Delia stared out the windshield. Her face was pink and flushed with heat. Her mouth was slack. She gripped the wheel of the car and looked back at the diner. There were two posters in the window, one announcing a fish fry sponsored by the local fire department and another proclaiming a welcome week at Holiness Redeemer, with a guest preacher from Gaithersburg. She could see the waitress looking out at them above the sign for the church.

“Nothing a bullet in the brain won’t fix,” Randall would say. “A bullet in the brain, a couple of lines, a shot of tequila.” Delia swallowed hard.

What had she been thinking?

After all this time she could still taste it, tequila oily on the tongue. She had never cared for the lime. Didn’t need salt. She liked the way tequila crossed her palate, burning away the dross. Randall would suck limes and put that powder up his nose. Randall would screw half a dozen girls and race cars on twisty oceanfront highways. All Delia ever needed was a drink in her hand. A bottle of beer, a glass of something, that scalded sweetness at the back of her tongue.

Cissy shifted on the seat beside her. Reluctantly Delia turned her head to look at the child, pale beneath her sunburn, her hazel eyes so dark they picked up the red-black of the hematite stars at her throat.

What have I done?

Delia closed her eyes. Randall had warned her. “Cayro, Georgia, an’t never gonna love you,” he’d said. “If you want those girls, we’ll have to steal them.” She had never listened. She had never believed. But those faces in the diner, hateful and hard—they had looked at her like she was a monster.

I should not have come back.

“Are we going?” Cissy’s voice was breathy and thin. Her left eye was watery and bloodshot.

I’m no good for her, for any of them. No good at all.

Delia’s pulse thudded in her neck, the cars in the lot shimmering to its beat. That song was picking up again, the do-not-deserve-to-live refrain.

Delia nodded her head fiercely, picking up the melody. God-god-god-god-damn. Ought to die, want to die.

“Are we going?” Halfway across the country, Cissy had wept and stormed, but what sounded in her voice now was at a higher pitch. Hysteria threaded the syllables. The child was worn out. The child was at her last nerve.

“We’re going,” Delia said as calmly as she could.

A shot of tequila or a bullet in the brain, it was the same thing when you came right down to it. But Delia had dragged Cissy all this way and she hadn’t even seen Dede and Amanda. She started the engine, shaking her dirty hair out of her face. She’d get Cissy settled, make sure her girls were all right. Afterward she could think about the alternative—one blue metal bullet or a glass of tequila straight up. This was not California. This was Georgia. In this county alone there were two dozen places she could get a gun as easily as a bottle of Cuervo Gold.

“You all right?” Cissy finally asked when they sat so long the second time. A part of her wanted to enjoy Delia’s obvious misery, but another part was frightened.

“I’m fine,” Delia said. “Just fine.”

Cissy shrugged uneasily and turned her attention to the scenery, picking at a bit of toast stuck in the gap in her front teeth. She thought about the people in the diner. Nothing she had imagined on that long trip across the country had prepared her for them. They were everything Randall had ever said they were, hard-faced and cold-blooded. They were the people who had made Delia; they were her match. She glanced over at her mother and quickly turned back to the window.

Cayro, Georgia, was just another wide patch off the side of Highway 75. Most people on their way north from Atlanta never saw it. Downtown consisted of a triangular intersection no bigger than a good-sized basketball court. There was a sign that read WELCOME on one side and COME BACK SOON on the other; The cutoffs at each corner of that intersection were marked with little directional arrows on which someone had drawn smiley faces. The road north led back to Highway 75 and the route to Nashville, but another smiley-face sign indicated that it was also the way to the county hospital. The route south was marked MARIETTA, but the road west was a mystery, with only the silhouette of a chicken beside the smiley face.

“Where does that go?” Cissy asked.

“The river,” Delia said. “Farm country. Your Granddaddy Byrd’s place and a lot of truck farms.”

“What’s a truck farm?”

