I normally wouldn't drink at lunch, but sinceI wasn't going back to work that day, I figured I might as well. Ineeded to celebrate the unexpected and ...uccessful conclusion of my firstChristmas shopping as Cindy Patton."Okay," I said after we had ordered, "you want something, don't you?"Diana looked around the room in mock innocence. "Oh, nothing, really. Ijust thought since you had a little time, you could tell me a story."Telling a story to one of the gods consisted of falling into a trancefor. But if you're in Tennessee, you're taking a risk. A BIG risk. Unless you get married."I took a deep breath. "Brad, let me sign these papers. And then Tina and I have some thinking and talking to do."God dammit, you two, please forgive me. I never wanted to mess ya'll up." Brad's expression looked sincere. "I mean, as far as I'm concerned, ya'll ARE married. But the state..."I signed the papers. I, that is, me and my not quite wife, were owners of an airplane. I wish I could say we were happy. “You wanna hang out?” I asked as casually as my husky voice would allow.“Yeah, I’d like to have a beer and feel grateful.”“Grateful,” I repeated. It seemed the perfect word for what we were.I looked into his glistening eyes, and for a moment the sadness and longing had been replaced with my own images; and as much as I wanted to reside in them, I settled for the squeeze of his hand as the sun lowered over a wet row of trees and over a neighborhood forever changed.My initial motivation came from. We would often go to the other persons house after school after school to do homework, watch tv and read comics. The fact that our birthdays are so close together meant that our parents threw us a joint birthday parties, which consisted of the two of us, about 60 friends, all cramed into a small hall running all over the place. After a few years our parents got tired of this and on our tenth birthday, they decided that we should make it a more low key affair, so they would take us to the cinema.