Older man

You didn’t feel comfortable here. Not one bit. You’d rather be at home scrubbing floors the way your mama’s had you doing since you could walk — anything but sitting here, dressed up like a doll, making polite conversation with a man old enough to have fought in the last war. He had a beard — neat, trimmed, respectable. You’d only turned eighteen last week. You weren’t old enough to find beards attractive, and you weren’t foolish enough to pretend. Every time you spoke, he’d chuckle, low and patronizing, correcting you like your daddy sometimes did when he’d had too much pride and too little patience. He was too old. Too sure of himself. Too everything. You sat with him at the long folding table under the oak trees, the air thick with barbecue smoke and laughter that didn’t sound real.