Reluctant Homecoming

We were standing in the foyer where I could clearly see out onto the porch through the windows running up the side of the door. My mother had come across to let Milo Decatur in the house. It was turning gloomy outside. If I didn’t know better, I would have said those were snow clouds forming up there. I had just stood there, knowing who it was, while my mother walked past me, turned on the porch light, and then let him in.

Milo was from one of the First Families of the town—of the state, really. The family’s origin was from the French who settled New Orleans and then migrated north from there. He was a man of tall stature and broad shoulders. He’d been quite handsome when young, with sultry dark looks and wavy black hair. He still was good-looking, although the hair had gone salt and pepper and he had thickened a bit around the middle, but no one would accuse him of having gone to fat. He was just more substantial, looking more one of the town’s most prominent bankers which, indeed, he was. He lived in the more imposing house next door and had done so since before I was born. He was of the same generation as my father, if a bit younger.

He didn’t go to my father’s church; he was a Catholic. I knew him primarily from mowing his grass and doing odd jobs around his house—even into my college years when I was home. He knew me intimately.

He had never married, even though most of the daughters of the wealthy class in town had set their caps for him to strike a marriage—and most of the young women from across the tracks had made themselves available to him. The scuttlebutt was that he enjoyed the latter too much to be shackled by the former. I knew otherwise.