Clyde had blue eyes that sparkled, and his dimpled smile made me shiver. The only problem was that Clyde was in love with Diana, a pretty petite blonde who always wore perfectly matching skirts and blouses that were store bought from the States, not home-made like my clothes. I knew Clyde didn’t care about me, and I didn’t have any beautiful matching skirts and blouses. But I could still daydream about him.

Clyde was the child of missionaries in Paraguay, just like I. Except his parents were Baptist missionaries, much more modern and hip than my Mennonite parents. And he got to live at home in a big fancy house in Asunción, the capital of Paraguay, because his dad was an important surgeon at the Baptist Hospital. At 12, I lived on my own in a hostel in Asunción, because there were no schools at the leprosy compound my parents founded and managed eighty-one kilometers out of town. I got to go home only on weekends.

Clyde and I were both part of a Christian youth group, made up mostly of missionary kids living in Asunción. There were about twenty of us pre-teenagers and teenagers, bursting with excess estrogen and testosterone. We had organized a supper-basket auction for the following week to raise money for an outing to a Baptist campground. The plan was to meet on Saturday afternoon at a park in Itá Enramada. Each girl was to bring a basket filled with a meal. At the auction the boys would bid on the meals. The highest bidder got to eat the supper with the girl who prepared his basket.

At home at the leprosy station for the weekend prior to the auction, I worried about what to make for my basket. Since I had no access to a kitchen in my hostel, it was impossible for me to prepare the basket in Asunción. I had to make something at home almost a week before the auction.

“Mom, all the girls will have super delicious stuff in their baskets,” I wailed. “What can I possibly make a whole week ahead that will be any good next Saturday?” Over and over, I moaned and complained. I couldn’t sleep at night. I was obsessed with the auction and not knowing what to make.

“I just won’t go to the stupid auction,” I finally yelled my last day at home. I slammed the kitchen door and stomped to my room at the other end of the veranda.

A few minutes later, Mom opened the door to my room. “I have an idea, Marlena. We’ll make fudge for your basket. Fudge should last well for a week.” Her smile seemed strained.

Just fudge? I thought to myself. But then, Mom did make the best fudge in the world. Every Easter and every Christmas, she would make big batches of fudge to distribute to all of our leprosy patients. Mom’s fudge was great. Everyone knew that.

That afternoon, Mom and I made fudge. Every time doubts about the suitability of fudge floated through my head, I told myself, “Everyone loves Mom’s fudge.” I needed to believe it.

Mom’s fudge recipe was pretty simple. We mixed together about 2/3 cup milk, 2/3 cup cocoa, 2 cups sugar, 2 tablespoons corn syrup, and 1/4 teaspoon salt (Mom never measured anything out precisely). We couldn’t get corn syrup in Paraguay, but we would order it every time someone visited us from the States. Mom said it kept the fudge from getting too sugary. We cooked this mixture until we got a soft ball when we dropped some of it in cold water. Mom added some vanilla and butter and we waited for the mixture to cool a bit. The real trick was to pinpoint the right moment to begin beating it. And then to know when to stop beating it, just when the brown mass began to lose its sheen.

“OK, now!” Mom said as I pulled the pan off the stove and began beating the fudge as hard as I could with a long wooden spoon. At just the right moment, we quickly spread it out on a baking sheet, before the whole thing turned into stiffened brown glob in our pot.

This would be the best fudge ever.

I had intended to pack my fudge in a beautifully adorned basket, just to up the chances that someone would bid on it. But all we could find at home was a broken-down lidded wicker basket with holes in it.

“We can patch the holes with some yarn,” Mom said, undeterred. She pulled a ball of blue yarn from her sewing basket.

I watched my mother expertly weave the yarn across the holes in the basket. I was grateful, but I also had serious misgivings about this plan. I wished I could talk with Mom about how uncomfortable I was around boys. How dowdy I felt in my home-sewn, hand-me-down clothes. How I never knew the right things to say.

Instead, I just watched her darning needle go in and out, in and out.

The Saturday of the auction was one of those bright, crisp, slightly breezy winter August days. We all wore our nicest clothes for this exciting event. I had tried to pull up my hair with a ribbon, but it kept falling out, so I left it hanging loose. I noticed Diana’s perfectly coiffed short blond hair.

We had stacked our baskets on a wooden table under a tree with long gnarly roots and heavy branches that hung almost to the ground. We hadn’t labeled any of them. There was a lot of nudging around, the boys trying to discover, before the auction, which girl had made what basket. If the bidder guessed wrong, he’d risk spending the evening sharing supper with a girl he didn’t like, while the girl he had his eye on would spend the evening with someone else.

As I watched the boys milling around the baskets on the table, I started to wonder if it had been a big mistake to come. With the fudge. Many of the baskets were brightly colored. Some of them had fancy clasps. I had caught the aroma of fried chicken, chipa guazú (a rich cheesy Paraguayan cornbread), empanadas (spicy meat-filled turnovers) and other fragrant dishes wafting up from some of the baskets. And I had caught a glimpse of a huge slice of some kind of fruity pie.

I wanted to hide my basket under the table and run.

Somehow a rumor began that we girls had switched up the baskets and packed our suppers in each other’s containers. So the boys who thought they had figured it out became really confused about which ones to bid for. Our group leader held up one of the baskets to begin the bidding. When the commotion didn’t quiet down, he yelled loudly, “What do you bid for this basket?” He lifted the lid and looked inside, making a show of smelling the delicious food. One of the boys started the bid off at 100 Guaraní (just under $1 at that time). The leader shook his head, saying he couldn’t think of letting the basket go for such a puny amount. He reminded the boys that this was a fund-raiser for our yearly outing next month. The basket eventually went for 600 Guaraní.

One after another the baskets on the table were auctioned off. None of them seemed to belong to the girl the bidder thought was the owner. When the leader held my basket up, he again pretended to inhale the aroma of scrumptious food.

I heard one of the boys behind me whisper, “I think that’s Diana’s basket.”

I stopped breathing when Clyde shouted, “2,000 Guaraní!”

“Sold!” the leader proclaimed, after a few moments of silence.

I felt suddenly giddy. Why had Clyde bid on my basket? Because he thought it was Diana’s? Or possibly, just possibly, because he thought it was mine? But then I thought about the fried chicken, the chipa guazú, the empanadas and the pies in those other baskets, and the big hunk of fudge in mine, and hot blood rushed up into my face.

When Clyde discovered that the basket was mine, he looked over toward Diana with a scowl, like it was her fault. Slowly, he made his way toward me, holding my tattered old basket away from him as though it held something leprous.

My heart raced. “Hi Clyde,” I said too quickly.

He opened the lid and his big blue eyes widened, fixed on the single big glob of aging, slightly dried-out, week-old fudge. “You’ve got to be kidding,” he said as he placed the basket on the ground and walked away.

The following month, Clyde left to go to school in the U.S.

Thirty-five years later, sitting at my desk at the University of Colorado, an e-mail pops up on my computer screen.

Hi Marlena. I recently read in your parents’ missionary newsletter that you are a professor at CU and that you and your husband live up in the foothills west of Denver. My wife and I live here in Denver as well. Would you like to get together? Clyde McDowell.

I read and re-read the message, remembering the last time I saw Clyde, walking away from me at the auction. I close my eyes and sit back in my chair, trying to recall the sting of that rejection. But all I can remember is my mother’s fudge, the best fudge in the world, and her darning needle weaving the blue yarn in and out across the holes in my basket.