I made a whooshing sound.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“That’s me, letting the air out. You do know that that’s the nicest thing anyone has ever said to me?”

She didn’t answer. She said, “I suppose if you go to UNC, you’ll live with Susan.”

“I don’t know. She hasn’t asked me.”

“She’s lucky to have you. There—that’s your last compliment of the evening.”

“Thanks. Now I’m set for life.”

We reached the end of the trail and had to turn back. I waited until we were out from beneath the canopy of trees where the moon cast enough light that I could see her face.

“Give me a week,” I said. “Whether I hear from UNC or not, I’ll give you a definite answer then. Does that sound reasonable?”

“Yeah.”

“And Abby . . .”

“What?”

“Thanks.” I hugged her and, because I thought I’d never have the opportunity again, kissed her lightly on the mouth. She held very still for a moment and then kissed me back. We pulled away at the same time, both breathing unsteadily. Abby was the first to speak.

“Well, that’s done it,” she said, laughing. “Now I’m a great big honking dyke. Edna’s going to kill you.”

Hunter still hadn’t come home. My mother was in favor of calling the police.

“It’s been more than forty-eight hours,” she said. “We can file a missing person’s report. It would serve him right to have the police drag him home.”

“No.” Nana opened a fresh pack of Virginia Slims, her second of the day. “I don’t want the embarrassment. He’s off with Fred somewhere. He’ll be back.”

“Unfortunately,” I said.

“You shouldn’t provoke him,” she told me. “It only makes things worse.”

“How do I provoke him?”

“You argue with him. You get him started. You . . .”

“You,” my mother interrupted. “Did you get the keys to Cookie’s beach house?”

“Yes.”

“I’m still not sure that Susan is a suitable chaperone for a mixed party.”

“Boys and girls, all together in a beach house, no adults anywhere in sight,” Nana clucked. “What will people think? In my day, that sort of thing wasn’t done.”

“In your day, people wore bathing suits down to their knees.”

“We did no such thing,” Nana snapped. “We . . .”

“Ya’ll stop,” my mother said. She eyed me closely. “I trust you, Poppy. It’s the others I worry about. That Kim—she’s a little too fast for my taste. Her parents let her run pure wild. No curfews, the house all to herself most of the time.”

“It’ll be okay,” I assured. “Susan will be there.”

“Susan’s not yet twenty. Is there a phone down there?”

“I think so.”

“Phone or not, you are to call home every single night. Get yourself to a pay phone if you have to. I want a full report on the day’s shenanigans. You remember—it’s not just a question of me trusting you, it’s Cookie. You don’t want to let him down.”

“Be sure to call collect,” Nana added. “Don’t you run up Cookie’s phone bill.”

“When have I ever run up anyone’s phone bill? That’s Hunter’s department. Ma, you’ve met everyone who’s going—Abby, Kim, the nerd boys, and Jack. Not exactly a rollicking crowd. Every night, I promise, we will separate into same sex sleeping groups. No co-ed. Cookie says there are five bedrooms. Some of them might even have locks.”

“Keep cracking the jokes,” she replied, “and you’ll find me coming with you. Just like your father. Ha!”

“Not funny,” I said. My mother only knew half the story. I’d kept the part about the pot-smoking to myself.

“I know,” she went on. “I’m not nearly as much fun as Eddie is. Now remind me, just how long is Jack Leinweber going to be sleeping on our sofa?”

“Until beach week. He has to report at Camp Lejeune on June the 6^th.”

“Fine,” she said. “I’m not his mother, and Jane didn’t ask me to baby-sit him—she just seems to have sent him down here for a free vacation. I’m also not Kim DiMarco’s mother. If I were, she wouldn’t be going to the beach with Jack Leinweber. I’m sure you know that there is something going on there. I’m not asking you to be the nookie police, but I don’t want you held responsible should that situation get out of hand. Do you understand?”

“You ought to go with her,” Nana said. “Can’t you get some time off from the library?”

