearby, and she breaks up giggling, spilling her fourth bourbon-and-water on the back of Buddy’s neck.
    â€œNo,” she says. “I change the last one enough, so I didn’t think I ought to mess with the first one. How about you? Are you still a Buddy?”
    â€œI’m still your Buddy,” he says, so low she’s not sure she hears him correctly, and she lets it pass.
    He says he’s dating a woman, a reporter at the Times-Dispatch, but that it isn’t serious. They argue a lot about politics and religion, and she wants him to have the tattoo on his arm removed.
    â€œTattoo?” Nancy says and breaks up again, spraying bourbon and water. “You were afraid to let them give you flu shots. Lemme see.”
    She finally gets him to roll up his sleeve. Sure enough, just above his right elbow the tip end of what finally reveals itself as a snake appears. The snake is a now-faded green and dominates the upper half of his right arm. He got it, he says, at a place in Wrightstown, New Jersey, while he was waiting to go to the war. It seemed right at the time, he says, and shrugs.
    Nancy is transfixed. She runs her hand along the surface of the tattoo, and she feels a rush of sorrow that an arm she once loved to stroke should be mutilated so.
    â€œMomma and Daddy blamed