"Maybe he was pulling your leg," I said. "Maybe there never was any meteor shower. Did you ask Ramona?"

"No. I never thought of that. I just assumed."

"Well, why don't you call her up and ask?"

"She and Manny moved to San Diego," she wailed. You'd think they had moved for the sole purpose of keeping this information from Lou Ann.

"Well, I'm sorry."

She persisted. "But that's not even really the point. It wasn't just that I'd missed something important. I kept on thinking that if I could miss a whole meteor shower, well, I'd probably done something else ridiculous. For all I know I could've run naked through the desert singing 'Skip to My Lou.'"

I shuddered. All those spiny pears and prickly whatsits.

She stared mournfully into the empty bag of chips. "And now it's Valentine's Day," she said. "And everybody else in the whole wide world is home with their husband smooching on the couch and watching TV, but not Lou Ann, no sir. I ran off both my husband and the TV."

I couldn't even think where to begin on this one. I thought of another one of Mama's hog sayings: "Hogs go deaf at harvest time." It meant that people would only hear what they wanted to hear. Mama was raised on a hog farm.

Lou Ann looked abnormally flattened against the back of the sofa. I thought of her father, who she'd told me was killed when his tractor overturned. They'd found him pressed into a mud bank, and when they pulled him out he left a perfect print. "A Daddy print," she'd called it, and she'd wanted to fill the hole with plaster of Paris to keep him, the way she'd done with her hand print in school for Mother's Day.

"I always wondered if that night we got drunk had something to do with why I lost him," she said. I was confused for a second, still thinking of her father.

"I thought you were glad when Angel left."

"I guess I was. But still, you know, something went wrong. You're supposed to love the same person your whole life long till death do you part and all that. And if you don't, well, you've got to have screwed up somewhere."

"Lou Ann, you read too many magazines." I went into the kitchen and checked the refrigerator for about the fifteenth time that night. It was still the same: cabbages and peanut butter. I opened a cabinet and peered behind the cans of refried beans and tomato sauce. There was a bottle of black-strap molasses, a box of Quick Hominy Grits, and a can of pink salmon. I considered all of these things in various combinations, then settled for another bag of tortilla chips. This is what happens to people without TVs, I thought. They die of junk food.

When I came back to the living room she was still depressed about Angel. "I'll tell you my theory about staying with one man your whole life long," I said. "Do you know what a flapper ball is?"

She perked up. "A whatter ball?"

"Flapper ball. It's that do-jobbie in a toilet tank that goes up and down when you flush. It shuts the water off."

"Oh."

"So one time when I was working in this motel one of the toilets leaked and I had to replace the flapper ball. Here's what it said on the package; I kept it till I knew it by heart: 'Please Note. Parts are included for all installations, but no installation requires all of the parts.' That's kind of my philosophy about men. I don't think there's an installation out there that could use all of my parts."

Lou Ann covered her mouth to hide a laugh. I wondered who had ever told her laughing was a federal offense.

"I'm serious, now. I'm talking mental capacity and everything, not just parts like what they cut a chicken into." By this time she was laughing out loud.

"I tell you my most personal darkest secret and you laugh," I said, playing vexed.

"They can always use a breast or a thigh or a leg, but nobody wants the scroungy old neckbones!"

"Don't forget the wings," I said. "They always want to gobble up your wings right off the bat." I dumped the rest of the bag of chips out into the bowl on the ottoman between us. I was actually thinking about going for the jar of peanut butter.

"Here, let me show you this Valentine's card I got for Mama," I said, digging through my purse until I found it. But Lou Ann was already having such a fit of giggles I could just as well have shown her the electric bill and she would have thought it was the funniest thing in recorded history.

"Oh, me," she said, letting the card fall in her lap. Her voice trailed down from all those high-pitched laughs like a prom queen floating down the gymnasium stairs. "I could use me a good wrench around here. Or better yet, one of them... what do you call 'ems? That one that's shaped like a weenie?"