“No,” my mother and I said simultaneously. My no was a little too vehement, so I added, “She doesn’t need to do that. We’re not animals. This won’t be a beach blanket orgy.”

“I’m sure it won’t,” my mother said. “What worries me is what state Hunter will be in after disappearing for three days.”

“Mental state or geographical?” I asked.

“It’s not funny,” Nana said, puffing nervously. “He’s missing work. This is the rock bottom they talk about in AA. He’s been warned, time and again. There’s no telling what he’ll do when he comes back. No telling.”

“Another reason I’m sorry we’ve got Jack staying here,” my mother observed.

“Don’t worry about him,” I said. “He grew up next door to Lucky Eddie. He’s already seen the worst this family has to offer.”

“So when Hunter came home,” Abby said, “he brought you a car.”

She turned right onto Raleigh Boulevard. We drove for two blocks and then she turned to the left, passing through her old neighborhood. When we were in high school, Raleigh Boulevard was a line of demarcation. It separated a predominantly black neighborhood to the west from a predominantly white one to the east. Though the line had blurred, it had never been erased. Black advancement led sadly but inexorably to white flight. Abby’s aunt, Pearl, now lived in one of the eastern houses, sandwiched between two elderly white women who eyed her with suspicion and yet relied on her as heavily as my great-grandmother had.

“He wouldn’t say where he’d been. He just showed up, driving that alligator green Pinto. Lucky Eddie didn’t come through, so he did. He was like that, Abby—nothing was ever simple. The car was a bribe and it wasn’t a bribe. He wanted me to have it. He wanted me to like it. I could never hate him like I did Eddie. My father had no redeeming characteristics. He was all ego. Hunter—Hunter was a martyr to the id.”

“You drove that car until graduate school,” she said.

“I drove that car for eight years. It didn’t die until my first year in the Ph. D. program at Ohio State. It ground to a halt on the freeway just outside of Yellow Springs.”

“What were you doing in Yellow Springs?”

“What do you think? Throw a rock in Yellow Springs, hit a lesbian. I thought I might meet a better class of woman if I prowled somewhere other than the Columbus gay bars.”

“And did you?”

“I met Leesa. Remember her?”

“Do I ever. Vegan, pagan, insisted you throw out all of your aluminum cookware because she thought it would give her Alzheimer’s. I assumed you’d met her in that yoga class you were taking—back when you were pretending to be flexible.”

“I am flexible. Sort of. What I learned from my Yellow Springs experience is that there’s something to be said for meeting women in bars. If she’s drinking straight bourbon and her hand is permanently curved in the shape of a pool cue, she’s probably not for you. If you meet a woman while you’re both shopping for natural fiber clothing, you think, ‘She’s okay, she likes cotton.’ It’s very misleading.”

“Instead of exchanging phone numbers,” Abby said wryly, “you ought to ask for letters of reference. There’s a pattern here, if you would but look.”

“I see it all right. I just don’t know what to do about it.”

“Why don’t you think long and hard,” she replied. “Ask yourself why it is that all of your relationships come to grief.”

“‘This grief is crowned with consolation.’ Antony and Cleopatra.”

“Don’t you Shakespeare me. I’m wise to your tricks.”

She pulled into the driveway of my grandmother’s house and turned off the engine. The yard was immaculate, masking the chaos within. How my mother and Nana could keep the sidewalks edged and the borders trimmed while packing the interior like a pair of wharf rats was a mystery to me.

I hesitated, my hand on the door handle. “I warn you, it’s like threading your way through the ruins of Pompeii.”

“You’ve warned me. Now lead the way.”

I looked at my watch. “We told them we’d be here at seven. It’s now a quarter past. That doesn’t matter because they’ll still need another forty-five minutes to get ready. We’ll have to sit and wait.”

“Okay,” Abby said, “what’s the problem? Do you want me to blow the horn and give them time to take down the Confederate flag?”