Delia shrugged. “I don’t know. Farms. People have always called them that. Maybe they’re places where people truck produce out to the markets.” She rubbed the back of her neck. “Never been much industry here. Mostly dairies and chicken farms and peanut fields.”

“What does Granddaddy Byrd grow on his farm?”

“Dirt.” Delia gave a wry grimace. “He an’t farmed in thirty years. He bred dogs for a while, good hunting dogs, people said. But that takes a lot of energy and getting around to talk to folks. He ran out of both around the time I moved in with him. He was living on savings and selling off pieces of land when I got out of school. There may not be much of the farm left.”

Delia drove along slowly, rubbing her neck every couple of minutes. She pointed out Cayro Junior/Senior High School, from which she had graduated. Past that was the brick hospital that had replaced the one that burned down. Cissy stared glumly. Delia turned the car abruptly and drove them back through Cayro, past the courthouse and the Methodist church. She cruised past the church parking lot, looking around intently, and then swung the car back toward the center of Cayro.

“Aren’t we going to Granddaddy Byrd’s?”

Delia stopped the car in front of a little shop with a dirty picture window and a hot-pink sign, Bee’s Bonnet Beauty Salon. “We’ll get there,” she said. She leaned out of the car to peer into the window, which was full of dead plants.

“I worked there before your sisters were born,” Delia said. “Mrs. Pearlman owns it. She was always good to me.”

When they finally pulled up in front of the little farmhouse, it was going on noon. The dusty porch was bare, the windows shadowed by faded blue curtains. Delia sat clutching her purse and gazed around with big, dark eyes.

“Don’t look like he’s here,” Cissy said.

Delia shook her head. “He’s here. He’s always here.”

The screen door swung slowly open. An old man stepped out into the hot sun and gave them an angry glare. Slightly bent, chin thrust forward, shirt unbuttoned, he had wild gray hair all over his head. He came down the steps hesitantly, as if he had to tell every separate muscle what to do, but once on the ground he walked toward them firmly. Delia got out of the car and stood waiting by the fender.

He is not expecting us, Cissy thought as he gave her one long look and slowly walked all the way around the chalk-green Datsun.

“Pitiful excuse for a car, Delia.” He wiped his face with his sleeve.

Delia smiled tentatively and reached for him, then dropped her arms as if her energy had run out. Standing there in the heat, she started to cry. The old man winced as she leaned into him and sobbed on his neck. From the front seat of the car Cissy watched, awestruck. She had never seen Delia cry.

“Slow down now, Delia,” Granddaddy Byrd said. He patted at Delia’s back with one hand, his knuckles knocking her spine like a salesman’s at a strange front door. His eyes shifted to Cissy in mute impatience, as if he expected her to come take her mother in hand. Cissy stayed where she was, pulling her legs up on the front seat and resting her chin on her knees.

“Now, Delia,” the old man said again, and Delia grabbed him even tighter. Then she pushed herself back and wiped her eyes.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “It’s been a long trip. Feels like I’ve hardly slept since we left Los Angeles.” She looked at the car. “Cissy, come over here.”

Cissy sighed and got out of the car. She was painfully conscious of what she must look like, her hair blowing across her sunburned face and her wrinkled clothes covered with dust. “Hello,” she said carefully.

The old man turned from Delia to Cissy, his expression as distant and stern as any stranger’s. “Girl.” He nodded curtly, then did something funny with his mouth so that his lower lip moved down and pulled flat. “Harrumph.” It was not quite a grunt. Maybe it was some Southern expression, some Cayro code for welcome, but Cissy didn’t think so.

“I wasn’t sure we’d make it.” Delia pushed her hair back. She looked almost drunk with relief. “I swear, Granddaddy. It felt like we were racing against fate, like the ground was going to open up and swallow us if I didn’t get home as fast as I could. Like you wouldn’t be here.” She gazed at the blue-white empty sky.

“Where would I be?” Granddaddy Byrd’s voice was a scratchy, irritable whisper, as if he were out of practice talking to people. “I don’t go running around. This is where I always am.”

