"Look, Dan, lemme tell you somethin', Helen said. "You never met my husband, Mr. Hardison. He died six years ago. Eighty-six."

"But you're not that old, Helen, I said.

"Nope. Herb Hardison was twenty-nine years older'n me. I was fifteen. He was forty-four. He took care of me all my life. Took me out of a share-cropper house. I went with him an' we worked hard, but we never went hungry or did without the necessities. And we did pretty good. I wouldn't own this business if he wasn't who he was an' made me who I am."

"And you're telling me..."

She smiled. "Dan, it's written all over your face how you feel about that little girl. You think that you're getting into something that is so wrong that society condemns it, but I'm tellin' you that sometimes society makes rules for the worst case, an' they completely bury the best case." She took a deep breath. "I'm serious. In four weeks you've turned a ragamuffin who was scared of her own shadow into a nice lookin' young lady. And her manners are better. An' YOU take care of her." Helen looked at me, silent for a second. "An' I think you know what I'm sayin'. Just take care of her, okay?"

"But, Helen, what am I gonna do in four months? I can't stay here after the job's over. Well, I can, for a while. I have savings. But I need to move on, you know."

Helen released an almost cryptic smile. "Don't you worry, Dan. Things change."

I smiled at Helen. "Maybe so, lady. Thanks!" I left and went to my little haven. My cellphone's ring assaulted my ear. I flipped it open and saw "Cindy".

"Hey, cutie," I said.

"Hi, Dan," she chirped. "I got homework."

"Real homework, or..."

"Maybe some of both ... I'm halfway there..."

I looked across the park and she was indeed walking toward me, bookbag slung artfully over her shoulder. So I waited for her to join me at my trailer. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught Helen watching at the office door. I unlocked my trailer and let Cindy and me inside. As I landed my computer bag in the miniscule space beside the sofa, I heard the door lock click.

I turned and Cindy smiled, her eyes happy, laughing. Then she squealed and jumped at me, throwing her arms around my neck, pressing her neatly clad body full against me. And she kissed me. We kissed. Long. This was the drink I thirsted for.

"Hello, little love," I said.

"I missed you, Dan," she sighed. "Hi."

She was still in my arms, smiling, her eyes bright. Her head was tilted back because of almost a foot difference in our heights. Her lips were naturally red, soft, still wet from the kiss. I sat back onto the sofa and pulled her toward me. With me now sitting, she was looking down at me and she put her hands on the sides of my face and kissed me again, then a shower of kisses.

"One more," I said between kisses, "and then homework..." I got, oh, two, or three, or half a dozen more. We spread books and notebooks and papers on the little dinette table and went over the lessons. English? Not a problem. Cindy was a reader on her own, and language was easy for her. Math? We worked on math. I explained what the books and the teachers wanted, and we talked her way through problems, and that was done. Science? For a kid who thought "Discovery" was the top-rated channel on TV? Hah!

I heard a knock at the door. Cindy answered it. I looked across the trailer. Donna. "Hey, Donna," I said.

"Hey, Dan," she answered. "I'm goin' in to help at the bar tonight. I was just checkin' on Cindy."

"She's okay," I countered. "She finished all her work. I was gonna take her out for pizza, if that's okay."

"Sure," said Donna. "Saves her from makin' a mess in our place."

"Are you gonna be in early? Or should I watch her?"

"I dunno what time I'm comin' in, but if you watch her, then I won't worry about it. But she can stay there by herself, you know."

"Yeah, I know, but after that storm the other night..."

"Yeah, but the trailer's tied down. Ol' Helen paid somebody to do that after the wind blew it sideways."

I continued, "And that red pickup truck keeps driving by..."

"Oh," laughed Donna. "That's just Larry. He was gonna move in with us, but he's whacked out, an' we broke up, an' he keeps hopin' for another chance."

I snorted. "Yeah. Creeps me out, especially when I see him drive by there and stop on the road and stare at your trailer and I know YOU'RE at work and Cindy's there by herself."

"He ain't gonna do nothin'. It'll violate his probation!"

"Well," I said, "Cindy's good on the sofa here if it's okay with you."

Donna gazed at me. "Yeah, I s'pose so. Anyways, I gotta go..." And she left.

Cindy turned back towards me and smiled impishly and purposefully locked the door. And turned toward the bed, kicking her shoes off. I joined her. Got one trophy-class hug, and she pulled me on top of her. I couldn't resist that, at least for a little while. I propped up on my elbows and surveyed that angelic face at close distance. Her eyes darted back and forth between mine, then she wrapped her arms around my neck and drew me down to kiss her.

"This keeps getting better and better," she said, "an' that's just the kissin'."

Yes, it was. Soft, eager lips. A tongue that was positively athletic. A face that angels envy. That bronze hair, and those green eyes ... And the giggle. And the smile. And the supple, now eager, body that carried all that around.

"Uh, yeah, baby," I said, "about that other stuff..." I rolled off her onto my side, facing her. She bounced once and lay on her side facing me.

"Mmm-hmmm," she smiled, and put a finger on the tip of my nose, then planted a kiss there. "Dan, we made love. My very first time makin' love. It was US!"

"I know, sweetie, and it was wonderful. You're very desirable and beautiful and it WAS wonderful, but I can't help but think that maybe I took advantage of you."

"Why, Dan? Why would you think that? Did you get me drunk? Give me drugs? Tie me up and tape my mouth shut? Huh?"

"No."

There's only one person in this whole wide world that comes even close to being as nice to me as you've been. An' that's Mizz Helen. An' she told me you were a nice guy an' I should be friends with you."

"Yeah," I said, filing that little tidbit for another conversation with Helen later. "But I was being nice without taking you to bed."

