Rock of Ages by Howard Owen

and managed to flunk out of VMI, James Madison, and Randolph-Macon over a five-year span.
    He had always been good with his hands, he told her. (“Only thing between me and the poorhouse.”) He had been running his own company for more than a decade.
    â€œI doubt if my momma will ever think I’ve amounted to anything, though,” he said. “She thinks you have to have a couple of degrees on the wall to be a success.” He looked at her own wall, with the three diplomas hanging there, and blushed. “No offense.”
    â€œNone taken. My father was one of the smartest men I ever knew, and he didn’t even learn how to read until he was older than you.”
    â€œLot of that going around. I don’t suppose they even called it a ‘learning disability’ back then. ’Course, I had a judgment disability, too.”
    They made eye contact for no more than a second, but there was something she saw, some question that needed answering. It was a strange thing, Georgia thought later, how you talked to people all the time, face to face, without really making that one laser-sharp connection. Then, out of nowhere, a guy like Phil Macomb shows up, and there it is.
    She got him a beer after he was done, and they sat and talked for a few minutes more. He said he had another job to do, and when he waved goodbye, she supposed that she might see him again, the next time something needed fixing that was beyond her meager talents.
    Two nights later, he called her.
    â€œI don’t suppose you have a lot of free spots on your dance card, pretty as you are,” he said, with almost no preamble, “but it occurred to me after I left that I’d sure like to see you sometime. Socially, or whatever.”
    She told him that, actually, she hadn’t been doing a lot of dancing lately. She had turned into kind of a wallflower.
    He said he hadn’t been doing much shagging either, but he thought he remembered how, if she’d like to join him.
    â€œWhat kind of shagging are you talking about?”
    â€œAw, Miz Georgia,” he said with an exaggerated drawl. “I love it when you talk dirty.”
    She went out with him two times before the night they slept together, once to a county high school basketball game because his son was the coach at one of the outlying schools, once to dinner. He turned down her invitation to come back to her place for coffee both times, kissing her goodnight at the door as if she were 17.
    He’d been married and divorced before he knew where babies came from, he told her on the first date, when she expressed surprise that he could have a son in his mid-20s. He kept up with his two children from a reserved, polite distance.
    â€œIt isn’t much to brag about,” he said, “but I am a little better person now that I’m fully grown. I don’t suppose my son and daughter have a lot of great memories from back then. It wasn’t exactly the Waltons.”
    He had sent them checks and Christmas presents, mostly.
    After the basketball game, which his son’s team won, Georgia asked him if he wasn’t going to go down and speak to him.
    â€œNo,” he said. “He doesn’t need me right now. When he needed me, I wasn’t there. I’ll talk to him later.”
    The third date, they went to a movie, one with more dialogue than action, recommended by Georgia. She moved close to him in the dark and chilly theater and felt for a moment like they should be doing at least some light petting. His body was warmer than hers, and she leaned into it.
    She had asked a friend who knew the Macombs how old her new boyfriend was. The friend said she wasn’t sure, but she thought he’d graduated from high school in 1969. Georgia wondered if she should lie about her age. Three years might be enough to scare even a seemingly good man like Phil Macomb away.
    That night, after the movie, they were sitting at a table in one of