At the Doverton Country Club, a boy, the boy, the one who was mine the minute I saw him, worked on the grounds. He had sun-coppered hair and strong arms. In the summer, his skin was a burnished russet that made his blue eyes otherworldly.

By the second week of my sixteenth summer, all the girls at the club giggled over him. They were mostly from Doverton, but he and I were from neighboring Barrington. The town bore my name because my father and his father before him had owned the bottling plant, and that was what you did back then. If you created the town and made it thrive, you named it after yourself. Fifty years later, it was still named Barrington, we still lived there, and the folks in Doverton called it Trashington.


The town’s reputation bothered my father a little… but my mother? When she heard some of the Doverton Ladies of the Court hadn’t invited her to a cocktail brunch because she lived over there, it drove her over the edge.


“Don’t you give them a reason to call you trash.”