Julia's Chocolates. Cathy Lamb

Peter Harris left. He went straight to the sheriff, but as the sheriff is one of Stash and Aunt Lydia’s best friends, he walked Peter Harris to the bar and bought him a few stiff ones, and that was that.

      The pig named Micah was named after a skinny, gangly cousin of hers who had a penchant for Jack Daniels and loose women. He was a belligerent drunk who never worked but always had time to pester Aunt Lydia for money. One night when he’d been at the local bar too long, he accidentally crashed his car into her front porch. As she had just painted the front porch yellow with orange railings, that was the last straw.

      Lydia dragged his body out of that beater, his head lolling to the side, and stripped him naked. Next she drew a short red negligee over his unconscious head, then hauled him into her own truck. She dumped him off in the middle of a field right behind the town.

      The gossip in town over gangly Micah in the red negligee didn’t subside for two weeks, and the little girls who found him and ran and got their mothers will never forget the sight. Micah woke up surrounded by giggling women and rough and tough farmers and townspeople who looked at him with disgust and pointed their guns at his personal jewels.

      “We don’t need your type here, Micah,” Old Daniel said, who owned the gasoline station and had regular poker games in the back room.

      “You’re disgustin’,” said Stace Grammar, who worked in a factory and had biceps the size of tree stumps. “Get out of this town. Next thing you know, you and your boyfriend will be demanding equal rights.” He shot off his gun six inches over Micah’s head. “Take it to the city, boy!”

      Micah turned and ran as fast as he could through town to Aunt Lydia’s, his bottom jiggling out the back of that red negligee. He ignored people’s hoots, hollers, and another gunshot, revved up his truck, and zoomed out of town.

      We have never seen Micah again.

      Stash is the only man in town who can ever beat Aunt Lydia at poker—that’s why a pig has been named after him. No one will play with Aunt Lydia anymore unless she agrees to play for pennies only, except Stash.

      Aunt Lydia says he cheats. Stash is a grizzled man with a white beard and a bald head who’s built like an ox. His eyes are always laughing, and every time he’s come over when I’ve been there, he brings me fruit or candy and gives Aunt Lydia a plant or a new herb for her windowsill. Twice now he’s brought her perfume.

      One time during my visit, he brought her a little box with something silky inside. Aunt Lydia shoved it back in the box real quick, tied the ribbon up tight, and threw it at his head. I’ve never seen Stash laugh so hard. He left the box on the dining room table.

      Stash owns hundreds of acres of farmland, all of it surrounding Lydia’s five acres. He has a company called Oregon’s Natural Products, and he sells his goods all over the nation. He has farmhands and “business hands,” as he likes to call them, who help him run “The Biz.”

      I remembered that Aunt Lydia pretended to get angry every time he came over. “Would you quit staring at me, Stash?” she’d snap, and he would laugh. “Can’t look away from a beacon of light,” he’d always say. Then he would settle back in a chair and watch my Aunt Lydia as she puttered around the kitchen or talked to her plants.

      Whenever Stash could, he’d run his fingers through her thick, graying hair or hug her slender body to his. Now and then she’d allow it, but most of the time she slapped his hands away and told him to behave because there was a child in the house. The last time this happened, I was thirty-two.

      He always kissed her right on the lips before he left and then told her what he was going to do. “I’m gonna plow your back acres tomorrow, Lydia Jean,” or, “I’m sending the guys out to harvest your corn on Thursday,” or, “If you make some more of that jam, I’ll sell it for you at the Saturday market.”

      “Stay off of my land,” Aunt Lydia always yelled as the screen door slammed behind him. I could tell she didn’t mean it, because she had to try hard to hide her smile. Stash always left with one of Lydia’s jars of jelly or fresh-baked bread.

      I don’t really know why Aunt Lydia has named a pig after Stash except that she really does take her poker seriously and is not a good sport about losing.

      But the pigs do gather a lot of attention from anyone driving by her farm. “No sense having a boring front yard,” Aunt Lydia has told me on several occasions during our talks. “Life is too short for boredom, and pigs are never boring.”

      Aunt Lydia also has a real, live pig she calls Melissa Lynn and a multitude of parakeets and lovebirds she lets out of their cages twice a day so they can stretch their wings in the house. Remarkably, they will usually agree to go back into the cages.

      She cleans her gun every day after target shooting, loves to do crafts of any type, and grows a little pot in her basement. “For my colitis,” she tells me, although she hasn’t been to a doctor in decades.

      Aunt Lydia, I reflected, was the one stable person in my life, and within about three days, driving almost straight through, I would arrive at her home. I wiped the tears from my face, tears I had no idea had sprung from my eyes, and floored the accelerator, even as fear gnawed at the insides of my stomach like giant claws.

      No need to worry about the size of my butt anymore. Robert was gone, and I had no use for men. None. I wiped my eyes again. Stupid men. Stupid and mean and beastly and selfish. With all the men running the world it is a damn miracle we have not blown ourselves to smithereens. Yet.

      The wind whipped around my head, and on impulse, I ripped the rubber band out of my brownish-blondish curls and let them whip around my face for the first time in two years. Robert had had no use for “wild-looking women.”

      Sweating, dirty, and exhausted, I knew the only cure: chocolate. I drove with my knees and peered through the red bag on the passenger seat, grabbing a Baggie full of chocolate squares I had made myself. The first bit of chocolate hit my tongue like a slice of heaven. The second had my tears drying up. The third had me laughing, in a pathetic sort of way, about my hapless wedding dress.

      I dropped two chocolates into my mouth. I had failed in almost every aspect of my life, I thought in a burst of disgusting self-pity, but the one thing I was good at was melting in my mouth right at that moment. I knew chocolate. And, Lord, no one anywhere made chocolate as good as I did.

      Golden reminded me a bit of the tree where my wedding dress was probably still flapping. It had at one time been a thriving little town, but the logging boom was over, the endangered species had won, and many of the residents had moved on. There was one rather long Main Street, lined by the requisite trees; spring flowers hung from the lampposts. The flowers were the only things that looked alive.

      Several of the shops were simply gaping black holes of businesses that had come and gone. But there was a corner drugstore with a broken sign that read S MS DRU STORE.

      There was also a movie theater, a cozy-looking coffee shop with red tablecloths, a grocery, an auto repair shop, a hardware store, and several other stores one would expect to see. There were people out on the streets—coming home, I thought, from one of the town’s two restaurants or a board meeting at school.

      I suddenly felt my heart lighten a bit. I didn’t feel like I was going to vomit in fear, the way I did when I was packing up my suitcases in Boston over a week ago, leaving my tight white heels behind.

      “For God’s sake, Possum, your feet are huge!” I could still hear the sneer in Robert’s voice a month ago. “Shit, bitch, don’t look at me like that! I’m just stating a fact. You always take things so personally.”

      He had picked up my foot and then shoved it off his lap as if he couldn’t bear to have it touching him for a moment longer.

      And still, I tried to appease him, briefly wondering if I could get my feet surgically shortened. But Robert had wanted me. Me—with my frizzy curls and large butt and a family history that could make your blood curdle in your veins and a past I couldn’t share for fear of the revulsion I’d see on people’s