“I know, I know.” Delia’s hands swiped through her hair again and gripped the back of her head. “It didn’t make sense, you know? It was like Cayro itself wouldn’t be here. Like one of them terrible television shows where people and places just disappear and you think you’re crazy.” Delia dropped her hands. “Nobody ever talks about how long it is, driving all the way across the country.”

“I don’t have no television set,” Granddaddy Byrd said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Delia said, “No, of course you don’t. It’s all right. I’m all right. I’m just tired.” She turned to face the house. “And I’m filthy. Let me get a shower, make us all some tea.” She looked down at her dusty sandals.

“You want some tea, Granddaddy?”

The old man shook his head. “I don’t need nothing,” he said. “You go get yourself cleaned up. And be careful of that shower. The pipes are backwards, the hot handle turns on the cold.”

Delia grinned at him. “You never fixed that? All this time and you never fixed that?”

He shrugged. “What’s to fix? It works.”

Delia opened the screen door tentatively and stepped inside as if she were afraid the floor would give way. Cissy bit her lips. Granddaddy Byrd took a seat on the front steps and dragged a folded bag of Sharpe’s tobacco out of his shirt pocket, not even bothering to move up into the shade of the porch. Cissy sat down beside him, trying to make herself small and unobtrusive but wanting to look at this man.

Granddaddy Byrd shot her a narrow glance. Cissy dropped her head and kept her eyes on his hands on the tobacco bag. None of what was implied in the word “granddaddy” seemed to fit this craggy-faced reptile. His fingers were thin and long, with big knobby knuckles, the nails ragged and black. As she watched him work the tobacco paper, she saw that the left hand shook slightly, a steady palsied trembling, though the right was firm and he spilled not a flake of the crumbly reddish brown tobacco. His technique was to cup the paper against that firm right hand and roll it deftly with the fingers of the trembling left. He did it slowly, with great care, and the loose cigarette he produced took the flame easily.

“Pretty good,” she said admiringly.

“Harrumph.” A language all his own. He held the cigarette with his left hand and Cissy wondered briefly why he didn’t use the right.

From inside the house came Delia’s voice: “Cissy, you want anything?”

“No,” Cissy called back. She canted her head and looked again at the right hand, which still held the Sharpe’s bag. Something strange there. The long, skinny fingers with the swollen knuckles lay precisely against each other, ending in an even line. Cissy flattened her own hand against her thigh and immediately saw the difference. Her middle finger extended more than a quarter of an inch past the two on either side of it. On Granddaddy Byrd’s right hand the fingers were the same length all across, the nails of the middle three flush with the nail of the pinkie. In each he was missing at least the length of one joint.

Cissy looked up at his face. He was looking right back at her. She flushed with embarrassment. Those fingers hadn’t been chopped off, the nails were intact. No, Granddaddy Byrd had been born without those joints, and she had been staring. She dropped her eyes. She hadn’t meant to hurt his feelings, she hadn’t known.

Cissy curled her fingers into fists and locked her gaze on the mock-Indian face on the tobacco bag. “Looks like you,” she said, her voice sounding unnaturally high. “Just like you.”

“Humph!” Granddaddy Byrd used one of those short fingers to flick tobacco flakes from his lower lip. “Don’t be stupid.” His tone was flat, his glance indifferent. Cissy remembered then what Delia had said about him, that he was old when he took her in. How old was he now?

When he had smoked the first cigarette down to a nub, he took his time rolling another. Cissy sat there, unable to look at his hands and unable to look away. She kept comparing him with the Indian on the label. The feathers of the headdress above those painted features were fat and tapered like unsmoked cigars. The features themselves were sharp, angular, and shaded to catch the eye. The Indian was handsome, with his prominent cheekbones and pale blue-gray eyes. Granddaddy Byrd was not handsome. His cheeks and eyes were sunken like the faces of the mummies in some pictures Randall had once shown Cissy after a trip to Mexico.

