"Mmm. No."

Darrel and I had been going together for a month and a half and this was the first thing he'd tried. Yet, I reached around and pulled his hand out of my pants as if I was deathly afraid of it.

It was 1969 and I was going to be a sophomore at Santana High School. I liked Santee but a lot of people thought it was a joke. When you passed by it on the freeway, the big attraction was the wannabe cowboy bar on the side of the road, just before the second exit, almost straight across from the drive-in movie. That was Santee. Two exits, one stop light and three or four stop signs. The big news was the 7-11 they were building down the hill from us. We were in one of two housing tracts, little starter homes, twenty five or thirty miles from San Diego, out where the people who couldn't afford a real house or didn't want to live in the big city bought.

Mom and Dad had met in Oklahoma where they both went to school. They must have met early on in life because my dad decided he didn't like high school after trying it for part of a semester. They got married soon after she graduated, maybe because of me, maybe not. I know I came along real quick after the wedding.

Mom and Dad were like night and day, Mutt and Jeff, Laurel and Hardy. Dad had a real belly on him. Not so much from beer, though he did like a couple while watching the Padres on the tube. He always had a cigarette going, the red pack of Pall Malls visible in the pocket of just about any shirt he wore. Dad drove a truck for a local company, so he was home nights. To listen to him talk, though, you'd think he was on the road for weeks at a time. You'd also think he was still in Oklahoma to hear to country twang to his voice.

Mom, on the other hand could probably fit into her high school cheerleader's costume, if she'd ever gone along with that nonsense. Her opinion of cheerleaders was that they were too stupid to get good grades or stay off their backs. She didn't have any accent you could notice, though what I called a countryism would sneak into her speech once in a while. She probably weighed in at about a third of my dad's weight but she could knock him across the room with a look. I swear, he was scared to death of her the few times I saw her get mad. Mom was a nurse at Kaiser. She could tell stories for hours about the lousy service and the runaround the patients got. She did pretty good, but I could always tell when one of her patients died on her. Mom didn't smoke or drink and she very rarely cussed.

So, it was Friday night, probably Saturday morning by now and Darrel and I were on the couch in the living room. Mom and Dad had gone to bed before we got home from the movie. We'd gone to see Love Story, with Ryan O'Neal and Ali MacGraw. He was a rich kid who fell in love with a girl who was from the wrong side of the mansion and married her against his father's wishes, actually getting disinherited. And then she up and died on him.

My eyes got wet in the theater, but all hell broke loose when we got to the parking lot. The only thing Darrel and I ever fought about was that he smoked and wouldn't give it up for me. As we were leaving, he had a box of Marlboros in his right hand while pushing open the glass door with his left shoulder. He had this way of shaking the pack and three or four of them would raise up so he could snag one with his lips. He was taking one out of the pack while holding the door for me, lighting the thing with his Zippo before the door swung closed. Seeing the end of that cancer stick flame up right after seeing Jennie waste away just caught me off guard and I started bawling. I couldn't even answer him when he was trying to figure out what was wrong with me until we'd been in the car for at least five minutes. When he told me that he wasn't planning on dying for a long time after I finally got out that I was scared of that very thing, it got worse. Poor Darrel looked pathetic, trying to figure out some way to make things better and not coming up with anything.