I was seven years old, tall for my age, and bending over to get a sip of water at a rest stop on I-10, along the way from Tampa to Monroeville. The water fountain was fastened to a wall that only went halfway to the ground, stopping just below the mount of the fountain, exposing the lower half of whatever body was stooping for refreshment. As I slurped the cold water, I heard my mother’s voice drawl, “Bill—stop it. That’s your daughter you’re looking at.” When I looked up, I saw my father rounding the corner, trailed by my mother, both of them with their eyes directed to my legs, the legs that spent my childhood naked below the hem of my shorts. My father startled a groan, then shakenly told me to hurry back to the car.

I did as I was told, but when my parents followed and climbed in, I started with the most basic of questions: “What did I do wrong?” My mother reached over the front seat and patted me on my knee, hushing me without shushing me.

We’d gone quite a distance down the road before my father silenced the radio and stumbled his way back to the topic. “Anna Banana, you didn’t do anything wrong back there. It was me. I forget that you’re growing up and I don’t always see what I’m afraid everyone around me already sees. You have your mother’s long legs and your father’s muscle tone,” he stuttered, “and they’re…they’re…it’s just a problem for right now.” Before I could argue whatever point there was to argue, he held up the back of his hand to silence me. “Boys notice these things and I want you to consider wearing long pants.” I wept—it felt like punishment, punishment for something he’d just said wasn’t my fault. And my brother silently giggled and repeatedly poked at my legs, ignoring the imaginary line across the backseat that we were forbidden to cross. I hated every single one of them and I wasn’t quite sure why.

We’d been in Monroeville for a day or two before my grandfather loaded my brother and me into his car and took us to the Vanity Fair factory outlet. Momma had told him that my brother needed something or other, and I was to come back with at least two pairs of long pants. This was the only time that I absolutely dreaded going to the outlet.

My grandfather, whether out of sympathy towards me or something else, bought me only one pair of jeans, my first pair of jeans, jeans that when I tried them on were so uncomfortably long, jeans that covered the length of my thighs, my knees, they fell past my calves and ankles, all the way to the tops of my feet. I was miserable the second I buttoned them, when I modeled them for my grandfather, when he said they fit well enough to buy. I only found relief when I peeled them off. “Stick that bottom lip back where it belongs,” my grandfather warned me. “This won’t kill you to act like a lady and wear some long britches.” I wasn’t so sure.

My parents required me to wear them the very next day. I tore the tags and stickers off of them, hoping the denim would rip in the process, and yanked them on me, spending the rest of my day anxious and ill at ease in them. “Stop squirming in them and you’ll get used to them,” my grandfather advised. “You look like you’ve got your pockets full of Mexican jumping beans and it’s making us all not want to be around you.” I didn’t want to be around them either, especially if I was going to be imprisoned in denim from the waist down.

The next day, my mother, with a face dripped with compassion, reasoned to my father that the jeans were dirty from the previous day. I was allowed to revert to a pair of shorts, but I did my very best to flush the jeans down the toilet when no one was looking. But they wouldn’t go. So I wadded them up on the floor outside the shower, hoping that someone would assume that they’d gotten wet from the shower curtain without me having to explain further. My scheme worked in that there was no mention of the jeans again until we got back home to Tampa. I wore them occasionally, when they were clean and when I was told to, but I’d wear them then neglect to put them in the hamper and, when I did, I’d bury them at the bottom, hidden beneath the “hand wash only” garments that took up residence in the hamper for long periods of time.

For the next few years, my legs continued to extend themselves, pushing my hips farther and farther from the ground, my curly mop closer to the sky. By the time I was 12, I was 5’7” and the memory of those jeans was long forgotten; they were long outgrown and remained unreplaced. I had a wardrobe of shorts and only shorts, outside of the one or two skirts I had for funerals and such.

I was in a pair of those shorts the night I was crawling down the ladder from the pressbox where my father was working, setting up his radio broadcast of a high school football game in Chiefland. He’d sent me down to the car to get his clipboards, and as I was descending, my back to the world around me, I heard a voice below. “Hey pretty little grasshopper—play me a tune with those long, pretty legs of yours.” I momentarily froze, the lesson of the water fountain finally hitting me, paralyzing me. I was scared. I consciously forced myself to find my way to the bottom of the ladder, knowing my father needed those notes.

