The girls stop to put up the top on the Mustang and get some refreshment, unwittingly putting on a show for the locals.

Half an hour later, a few minutes past noon, on a different road, clouds had come up west of us. Dark clouds, the kind every Midwesterner learns are full of rain. I turned off the highway down the Main Street of a small town and pulled into a diagonal parking space in front of a Piggly Wiggly.

“Put the top up?” asked Dolly, getting out on the passenger side.

“I think we’d better,” I said. We pulled the soft top out of the boot. It stretched reluctantly, but we got it extended over the passenger compartment where we struggled with the latches to hold it in place.

“Woof!” said Dolly as she got it fastened on her side. I’d already finished, but I knew from experience that the pins on the right-hand side did not slide as easily. I grinned at her, holding one hand up limply and she stuck her tongue out at me.

Which produced a noise from the six or seven men standing around watching us. We hadn’t noticed. I know I blushed, but Dolly acted delighted, fluffing her hair and smiling.

One particular tall man grinned at me and I kept blushing. I guess I got flustered because I sort of suddenly turned around and headed into the Piggly Wiggly, maybe just for something to get me away from all the attention.

Dolly caught up with me inside and handed me my purse. “You forgot this,” she said, smirking at me.

“Thanks,” I said. “Why were they staring at us like that?”

“They’re men,” she said. “It’s what men do.”

“Arr,” I muttered.

“Wanna get an RC and a Moon Pie for lunch?” Dolly asked.

“I hate RC.” Royal Crown Cola, a weaker, fizzier, Pepsi-like soda pop. “I’m not big on any pop, but I prefer Coke.”

Dolly giggled but didn’t explain why. “How about a Yoohoo?”

We wandered toward the cold cases and found two bottles of Kayo, better than Yoohoo, any day. Pleased with ourselves we headed back to the cashier.

We stood in the short line, and I got some coins out to pay when Dolly startled me by asking, “You like guys, don’t you?”

“I...uh?” I didn’t know how to answer.

“Weren’t you dating that Jimmy character for a while?”

“That was your idea,” I protested. Jimmy Lane was a weightlifter with a thing for girls with something extra. If he'd had two brain cells to rub together something might have worked between us.

“Hmm,” she said.

We paid for the drinks, including deposit on the bottles, and headed back out to the street. The Piggly Wiggly actually had a screen door like a house, and I paused where I could look without being seen. The tall man who had grinned at me was just walking away from near the Mustang, but I didn’t see any of the other guys hanging around in the area.

“C’mon,” I said, and we scooted out and back into the car where we sat and sipped our Kayos for a minute. It being June, we rolled down the windows so we wouldn’t cook, but a breeze from a river somewhere made it actually pleasant.

“The reason I asked if you like boys...” Dolly began.

I interrupted. “Is because you want to know if I’m going to get in your way?”

“Uh, sort of. I mean, I don’t want to start something with, like, a pair of guys and find out you aren’t willing to double date.”

I took a bigger swig of my drink. Kayo is made with milk and coats your mouth with a creaminess that Yoohoo just doesn’t have. I savored the sweet, chocolatey taste and the rich mouthfeel. I didn’t want to think about Dolly’s question.

She didn’t dig at it but let it lie there while she chattered about needing a new lipstick because most of the ones we lifted from the show were pink. “And pink lipstick makes me look sallow,” she concluded.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Oh, it does.”

“No, I mean, I don’t know if I like… like guys. The way you mean it….”

“Hm.”

“What if they like me back?” I wondered out loud, thinking as I did so what a lame question.

“Oh, they will. And I think you do.”

“Huh?”

She waved with her pop bottle. “Earlier when those guys were laughing, you looked at that one guy, and you made your eyes big and he saw that and his eyes got big and if you had wanted to right then, you two could probably have found a bush somewhere and started making out, right then and there on the eighteenth of June here in Sterling, Muhzzurah. Boy howdy.” She said it all at once just like that, and I had to stare at her.

“I did what?” I protested.

She turned toward me and demonstrated, lifting her eyebrows and making her big, brown eyes even bigger.

“I did not!”