"Uh, Dan, I took YOU to bed..." She paused. "You've been so good to me. My friend. My very best friend. The one I can talk to. An' I wanted to give you something. All I had was ME!"

"Cindy, you are a wonderful gift."

"So," she said, looking me in the eye. "When YOU say "I love you", is it hard for you to say? Does it mean anything?"

"Cindy, I told you about my first wife." I sighed. "Four years ago I started seeing another lady seriously. She was pretty nice looking, smart, independent, no kids, and I thought it was going places. I was going to ask her to marry me. And one day, out of the blue, she announced she was moving back in with an old boyfriend that she'd only mentioned to me once in four months. That almost killed me. Tore me apart. I sat at home for a week, in a dark room, then I decided that I needed to get out of that crap. And that's when I started this road work. I've dated a few women. I don't do trash. If a woman is nice, sounds smart, friendly, available, I will do a date or two, but I just don't want that "one night in the sack and let's get married", and I don't like one-night stands, and I don't want my heart broken again. So yes, I know what it means when you hear somebody say "I love you" and it turned out to be on a time limit."

"So what's the time limit for Friday night?" Serious-looking face on this young lady.

"Heaven help me, Cindy, but I don't put a time limit on it. That's one of the things that scares me so damned much about this. I have fallen in love with a thirteen..."

"Fourteen," she interrupted, "Saturday."

"Okay, I've fallen in love with a fourteen year old girl. And fourteen year old girls can have a whole different idea of 'forever' than I do." I sighed.

I got a kiss in return. "Now," she said, "YOU shut up an' let me talk."

"Okay."

"First, I think you're too smart to think that I'm like every other teenaged girl you might have ever talked to. How many of them have a momma makin' her live in a thirty-foot travel trailer? And a momma doin' her boyfriends at the other end five nights a week? An' leavin' her there by herself overnight since she was eight? Huh?"

"You're the first," I admitted.

"So don't you think that I just MIGHT be a little different? I probably know more about men an' women and what they do to each other than most people you know. I know what Mom goes through when she loses one she wants to keep. An' I know what the guy does when she decides she don't want HIM any more. I know about screamin' an' hollerin' an' cryin' an' yellin' an' even hittin'. Do you think that I think that stuff's normal? Or good?"

"No."

"An' I know what drugs an' alcohol do from close up. I didn't just sit through the class at school. I watched my own mom do all that. I know! Do you think I want any of THAT?"

"I should hope not."

She scooted into my arms. "So, Dan, I know you think it's weird. I mean, I'm fourteen an' you're what forty?"

"Yeah. Forty-one, actually."

"An' you're thinking that fourteen year old girls shouldn't be sayin' 'I love you' unless they mean it. An' I'm tellin' you that I know enough to mean it. Really, Dan ... I think you know..." and there was a tear on the cheek of this little angel in my arms.

I kissed the tear away. And held her. "I'm sorry, Cindy. It's just such a big mess. I can believe you mean it. But this job's gonna be over in February and there's no more work here for me. I can stay here for a long time on my savings, but you know that sooner or later I have to go back to work, and that's not going to be here. So where's my Cindy forever gonna be when Dan's gotta haul his trailer halfway across the country?"

"Your Cindy forever's gonna be with her Dan forever."

"Baby, there's a problem here. No state in the union is going to accept you leaving your mom to live with me. What we did Friday night can get me a long prison term in any place in the country."

"So let's get married!"

"Same problem. Some states might let you get married at sixteen IF your parents sign for it. No state will let you get married until you're eighteen without your parents' approval."

"Stupid laws! I read some books that they talk about in history class an' I know that women used to get married as soon as they was old enough to have babies. I'm old enough now!"

"Baby, the laws might be stupid, but they ARE the laws."

So she wiggled a little bit. "An' February, what would you be doing if you didn't have a Cindy forever?"

I kissed her face into a smile for a brief moment, but the smile faded when my lips moved away. "Well, sweetie, the way it normally works is that some of the people I've worked for before will know when I am getting close to finishing this project, and they'll be wanting me to move to the next one. Sometimes I take a month off and go home and stay at my real live house, but then it's back to an RV park somewhere."

She sighed.

"But I will stay here as long as I can ... I have plenty of savings. I could do a couple of years here, just lounging around, maybe taking off for little projects for a week or two. And I could keep my Cindy forever. If she can stand that kind of life."

Cindy was killing me with those green eyes at this close range. "What do you mean, "If I can stand it"?

"Well, baby, I might have to be gone for a week or two at a time. That's a long time for you to be alone."

She pulled back from me. "Mr. Dan," she said, and it was the first time she used the "Mr." part since Friday night, "do you honestly think I'd forget about you in two weeks?"

"No, baby," I said, "I don't. But I'm just wanting you to know the conditions."

She said, "I'm not going to forget YOU. I love YOU!!! And I'd be more worried about some of Mom's boyfriends while you were gone. Did you see that one that keeps drivin' by?"

"Yeah, I saw 'im," I said. I paused and drew a deep breath. "Look, little green-eyed girl, I want you. I'm just trying to figure out how to make this work. I mean, I COULD figure out a way to stay here for the next two years and then get your mom drunk enough to sign papers to let you marry me."

"She'd be glad to get rid of me before then."

"Seriously? What makes you think that."

She grunted, "Hmph! Subtle little hints like "I wish there was somebody you could go live with." and other things I need to hear, like "Billy-Bob would marry me if I didn't have a brat for him to raise." But I think that ol' Billy-Bob's beginning to think that I might be part of a package deal now that I'm a little older."

"Sweetie," I said, don't make me have to go shoot ol' Billy-Bob for messin' with MY girl."