When my feet met the solid earth below, I spun in the shadows of the pressbox overhead, coming face-to-face with the man who’d just called up to me, up to my legs. He was visibly startled to meet the 12-year-old eyes that rested above my freckled cheeks. “I’m sorry,” he fumbled, “I thought you were someone else.”

I took off running, running to the darkened parking lot, for my father’s car, telling myself that I’d lock myself inside it if the man was following me. I braved a glance over my shoulder and the only thing behind me was the puffs of dirt I’d kicked up. I locked myself inside the car just the same, pausing briefly to catch my breath but weighing that my father needed his clipboards. When I got out of the car, I took off running again, back towards the lights of the football field, towards the cheering crowd, towards the murmur of the distant marching band.

When I reached the ladder to the pressbox, I looked around and, seeing no one, I started to climb. The closer I got to the top, the more distinctly I could hear my father’s booming voice, so warm and safe. He was laughing, talking to someone about football, a pause before airtime. I was eager to cling to his side as I so rarely did and perhaps explain myself after the game.

I reached the top of the ladder and saw my father seated, his back turned to me, next to the back of another man who was in my folding chair, the seat where I always sat when I worked as a spotter for my dad. I handed Dad the clipboards over his shoulder, then stepped back and waited quietly for the man to get out of my chair. He didn’t move, looking straight ahead as my father finished his tale. Then, after my father had delivered the punchline and the guffaws had subsided, my father stood up and said, “LC, I’d like you to meet my daughter.” The other man finally stood, turned, and looked at me, then back to my father.

“We’ve already met, but I didn’t catch your name.”

“Her name’s Ann. She works with me on Friday nights—she’s a good girl.”

“Yes sir, she is,” LC said, and his smile sent me a shiver in the late summer heat. I stood there silently, my eyes absorbing the moment.

LC was about my height and was that wormy, wiry, wisp of a man that you’ve seen all of your life, usually pouring out of a pickup that’s edges have been eaten by rust, pouring towards the doors of the darks of the neighborhood bar long before nightfall. Of indeterminate middle age, he’s got small, quick brown eyes beneath heavy lids, giving him the appearance of being sleepily alert. His leathered skin hangs from his cheekbones, and his grizzled moustache pools below the extension of his once-broken nose and spills down the sides of his fleshy lips and drips off his jawline in such a way that makes everyone around him feel a bit unclean. His flop of dark hair is slicked back, smooth as a bowling ball beneath his cap. His short legs are forever burdened with the denim of Levi’s, the leather patch advertising his 28-inch waist. His shirt is plaid with the faux-pearl snaps, covering the t-shirt that even the laziest of imaginations predicts to be sweat-stained at least. And his boots are good boots, Dan Posts maybe, and are snakeskin brown when he’s aiming to look his best. That man became one of my father’s closest friends, perhaps as a result of getting too drunk to drive that night and winding up sleeping on our couch.

The next morning, my mother fixed him a hearty breakfast, already long accustomed to my father’s extension of hospitality to people who were otherwise strangers to our family. LC ate voraciously, eager for every morsel that left the stove. Bacon, eggs, and biscuits before my father suggested pancakes, a meal that became a rare mid-morning feast, welcomed by almost all, but seemingly more so by the lanky stranger.

My brother, not at all uneasy around this man, sat next to him, talked football, and offered him coffee and orange juice. I sat away, in the living room, on the couch where he’d slept, with my legs covered in a blanket, listening. “What’s LC stand for?,” my brother dared.

“Loose Change.” They all chuckled. I leaned towards his wallet that still rested on the coffee table and flipped it open. His driver’s license said “Leon Charles.”

He didn’t leave that day. Or the next. But by Monday, when we left for school, the couch was vacated. As he drove, my brother looked at me and said, “He’s really nice—I don’t know what your problem is.” We rarely agreed on anything. “Besides, you might as well get used to him. When Mom and Dad go out of town next week, he’s gonna stay with us.”

“What?…WHAT?”

“Yeah, that’s why he came over Friday night, so he could meet us.”

“No, he came over because he was too drunk to drive. He left his truck at the football field and passed out in the backseat on the way home.”

“Well, he’s still gonna be staying with us next week. And Mom says you gotta do the cooking and I gotta feed the dogs. And LC will make sure we both act right.”

There was no point in arguing, not with my brother, and not with my parents, even if they had been there in the car. Everyone liked him but me and although he was funny sometimes, I spent the next week with my bedroom door locked at night, a bookcase shoved in front of it.