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It wasn’t as if Maudie had ever believed Jack meant it.
She’d known the Finches all her life. Back when they were children running wild at Finch’s Landing, back before Maycomb felt small and settled and predictable. She’d followed Atticus into town the way everyone did eventually, trading riverbanks for porches and gossip for gardens. Till she joined that damn missionary group and zoned out while the ladies gossiped half way to noon.
Life had gone quiet after her husband died. Too quiet. The kind of quiet that settles into the walls and stays there. Her house held its breath most days. Only the scrape of a chair, the soft rush of pages turning, or the splash of water over her azaleas broke the stillness.
Then Jack started hollering.
Like clockwork, he’d step onto the Finch porch and bellow across the narrow stretch of road between their houses.
“Maudie Buford! Will you marry me?”
And just as regular, she’d call back without looking up from her pruning.
“No! Yell a bit louder!”
Every single time. For years.
It became part of the rhythm of the street. The milkman would pause to listen. Miss Stephanie Crawford would pretend not to. Even Scout couldn’t let it alone.
“Why don’t you just marry him, Miss Maudie? He’s real nice. Atticus says he’s just as smart as him.”
Maudie would laugh and shake her head, bending to fuss over her azaleas.
“Oh, Scout. Being smart and being sensible aren’t always the same thing.”
Truth was, she liked things as they were. Liked her independence. Liked her evenings quiet and her mornings her own. Jack was charming in small doses. From porch to porch, he was a harmless breeze. Up close? That was another matter.
Or so she thought.
Christmas of 1934 came sharp and cold. The sky over Maycomb had that washed-out winter look, and the town smelled faintly of pine and woodsmoke. Maudie sat wrapped in a shawl on her porch, a book open in her lap, pretending not to wait for the familiar shout.
Right on time.
“Maudie Buford! Will you marry me?”
She didn’t raise her voice this time.
“Maybe come a little closer and I’ll hear you.”
There was a pause. A shuffle of shoes on wooden steps. Then Jack crossed the road, hat in hand, cheeks red from cold or nerves, maybe both. He stopped at the foot of her steps instead of hiding behind the safety of distance.
He cleared his throat.
“Maudie Buford. Will you marry me?”
She studied him for a long moment. No grin yet. No crowd. No porch between them.
“Alright.”
The word dropped simple and plain between them.
That shut him up.
Then the grin came. Slow at first, then spreading wide enough to split his face clean in two. He looked like a man who’d just won something he hadn’t quite believed he deserved.
He wore that grin all the way back across the road and into the Finch house.
Atticus stepped out not long after, coat half-buttoned, spectacles catching the light.
“Is he serious?”
Maudie folded her hands in her lap. “Yup.”
Atticus studied her, one brow lifting.
“Good Lord, Maudie.”
She smiled, softer now.
“Don’t look so worried, Atticus. I’ve had years to think on it.”
Across the way, Jack’s laugh carried out the open door, loud and boyish and proud. She couldn’t hear all of it but the sounds of,
“I got a wife!”
Echoed from the Finch home.