Photograph by Shawn Theodore for The New Yorker

This is the fifth story in this summer’s online Flash Fiction series. You can read the entire series, and our Flash Fiction from previous years, here.

It was a Friday in spring when Norman, exhausted from dealing with Barbara-Pam and her jagged words, drove his pickup to the American Legion to meet his best friend. There were two women sitting at the table with Bo. Floretta was nudging Cloletha’s shoulder. Both were snapping their fingers to a jukebox song. Norman bought four beers and then sat down with them.

In Chicasetta, time hadn’t so much passed as crept out Norman’s back door. He and Barbara-Pam had grown up together in the same church and had attended the same segregated schools. Barbara-Pam’s mama was a widow, but, when men tried to court her, she’d tell them she’d had herself a good love. She didn’t need nary other. And Barbara-Pam wanted that kind of man, like her daddy had been to her mama.

She’d caught Norman’s eye when he was sixteen. He was good-looking, muscular, and knew it. Bo was his ace and full of laughter until he got called up to Vietnam, after graduation. But nineteen was still just an idea that year, and those boys walked the halls of the Negro high school like they were kings in a land where dark skin equalled royalty.

Barbara-Pam was pretty back in high school, but so was Floretta. Or maybe Floretta was just all right. Who knew? You couldn’t take your eyes off them big legs, and, if you tried to lift your gaze, there was that nice, round behind. Floretta’s mama was a widow, too, of a sort. The man who’d gotten her pregnant had gone to the electric chair. She insisted they’d been headed to the altar, but couldn’t nobody verify that story. The mother and daughter went to church at Mt. Calvary, where the siddity Negroes worshipped and sang true hymns, instead of lining-out spirituals.

The tension between what Floretta promised behind the high school and what Barbara-Pam pretended she didn’t know existed had eventually made the choice for Norman. But Barbara-Pam’s shyness gave way two years after they were married. She climbed on top of him, and he found he was disappointed in her pleasure. She was not as pristine as he’d thought. She’d simply been ignorant.

The years abandoned Norman. He was in his thirties, past his Jesus year. He was a deacon at his and Barbara-Pam’s church, where his father had served in the same pious role. When Norman opened the back door of his house, no unexpected tremors greeted him. Barbara-Pam rolled up her hair at night with pink curlers and wore flowered housedresses that reminded Norman of his own mama, an antidote to any man’s rising nature.

That night at the Legion, Norman put the beers down on the table, but Bo and Cloletha rose and left, holding hands. Floretta didn’t even look toward the door where the two had departed. She swayed in her seat and mouthed the words along to “Woman to Woman.” She told Norman that this was her song.

Everybody in town knew that Bo was married and didn’t have no business with Cloletha, but Bo was Norman’s best friend. Bo had changed and gone quiet after coming back from the war. Still, an ace was for life. You had to stay with him, or else what was honor? Wasn’t that the meaning of a friendship stronger than the bones that held your gore and spirit? Norman told himself that he was only sitting at the table to wait for Bo. That was all he intended.

But word travelled to Barbara-Pam that Floretta had slid onto the seat of her husband’s pickup, and they’d driven off into the dark. When Norman opened his front door, Barbara-Pam was waiting. She was tired, she said. Didn’t nothing seem to make him happy no more. He had a good, faithful woman and two little girls who were crazy about him, but he didn’t seem to care. She ordered him out, though the house was in his name.

Given the expense of divorce, he figured it was cheaper to keep Barbara-Pam, but he started living with Floretta full time. After a few years of private remonstrations from his minister, and his mama refusing to let him attend Sunday dinners at her house, which was only a few yards across the field from his technical dwelling, Norman compromised: he began spending a couple of nights a week with Barbara-Pam.

He got to thinking that all things were possible, like when he’d walked the halls of Chicasetta Colored High School. Like he was a man across the ocean in Africa, one who had a right to more than one wife. Whenever Barbara-Pam started in with her nagging, he’d remind her: Don’t get too feisty. Surprisingly, however, the loving had returned with Barbara-Pam. He began to enjoy it when she climbed on top. Also, there was the smothered cube steak she made for him on alternate Saturday nights.

Then Floretta’s baby boy came, and she started giving Norman a settling-down eye, and he decided Barbara-Pam was his choice. They had made vows in front of a preacher, it didn’t make no sense to keep bouncing back and forth, and, truth be told, Norman just couldn’t keep up no more. Their little boy had been walking for a month the Friday he packed the things he kept at Floretta’s place, but she didn’t cry. She told him, “Just ’cause the cock crow, don’t make the sun rise.” He thought about that for more days than he cared to admit, but he never could parse it through.

The Sunday morning after their true reconciliation, Norman reached for his wife, but she wasn’t in bed. He smelled sausage cooking: church mornings weren’t the same if there wasn’t pork on the table, and he sure hoped there were biscuits and grits as well. He quickly showered, dried off, then went to the closet, where he found that Barbara-Pam had splattered his deacon’s suits with bleach. Even his pride and joy, the maroon one with pointy-toed gaiters to match. Somehow, he’d been sound asleep while his woman had done this.

It took Norman two months to save enough for new church suits, and he was too old-fashioned to wear work clothes to Sunday services. On those heathen days, he’d drive to his old high school, which was now integrated. Not only law but custom had finally changed, and Norman didn’t even recognize the place. On school days, there were no loud boasts from boys, no girls fanning their bottoms. He sat in his truck and listened to the radio until he had to turn it off to save the battery. The paved parking lot wasn’t the dusty strip that had been there in Norman’s prime, in the right-handed kingdom of years past. ♦