“Don’t be a jackass. I just . . . I never thanked Hunter for that car, Abby. I just took it. All I said was something rude about it being a death trap. His response was to tell me that all of that stuff about the Pinto being dangerous was horseshit. He said if you drove one car up the ass of any other car, of course it was going to catch fire. We had a fight about a car he gave me. I fought with the man over a present.”

“You were angry. He drank too much. You were getting ready to move out. He was getting ready to leave. You were both trying to pull away.”

“He did leave. And I left. We pulled away from each other, but all I can remember now is fighting with him. It’s the last thing I can remember us doing together. I didn’t stop fighting with him until he was too senile and too demented to fight back. There was never any kiss and make up with us. I fought with him the day my mother and I had him involuntarily committed. I fought with him at Jean’s wake, for God’s sake.”

Abby put her hand out and waited.

“No,” I said. “I don’t want any human contact right now. I want to wallow in guilt and self-pity.”

“Too bad. Take my hand.” I took her hand. “Now listen to me. A man who was like a father to you—a better father than the rotten one you had, anyway—is dying. He wasn’t perfect. He wasn’t even close. But when you didn’t want to kill him, you loved him. Dying is absolute hell on the living. The feelings you have, they won’t stop until you kick the bucket yourself, but they will fade. Over time.”

I hesitated. “What are you going to do with Rosalyn’s ashes?”

“Hell if I know,” she said. “Maybe I’ll put them on the fireplace mantle. Maybe I’ll sprinkle them on Mount Hood. I might put them in the back of a closet and try to forget about them. They’re not Rosalyn. Rosalyn’s gone.”lay

We sat there and waited. I laced my fingers with hers and she gave me a reassuring squeeze. Finally, I let go and opened the door.

“There’s no Confederate flag,” I said, “but my grandmother does have a set of Mammy salt and pepper shakers.”

“I knew it,” she replied.

Chapter Twenty-Five

It was the Friday before we were due to leave for the beach. I was mowing the grass again. In the summer, it had to be mowed at least twice a week, and, if the weather had been particularly humid, three times. I’d finished the back yard and was starting on the front. I began on the outside edge, next to the sidewalk, and worked my way around in decreasing circles, blowing the green onions, dandelions, and grass clippings into the center of the yard. My grandmother’s azaleas—pink, red, and white—were the envy of our neighborhood. Our grass was not. The Savas used a lawn service that sprayed a terrifying concoction of chemicals onto their grass every month. It looked great, smooth, uniform, and entirely weedfree, but I wouldn’t have walked on it barefoot for any amount of money. Besides, I liked the smell of the onions. Mowing the grass had a cumulative, heady effect, like walking an aromatic labyrinth. I let my mind wander, lulled by the smells and the rhythmic drone of the lawnmower engine.

It was nearly halfway done when I saw Jean. She was down on her hands and knees, poking around at the bottom of one of the juniper bushes that marked the boundary between our yard and her driveway.

“Hi, Jean,” I called.

She’d always been Jean to me rather than Mrs. Sava, and even my grandmother didn’t consider this a shocking lapse of manners. Mike insisted on being called by his first name as a matter of professional habit—no one wanted to buy a car from someone they called mister—and Cookie Turnipseed was Cookie because he hated formality. I called Jean by her first name because, despite the fact that she was forty-four, she didn’t seem old enough to be addressed by anything else. She was perpetually jejune. Sober, she was nervous and scatty. When drunk, she was bumptious.

I liked her anyway. I often found her ingenuous and engaging. She assumed a casual friendship with everyone she met. She hoped you’d like her—she thought you probably would—and she hoped you’d help her. Jean was utterly without shame. She’d ask anyone for anything, a ride home, a kidney, or help tying her shoe. Whatever she asked, she presented it as a reasonable request, and most people seemed to find it hard to refuse her. My mother was one of the few exceptions, but then, my mother had been vaccinated against charm.

I stopped and switched the mower off. “Are you looking for something?”