“It is so dry down there,” her daddy had told her. “It’s so godforsaken parched and dusty, the dead dry up and last forever. They turn to statues that get leaned up against the walls of the caves near the missions. It’s something to see, all the dead lined up wearing the same expression, openmouthed and tragic. Makes you think. Makes you think how precious life is.”

Granddaddy Byrd did not look as if he thought his life was precious. He looked impatient to be past it. A walking dead man.

Cissy studied the little warts in the cracks and wrinkles that ran down his neck. She shuddered. Ugly, she thought, ugly and older than God. She waited for him to say something, but he didn’t. He watched. He had a way of watching as though the eyes of the world were in his head—an infinitely cruel world. I know who you are, his eyes seemed to say, while his lips remained pressed together, flat and thin. I know things you don’t know. I know how cold and mean the world is.

Cissy felt her insides shift. Fear tickled below her belly. The embarrassment she had felt earlier, the faint thread of pity, had steadily burned away and become anger. This old man had called her stupid. He had pushed Delia off him like a stinky dog. Now he stared straight ahead as if she were not even there, contempt radiating from him like the heat still rising from the hood of the Datsun.

Creepy old man, Cissy thought, but her anger did not quite cover her fear. She kept her head down, not wanting to be seen by those eyes, spoken to by that caustic tongue. Delia had told her the man was hard but fair. No. He was mean, just mean.

“He’s had a hard life,” Delia had said. Granddaddy Byrd looked hard. Just as hard as the parched red dirt of his empty front yard, the kind of hard that only accumulates over a lifetime. There was no crack in him. He was of a piece, this old man, a piece of flint.

Granddaddy Byrd’s hands creased and recreased that tobacco pouch. His eyes flickered off to the distant horizon and then came back to Delia’s Datsun. So far he had taken more interest in the car than in either Delia or Cissy. In the kitchen Delia made small noises, the clink of a glass, a splash of liquid, a cabinet opening and closing. A slight breeze picked up dust from the yard and brought it up to pepper the steps. Granddaddy Byrd’s tongue snaked out to lick his lips.

Lizard, Cissy thought again. Granddaddy Byrd stared at the Datsun as if he were thinking on how to get them into it, longing for the steady quiet he had treasured before they drove into his yard. Grimly Cissy pushed herself up off the steps and walked across the yard. She heard Delia’s shoes slap on the porch as she came out of the kitchen and sat down beside Granddaddy Byrd, who slid away a few inches.

“You sure you don’t want something?” Delia’s voice was softer. Her skin shone, her hair was smoothed back, the collar of her blouse was damp and open. She looked almost like a girl again.

Granddaddy Byrd eyed Delia for a moment, then cleared his throat with a rough hawk and spat. “Why’d you come back?”

Delia took a deep breath. “The girls,” she whispered. “I want to see my girls.” Cissy realized suddenly how skinny Delia was, all bones and angles. Her knees and elbows stuck out. Sitting there beside Granddaddy Byrd, she looked like a cartoon creature, a Halloween skeleton in a short skirt and T-shirt.

“You spoke to Clint yet?”

Cissy stepped close to the Datsun’s bumper. She heard a pinging from inside the engine as it cooled, and the clinking of the glass on the steps as Delia set it down.

“Naaa.” It was as if the breeze had stretched the word out, not Delia. The bright, fresh look of hope disappeared.

Granddaddy Byrd coughed angrily. Cissy watched the color drain from Delia’s face. She looked even worse than she had in the restaurant.

“Naaa,” she said again. Her eyes shifted to Cissy. They were a shade lighter than Granddaddy Byrd’s eyes, but like his they could go hard. Now they glinted like the shale that flashes from under the ledges of old mountains. The hollow in Delia’s throat pearled with sweat and pulsed with heat. The muscles there flexed as she swallowed, but she said nothing more.

“You can’t avoid the man, Delia. Specially not if you want to see those girls.”

