Madison let it ring twelve times. Then she hung up and sat in the dark limousine with the phone in her lap and her face burning.
Of course he did not answer. She had told him to stay home. She had told him not to come. She had told him he would embarrass her.
He was probably out in the barn in the storm, checking the cattle, the way he always did when it rained hard. He had probably not even heard the phone.
Or he had heard it, and seen the number, and decided she meant what she said.
"Maddie, are you okay?" Kenzie whispered beside her.
"I'm fine," Madison said. She was not fine.
Outside, the rain came down harder. Lightning lit up the creek. The water was over the shoulder of the road now, licking at the limousine's tires.
The driver was on the phone with his company, arguing. Brayden Hollis had stopped talking. One of the girls in the back was crying quietly into her date's jacket.
Then, through the rain, Madison saw headlights.
Two round headlights, set wide apart, coming down the narrow old back road from the ridge. The road that ran along the top of the bluff above the creek, that hardly a soul used anymore except farmers and deer hunters. The road that met the highway just on the dry side of the flooded low place, a hundred yards back behind them.
She knew those headlights. She would have known them anywhere.
She was out of the limousine before anybody could stop her, in her silver-blue dress and her borrowed silver shoes, running back up the highway through the rain.
The old turquoise Chevy pulled onto the shoulder just short of where the water started. The driver's door opened.
Homer Bledsoe got out in his barn coat and his overalls, with a flashlight in one hand and an old canvas tarp over his head.
"Maddie girl," he said.
She stopped in the rain in front of him. Her hair was plastered to her face. Her dress was soaked to the knees.
"You didn't answer the phone," she said.
"I was in the truck," Homer said. "I heard on the scanner the creek was over the highway. I knew the limo was coming this way. I figured I'd come and see." He looked past her at the long white car sitting in the brown water. "Looks like I figured right."
"Grandpa." Her voice broke. "I'm so sorry."
He put the tarp over her head.
"Get in the truck, baby," he said. "You're getting your grandma's dress wet."
He did not just take Madison.
He drove the old Chevy down to the edge of the water, where the shoulder was still solid, and turned it around with its tailgate toward the limousine. Then he waded out in his rubber barn boots to the long white car and knocked on the window.
"Y'all want to go to prom or not?" he asked.
It took four trips. Three kids at a time in the cab, squeezed onto the bench seat, with their gowns piled in their laps and the old heater wheezing. Homer drove them up the back road over the ridge, in first gear, through the rain and the mud, to the county road on the other side, where the water had not reached. Kenzie's mother met them there in her SUV, and two other parents, and they took the kids the rest of the way to Elizabethtown.
On the third trip, Brayden Hollis rode in the middle of the bench seat, between Madison and a girl named Ashley, with his tuxedo pants soaked to the knee.
He did not say anything for the first mile. Then he looked down at the old three-on-the-tree shifter, and the faded turquoise dashboard, and the crack in the windshield.
"Mr. Bledsoe," he said. "What year is this?"
"Sixty-five," Homer said.
"My dad would kill for one of these," Brayden said quietly. "He's been trying to find a '65 C10 for ten years. He says they don't make them like this anymore."
"They don't," Homer said.
Madison looked out the window so the others would not see her face.
On the last trip, it was just Homer and Madison.
He drove her all the way to the country club in Elizabethtown himself. Thirty miles in the old truck, with the rain finally easing off and the heater blowing and the radio playing an old Patsy Cline song on the AM station.
He pulled up at the front door of the country club, under the lights, right behind the parents' SUVs, in his overalls.
Madison did not get out right away.
"Grandpa," she said. "Can I ask you something?"
"Go ahead."
"Did you drive Grandma to her prom? In this truck?"
Homer smiled.
He reached across her and opened the glove box. It stuck. He hit it twice with the heel of his hand, the way he always did, and it fell open.
Inside, under the registration and a tire gauge and a pack of gum from about 1990, there was a small, flat, wax-paper envelope. He handed it to her.
Madison opened it. Inside was a flower. Pressed flat and brown with age, but she could still see what it had been. A gardenia, with a little bit of blue ribbon around the stem.
"Her corsage," Homer said. "May 1966. She left it in the truck that night. I never had the heart to take it out."
Madison held it in her hand for a long time.
Then she leaned over and kissed her grandfather on his rough cheek, and got out of the truck in front of the whole senior class.
The prom pictures that year had something new.
Somebody's mother had seen the old turquoise Chevy pull up at the front of the country club with a girl in a silver-blue gown getting out of it. By the end of the night, every couple at Hardin Creek High School's prom had their picture made standing in front of that truck.
Homer leaned against the fender in his overalls, with his arms folded, and let them. Brayden Hollis took a picture of him with his phone and sent it to his father.
His father called back in ten minutes and asked if the truck was for sale.
"No," Homer said. "It's spoken for."
On the first morning of Madison's senior year, Homer drove her to school the way he always had.
He came to the corner by the Dollar General and started to pull over.
"Grandpa," Madison said. "Keep going."
He looked at her.
"All the way to the front door," she said. "Please."
Homer drove the old turquoise Chevy up the long drive of Hardin Creek High School, past the buses and the SUVs and the kids on the sidewalk, and stopped right at the front steps.
Madison grabbed her backpack. She opened the door. Then she turned around in the seat and looked at him.
"Have a good one, Grandpa," she said.