But The Line has always existed in its own separate universe. Maybe because it’s literally between states, maybe because it’s the opposite of something likeCheers.Sometimes you wanna go wherenobodyknows your name, and The Line was good for that.
I think that’s what brought Landon there that night.
Later, he told me he’d heard people talking about how the prettiest girl in all of Alabama was waiting tables there, so he’d naturally had to come in and see for himself.
(And no, I didn’t remind him that he was married to a onetime Prettiest Girl in Alabama. I mean, men liked looking at me, but no one had ever commemorated that shit with a tiara, you know?)
Anyway, I think Landon was there because he wanted to shrug off being Landon Parkes Fitzroy for a night.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Landon’s father, Governor Fitzroy, had given him an ultimatum that year. I’m sure he said it all fancy and stern, doing that thing rich people do where they talk so calmly that you don’t realize you’re being threatened until it’s too late, but the gist of it was that Landon had fucked around enough, and it was time to Get Serious.
And to the Fitzroys, “Getting Serious” meant getting into politics.
Landon was a lawyer at his uncle’s firm in Mobile, and a successful one at that, but no son of Beau Fitzroy was going to be allowed to be “just” a lawyer.
“He won’t be happy until I’m the fucking president,” Landon told me in one of the last conversations we ever had. “The Alabama Kennedys, that’s what he wants.”
“Which makes me Marilyn,” I remember joking.
He didn’t laugh.
But that was all ahead of us. The fights, the lies, the accusations.
The storm.
Still, it’s important you know where Landon’s head was that night we met. He knew the walls were closing in, that the future that had been practically written into his DNA was barreling toward him. But it hadn’t arrived just yet.
Not fucking yet.
That warm and sticky September night, he was walking into a dive bar after a deep-sea fishing trip with some old fraternity brothers, looking for nothing more than a few beers and a band thatdidn’tplay Lynyrd Skynyrd (he’d be disappointed there—I used to think the bands that played at The Line must’ve assumed they’d be shot on sight if they didn’t give the crowd “Sweet Home Alabama” once every couple of hours).
He wasn’t looking for me.
I wasn’t looking for him.
But we found each other all the same.
I think about that a lot. How random it all was in the end. Him showing up that night, me being there. I was about to quit working at The Line because the tips were shitty, and I was sick of having my ass groped every time I walked too close to the wrong table.
I was jealous of Frieda, who’d gotten a scholarship to go to college in Tennessee, and damn near pea-fuckin’-green with envy that Ellen’s parents had saved up enough to send her to Spring Hill in Mobile. I missed them both and was pissed off that they had somehow managed to escape when I hadn’t. My own fault, if I’m honest. I’d gotten it into my head that I was too special for anything as boring as college, and I had been sending off pictures of myself—not headshots, mind you, just goddamnPolaroidsI made Mama take, I wasthatnaïve—to the big modeling agencies that I read about inCosmopolitanandMademoiselle.
Shocking that Eileen Ford wasn’t beating down my door, right?
But I hadn’t quit The Line just yet, so I was there when Landon and his friends walked in. The bar they’d wanted to go to, the classier place just over the border in Florida, had closed early for some reason, so they’d wound up at The Line, probably more as a joke than anything else. Guys like them didn’t frequent places like that as a rule.
I spotted them right away, a group of about five or six guys, all of whom were dressed casually. Khaki shorts, white button-downs with the sleeves rolled up, boat shoes. They looked like a million other guys who showed up at The Line when they were on vacation, red-faced and laughing too loud, feeling a little wild because hey, maybe in a bar like this, they weren’t boring-ass Herbert from Accounting but someone cool, someone laid-back, someone Jimmy Buffett would probably want to have a beer with.
But Landon stood out.
It wasn’t just that he was, to quote Lori, one of the waitresses at The Line, “sooooooo fine,” even though he was definitely that. His hair was dark and curly, a little too long for a lawyer, probably, and while he wasn’t as tall as Ellen’s boyfriend, Tim, he had a way of holding himself that made him look bigger than he was.
And his eyes…
They were so dark brown they were nearly black, and when he looked at you, it was like you were the only thing he could see, the only thing he everwantedto see.
It was the look that got me. Before I ever heard him speak, before our hands brushed as I was handing him a cold and sweating bottle of beer, before we were pressed together on the dance floor, the band playing “Gloria” at his request.
Before he murmured in my ear, “Christ almighty, where have they been hiding you, gorgeous?”