Granddaddy Byrd did not seem to see what his words were doing, the way Delia was folding into herself. He talked like a preacher, Cissy thought. Randall had always warned against preachers, men who talked as if the Bible were propped against their breastbones, God’s truth a razor beneath their tongues. Randall’s daddy had been a preacher. “And he was an evil old man,” he said. “Died blaming his sins on his children and his wife, my mama, who was the sweetest woman you’ll never get to meet. That man ran her into the grave. What I am saying is, don’t trust preachers, Little Bit, don’t let them get after you. You got to keep yourself away from those razor tongues.”

“You’ll have to talk to him,” Granddaddy Byrd said, his voice gravelly. He kept his face forward, as though Delia were somewhere out in the yard instead of right beside him.

“I don’t know.” Delia reached for her glass and tapped the bottom lightly on the step. “Don’t think Clint’s necessarily going to want to see me.” Her head was bent. Blown dust settled over her hair, her skirt, her bare arms and calves.

“Clint’s still your husband.” Now Granddaddy Byrd was looking directly at Delia. “He didn’t choose to divorce you, did he? No, he held on all the time you were gone. And he heard, everybody heard, what you had done.” His crippled hand gestured in Cissy’s direction. “Likely once he knows you’re back, he’ll expect you to come see him.”

“I don’t know that.”

“Delia.”

They were facing each other now, bodies rigid, eyes locked. Cissy saw Delia slowly angle away from the old man, saw her shoulders hunch and settle. She got smaller and smaller, but her head did not turn, her eyes did not drop. She might crack, but she would not soften. A slight vibration moved down Granddaddy Byrd’s long frame, from his leathery neck to his outthrust bony knees, as he clasped his hands in front of him and pulled his elbows in to his sides, like a mantis bent in prayer. Nothing in him leaned toward Delia.

“You got to talk to Clint.” That preacher’s voice.

Cissy turned away and squatted on the rough tarmac. She watched a line of ants circling a sun-heated piece of broken glass. Behind her Delia’s voice was choked with misery.

“Granddaddy, don’t. You know Clint an’t gonna let me see my girls.”

“Well, how you expect to see them if you don’t see Clint?”

Delia rocked back and forth on the porch step. “I’d hoped you’d help me,” she said. “I thought you might speak to Clint.”

“What have I got to say to him?” Granddaddy Byrd spat again.

Cissy looked at the spot in the dust where his spit had landed. There was a barely a mark. The dirt looked like gray powder, but it was unyielding.

“Delia. You never did listen to a thing I said. Wouldn’t think you’d start now. But you should. You should.” Granddaddy Byrd rolled his tobacco bag between his palms. “You married the man. Clint Windsor might have been a son of a bitch, but there’s lots of sons-a-bitches around. You married that one. You made babies with him. Then you run off and left him like you were never coming back.”

Delia covered her mouth with one hand. The other remained locked around her shins.

Granddaddy Byrd glowered in Cissy’s direction. “Hell,” he said, “you can’t just waltz back into Cayro and think you gonna get what you want. An’t a soul in this county thinks you got any right to those girls. Not a soul.”

He got to his feet slowly, straightening up as if in pain, and grunted again once he was standing.

“You won’t help me?” she said, so softly he could have pretended not to hear.

“No.” He stopped. Without looking back, he spoke again. “You go talk to the Windsors. They’re the ones you should go see. You get down on your knees and tell those girls what you been doing all these years. Don’t tell me.”

Cissy gritted her teeth and took up a rock. Delia sat rocking as Granddaddy Byrd went across the porch and through the door. If she hadn’t been so angry at Delia herself, Cissy might have run after him, thrown herself at the old man, and screamed out all the pain she could feel growing in Delia’s body.

“Cissy. We got to get going.” Delia stood up abruptly and headed for the Datsun.

Cissy ground a line of ants into the hot tar surface of the old driveway, tossed the rock aside, and followed Delia to the car.