Jean rocked back on her heels as if the juniper bush had spoken to her. “Oh, honey, I’ve lost one of my diamond earrings. Mike gave them to me for my fortieth birthday. They were antiques, and I’ll just die if I can’t find it. Would you help me look?”

I had hoped to finish mowing the grass before the sun reached high noon. It was nearing its apex now. “I’ll help,” I said. “Must be an epidemic. Hunter lost his Masonic ring a few weeks ago.”

“No!” This was delivered in tones of deepest horror, though it didn’t escape my notice that the instant I crouched down to look, Jean stood up.

“Don’t worry. We found it behind the toilet.”

“The bathroom!” she cried. “I didn’t even look there.”

“When did you first notice it was missing?”

She closed her eyes and thought. The sun was beating down on the top of my head and beads of sweat were rolling down my forehead. Fresh as a daisy, Jean took her time. “Just now,” she said. “The phone rang and when I reached up to take my earring out, it was already gone. As soon as I hung up, I looked all around in the house, and then I came out here.”

“Okay, where else have you been?”

“Well, I went to the Winn Dixie to buy some steaks for dinner—you don’t think it fell out there? Anyone could have picked it up!”

“I don’t know. Why don’t we retrace your steps?”

“What a good idea!” More thinking. “Okay. I came home and put away the groceries. I pottered around in the kitchen for a while, and then I came out here to get something out of the car, something I’d forgotten. That’s when the phone rang. I ran inside to get it and then . . . what was it I forgot out here in the car? I don’t believe I got it. That phone distracted me.”

I opened the door to her car. “I’m guessing that what you forgot was your pocket book. It’s here on the driver’s seat. And here’s your earring, right beside it.”

She flung her arms around my onion-smelling, sweaty, grassstained self and hugged me as if I’d just saved her life. “Good heavens,” she said, drawing back, “you’re hotter than a fritter. Come inside right this minute and have a glass of iced tea.”

It felt nice to sit in the cool, air-conditioned kitchen, and Jean made good tea. She made it the Southern way, dissolving the sugar in it while it was hot and then diluting the resulting syrup with ice and water. No lemon. I drank two glasses while she moved around the kitchen, pounding steaks with a little metal hammer and mixing up some kind of marinade that took at least a cup of bourbon. Inevitably, she also filled a glass with ice and poured another half-cup of bourbon into it.

“Susan says she’s going to the beach with you next week,” she said. “That’s nice, isn’t it?”

I nodded. “Yes, yes it is.” She was leaving for the Hilton Head detox the next day, and not a moment too soon. I didn’t want to hang around any longer. I finished off my iced tea and stood up.

“Don’t go,” she said. “I get so bored cooking all by myself. Stay and talk to me. Have some more tea.”

“If I drink any more, I’ll float away.”

She laughed and sipped her bourbon. “It’s so nice to have a young person around the house. Susan doesn’t have any time for me anymore. She’s always busy, always off doing something with somebody. She doesn’t come home on the weekends like she used to. I wish I’d had more than one child, I really do. Mike only wanted the one, though. ‘Only children have all the advantages,’ he said. He’s one of six—did you know that? His mother wouldn’t stop having them. Just kept on and on until she wore herself out.”

“I need to finish mowing the grass, Jean . . . ”

“Only children are lonely, don’t you think? No one to confide in, no built-in playmates. I was an only child. I had an older brother, but he died in infancy. Polio—this was before the vaccine—if he’d lived, he might have been crippled or in an iron lung. You don’t see people in an iron lung anymore, do you? Still, he would have been someone to talk to, someone to share things with. It would have been even better if I’d had a sister. I would have loved a sister.”

She sighed and took another drink. I had no intention of keeping Susan’s mother company while she got plastered.

“Thanks for the tea. I really have to get going. The sun’s already so hot, and the grass . . .”

“It’s a dangerous business falling in love with your best friend,” she said suddenly.