Chapter Ten
Lek’s promise to herself never to drink again didn’t last long, as it usually doesn’t, but she only drank at parties and rarely to excess. However, she did start going out more, and with the tacit approval of her parents, because they knew that it was getting time for her to find a husband. Most Thai women did not get married as early as girls in many other countries, including those in the West, but twenty or twenty-one was fairly common after a couple of years of engagement.
Lek wasn’t actually consciously looking for anyone either, but she was noticing boys more. At one of her friends’ parties one night, she was talking to a boy she knew and liked from school and the village when her world suddenly stood still. A handsome young man across the garden was talking to a very p
