Sucker | Michelle McEwen

First published in O & S, April 2009

Sucker

Gwendolyn Lee was the first Coffeyville girl

to pay daddy any real attention.  Any weekend

you could find them on some corner downtown—

holding hands.  The Thomasville boys, his bunch,

made fun of him for this.  Real Coffeyville girls didn't

hold hands— they started at the good stuff.  No one

ever really intended to make a Coffeyville girl

their main girl— except maybe Coffeyville boys

who were no match for the boys of Thomasville.  Even

on the football field, the Thomasville boys

outshined them and their girls took notice— would do

anything to be able to jump down from the bleachers,

lean against the fence and holler out the name

of a Thomasville athlete, but

they'd never be a main girl— they'd get taken

to the prom, they'd get shoved in the river and

not complain, but they'd never be able to say they made it

out of Coffeyville on account of a Thomasville

boy.  Daddy says he was the first

in Thomasville to fall hard for a Coffeyville girl.  Sucker,

they called him, but he didn't mind because

to him Gwendolyn Lee was just the sort you hung on to— maybe

married.  What did he want, he said, with a girl

whose mind was always on crossed legs

& Sundays?  Those were Thomasville girls for you

and Thomasville girls did not impress him— they were

made, instead, to impress mothers and fathers and aunts.  Gwendolyn Lee,

he said, didn't care how she looked eating a peach.