Funny Valentine

Southern Review, The, Summer, 2008 by Claudia Emerson Andrews

She had been a late and only child to parents already old and set; none of us had ever

wanted to go inside that hushed house and play with her, her room too neat, doll-crowded.

We did encourage her later, though, to enter the high-school talent contest--after we ' d heard

her singing " My Funny Valentine " in a stall in the girls ' bathroom, reckoning the boys

would laugh, perhaps find us even prettier by comparison. Still, we would not have predicted

those wisteria-scaled walls, the one room we could see from the street with its windows

open year-round so that greening vines entered and birds flew in and out-- bad luck

, we thought,

bad luck

. By then we were members of the ladies ' garden club, the condition of her house

and what had been its garden a monthly refreshment of disappointment, the most

delectable complaint her parents ' last Coupe de Ville sinking in tangled orchard grass and filled to the roof--plush front seat and rear-- with paperbacks, fat, redundant romances

she had not quite thrown away-- laughable

, we laughed, unphotographable

--with wild restraint.