“Yes, you did,” she insisted. “And you hooked him, girl. I saw it in his face. I’m just surprised he didn’t follow us into Piggy Wiggy or wait outside for us. He wanted you.”

I remembered him walking away as I paused in the screen door of the store. At least, I thought it must be the same tall man. Jeans and a white shirt with a pattern of like, fences and horses or something. Brown Stetson with a yellow hatband. Flat-heeled walking boots. I blushed all over again when I realized how vivid a memory of him I had.

Dolly giggled and made as if to toast with the Kayo bottle. “Yeah, you like boys. I thought so, ‘cause, you know, you never look at me that way.”

We tapped bottles. “I guess you’re right. You’re… you’re my sister, like. Not….”

“Not,” she agreed.

I had two other sisters, but at the moment I felt closer to Dolly than I ever had to either of them.

We finished our drinks, and I put the bottles in a cardboard box behind the passenger seat to turn in for the deposits later. Dolly used the mirror clipped to the sun visor to check for chocolate stains around her mouth and reapply her lipstick. I licked a tissue and scrubbed my own mouth without looking.

She laughed at me then folded the mirror back up and put her lipstick away. I twisted the key in the ignition, and the starter made that urgent clicking and grinding noise you tend to hear on cold winter mornings. But the engine did not start.

* * *

In two minutes we had exhausted our knowledge of what to do. I’d never owned a car before and Dolly drove but didn’t actually have a license.

“I know how to hotwire a car,” she offered.

I waved the key at her.

“Oh, yeah, huh? Well, get out and put the hood up and stare into the stuff in there and try to look helpless,” she said.

I turned to glare at her but she seemed serious.

“It’ll work,” she said.

“I don’t know anything about what’s under the hood,” I said. “And I don’t want to get grease on me. Or my clothes.”

“I know, I know. Trust me.”

“You’re expecting some guy to see me and offer to help?”

She nodded.

I protested. “You do it. You’re little and cute and more girly than me.”

She shook her head. “You’re the tall, skinny blonde. You’ll attract more attention.”

“Oh, so now I’m a blonde?” I puffed air at a lock of hair hanging in my face. “I’m not skinny and I’m not that tall.” Tall for a girl at five-nine, though. And skinny enough to wear a size ten. “C’mon. We’ll both do it.”

Sighing, I got out of the car and moved in front of it. I stared at the little horse emblem, realizing that I had no idea how to even open the hood. I looked at Dolly who had gotten out of the passenger seat to come stand beside me and we both shrugged.

“Problem?” someone said.

We looked around and here came the same tall man again, back from the direction I had seen him disappear before. A slender black man, nearly as tall, walked beside him, both of them smiling.

Dolly snickered beside me. Her plan had certainly worked quickly.

“It won’t start,” I said, feeling helpless and relieved and hating that just a little bit.

“Let me take a look,” he offered.

I stepped out of his way and he put his hand below the chrome of the grill and pulled something there. The hood popped up a bit and he reached into the space created and opened the hood.

Dolly winked at me.

“Ken will take care of you,” said the black man, still smiling. “I’m Otis,” he said directly to Dolly.

“Hi, I’m Dolly,” she said. “Bunny and me don’t know nothing about cars.”

Bunny? I glared at her and she grinned.

“Try to start it again,” said Ken.

I got behind the wheel and tried. It made the same futile noise as before but did not start.

“Hmm,” said Ken. He looked around the hood at me in the driver’s seat. “You ladies in a hurry? Otis and I were just heading over to the tent for some lunch. You can join us and afterwards I can come back with tools and figure out what is wrong with your car?”

“Tent? Lunch?” I said feeling a tiny bit ambushed.

“Uh, place we call the Barbeque Tent on the south edge of town. Best BBQ between St. Louis and KayCee. Otis’s cousins run the place, and they’ve got pulled pork, ribs, whole chickens and beef brisket, with beans, cornbread, light bread, and peach cobbler and... uh…” He trailed off looking at me.

I hoped I wasn’t drooling but breakfast had been a long time ago in St. Louis and one bottle of Kayo had not done much to forestall hunger. “We’d been planning to stop in Jeff City to eat,” I protested weakly and untruthfully.

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