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moment—she was just entering the ladies’ room. “You don’t know me. You probably have never even seen me before. But I was wondering—if this is something you would consider, I mean—well, that this Friday night maybe we could go out somewhere together. If you want.”
    Not surprisingly, at that precise moment she was feeling the same way he was: her body was about to explode, the blood was tight against her skin, and she needed to release the pressure.
    â€œWell, yes,” she said, without seeming to think much about it. “Friday would be nice,” and just that quickly she disappeared into the ladies’ room.
    Yes, she said, even though just that morning Don Price had asked her to marry him. She’d almost said yes to that, too, but then something had told her to take a few days to think about it, as though my father had sent his hope on a whisper, and she had heard it.

The Fight
    E dward Bloom was not a fighter. He enjoyed the pleasures of human discourse too much to resort to such a primitive and often painful form of settling disputes. But he could defend himself when forced to, and he was forced to the night he took Sandra Kay Templeton for a drive down the road on Piney Mountain.
    Three weeks had passed since their first date, and between then and now many words had passed between Edward and Sandra. They’d gone to a movie together, split a couple of malts, he’d even told her a joke or two. Simply by being who he was—no more, no less—my father was winning my mother’s heart. Things were getting serious: when he touched her hand, she blushed. She’d forget the end of sentences she’d begun. It wasn’t that she’d fallen in love with my father, yet. But she saw that she could.
    Maybe she had a lot more thinking to do.
    This night would be an important part of the whole thinking process. It was the night of The Drive. After a few miles of driving aimlessly they’d find themselves at the end of some country dead-end road, alone in the dark woods, and as the silence surrounded them he would lean toward her and she’d move imperceptibly toward him and they would fall into a kiss. And they were heading that way when in the rearview mirror my father saw a pair of headlights, small at first but getting larger, heading fast down the thin and twisting road on Piney Mountain. Edward didn’t know it was Don Price. He only knew it was a car coming up behind them at a dangerous speed, and so he slowed down, the better to make a wise decision if something was to happen.
    Suddenly the car was directly behind them, its headlights glaring in the rearview mirror. Edward rolled down his window and motioned the car by, but when he did so it bumped his fender. Sandra gasped, and my father touched her leg with his hand to calm her.
    â€œIt’s okay,” he said. “Probably some drunk kid.”
    â€œNo,” she said. “That’s Don.”
    And my father understood. Without another word, the situation was clear, just as it would have been one hundred years before in a frontier town out west and Don had met him in the middle of a dusty street, hand on his holster. This was a showdown.
    Don’s car bumped the fender again, and my father hit the gas. Edward had to prove that if fast was what Don Price wanted, Edward could be fast, and being fast he sped around the next curve, leaving Don Price in the distance behind him.
    He was back, though, in just seconds, no longer bumping from behind but side by side now, the two cars taking up the entire road, speeding over hills and turns that would have led weaker hearts to stop, then and there. Don Price edged his car into my father’s lane, and my father edged back, the two cars scraping door to door. My father knew he could drive this road as long as he needed to, but he wasn’t sure about Don Price, whose face he caught a glimpse of as their cars veered back and forth,