It's almost three years to the day the first time he hears Tracy tell of how they got together. There sitting with her aunt Mildred and her12ohsoadorable cats, one of them MilesorPeppyorMrWiskers stares at him from across the room, while he holds Tracy's hand and lets the rough cool circle of the engament band remind him of how things are going to turn out. When Mildred leaves to put the tea on he can't help but turn to Tracy and tell her about how things were from the other side.
He tells her of a time before, when selfishness and hairspray were just things that he had no sense of, when white pearls and father knows best were the easy reminders of safety and trust. This is long before Amber and could have been big breaks and Corny, it was so long and far away from Tracy that Link almost squints when he thinks of it. It's hard sometimes for Link to think of the things that were pre-Tracy, mostly because he feels as if his whole life is defined in eras Pre-Mother's death and Post-Tracy Turnblad, their are so many years missing, so much time that is expaned with uslessness and not quite greed but something that shames him all the same. Tracy just stares at him when his eyes go downcast and he feels like trembling, she is the only one who would ever see him this way, because he is always afraid that one day she look over and see him. Not the Link that she saw in black and white with an upturned lip and crouners style, but that she'll see the things he was before she literally dance her way into his life. He fears she will look and she the barbed wire like jokes and cruelty that he didn't feel but he particpated in all the same. That she'll see like he has, that takeing no action is the same as fighting side by side with the Von Tussles of the world. That it wasn't till he met her, that he found out that there was so much more to being a good person besides being good looking. But she never fails him, never lets him down, she simply smiles and takes his hand. So he tells her, tells her about another woman that would define him and shape him, another woman from so long ago that he has trouble recallng the exact shade of her eyes. But he tells Tracy, because there is no one else that matters so much, he tells her about the softness of his mother's hands and the way that he was brought up to be good and kind and genorous to a fault but somehow everything Lilla Larkin taught him, seemed to still and fall away when she died.