“Curtains and dishes are easy to replace,” she told her sister Sally, “but damned if I’m leaving my rootstock to Paul and whatever he’s gonna bring in.”

A seventh trip across town then, without Sally. M.T. left her sorting boxes and helping the twins, Ruby and Pearl, make up their new bedroom. She did not want Sally to see what she intended to do to the perennial bed by what was now, legally, Paul’s kitchen.

M.T. was a big woman, muscular under soft pads of flesh. She grinned widely as she took her spade to the tall delphinium spears and reduced them to a gray-green mash.

“Man got twelve years off me. Thinks he got the best of me. Stupid son of a bitch.” She chopped and tore into the plants, pouring all the rage she had never directed at Paul onto those loved green shoots. “Son of a bitch,” she cursed. “Stupid man. Show his ass.” When she was done, her eyes were full of tears, but she was satisfied.

“Something might come back here,” M.T. said to herself as she turned toward her car, “but it won’t be pretty.” She was swiping at her dirty cheek and arching her aching back when a green Datsun pulled into the driveway.

Later M.T. would tell the story as if she had known them instantly—her lost best friend and the daughter at her side. But sodden and heartbroken, skinny and desperate, Delia did not look like the girl M.T. had loved. For one never-to-be-admitted moment, M.T. thought that the woman driving up was another of Paul’s foolish girlfriends and that the child beside her was one of his numerous little bastards. God knew the man had been cheating on her at least that long. Maybe this woman had shown up to demand fair treatment from M.T., something she knew she would never get from Paul. If a legal wife could be done so badly, what could a girlfriend expect? Then Delia turned her face to M.T. and their eyes caught.

“Goddamn!” M.T. dropped her spade. “Delia,” she shouted as she ran toward the car.

Delia opened the door, and they fell into each other’s arms while Cissy wiped sweat out of her eyes and prayed someone would get her a cold drink.

“Damn, Delia. Goddamn.” M.T. shook Delia loosely and burst into tears. “Damn,” she kept saying, the word soft and reverent, a prayer of thanksgiving.

Delia spoke only once. She mouthed M.T.’s name, and then she began to sob.

“Another minute,” M.T. would say after. “Another minute and I’d have left. Delia was in such bad shape, you cannot imagine. She was almost gone. She was almost lost to herself.”

It was true. If M.T. had not stopped to tear up her garden, they might have missed each other. That would have been terrible, because it was not that Delia was almost gone. Delia was completely gone. Somewhere in the short drive from Granddaddy Byrd’s to M.T. and Paul’s old house, Delia had lost the part of her that could fight back, take care of business, and do what she had to do. The Delia who fell into M.T.’s arms was childlike and broken.

“Hold me,” Delia whispered to her old friend, and M.T. took her at her word, enfolding her like a rag doll, kissing her face and weeping onto her cheek. For several minutes M.T. kept her hands on Delia, one still on her shoulder even as the other reached for Cissy’s cheek.

“Oh, look at you,” M.T. pronounced, “look at Delia’s girl.” When Cissy scowled and shook her hair down over her eyes, M.T. only laughed and packed them both off to her new place—a more difficult prospect than it first appeared, since Delia seemed in that moment to have lost the talent for driving a car. “Never mind,” M.T. said, and loaded them into her old Buick. She placed a dirty box of cuttings on Cissy’s lap and cuddled Delia to her shoulder on the front seat.

It took years for Cissy to learn all that lay behind the friendship between Delia and M.T.—rivalries and resentments as well as rescues and impassioned loyalty. Eventually there were tales of the time M.T. hid Delia in her own honeymoon cottage and of the terrible night in 1978 when just one phone call to Delia brought a check from Randall, no questions asked. But of all the things that happened that day, the one Cissy would never forget was the welcome M.T. made them, the joy on her face when she recognized Delia and the matter-of-fact way she took them in. When they got to her home, M.T.’s voice rang out like a bell. She pulled them out of the Buick and displayed them to her sister like prize puppies.

“Look! Look!” she shouted. “Look who is here. It’s my best friend, my best friend in the world. My Delia has come back.”

M.T. sent Sally over to get Delia’s car while she put Delia down in her own bed. “You need to rest,” she said firmly, and took Cissy into her half-unpacked kitchen. M.T. fed the girl cold chicken and corn relish on slices of white bread and quizzed her about the long trip across country.

“I’m sorry about your daddy,” she said when Cissy mentioned Randall’s death. “I never met him, but I know what it is like to lose someone you love.”

Cissy looked at M.T.’s wide, gentle face and suddenly felt like crying herself. Her daddy was dead. Her daddy was dead and she was stuck in the back end of the world.

“It’s all right.” M.T. came around the table and pulled Cissy’s head into her belly. “It’s going to be all right, honey. Your mama and I will make it all right.” She soothed and whispered while Cissy cried fiercely for a few moments. When Cissy started hiccuping, M.T. took a wet washcloth and squatted down to wipe her face. “It’s going to be just fine. We’re going to take good care of you, sweetheart. Good care.”

Cissy held her breath. Her tears were bad enough, but the hiccups were humiliating. Around the bulk of M.T.’s body she could see two girls watching from the kitchen doorway.

“I’m sorry,” Cissy said.

“Nothing to be sorry about.” M.T. was placid and easy on her feet. She stood up effortlessly and tossed the washcloth onto a pile of laundry near the sink. “You’ve lost your father, and you’ve just come all the way across the country in less time than it takes most people to go across the state. I’d say a few tears are justified. More than a few, and you can cry around here as much as you like. I’m tenderhearted myself, and so are my girls.” She gestured at the twins. “I was wondering where you were. Cissy, I want you to meet my treasures, my Ruby and my Pearl.”

M.T. pulled the two girls in close to her hips. They were as thin as she was wide, narrow-faced and sharp-chinned, with dark brown hair in matching bowl-like cuts above their ears. They were not identical twins, though they were the same size and had the same coloring. They were easily four years older than Cissy, big girls, teenagers, and they were nowhere near as good-natured as their mother. Ruby was the sharper of the two, her eyes zeroing in on Cissy like twin rockets ready to flare.

“Your daddy was a guitar player, huh?” Ruby said. “Famous, huh?”

“Famous, huh?” echoed Pearl.

Cissy opened her mouth, then hesitated. Delia had told her that Randall was nowhere near as famous as he’d liked to have been and that Mud Dog was just famous enough to get by. But she could tell from the look in Ruby’s eye that she dared not say anything like that.

“A little famous,” she said. “He’s dead.”

Ruby gave her sister a thump on the arm. “That’s a shame.”

“A shame.” Pearl nodded.

Ruby looked Cissy up and down and smiled. “Well, never mind,” she said. “Welcome to Georgia, Cissy Byrd. What Mama won’t tell you, we will. Anything and everything about Cayro.”

“Everything,” said Pearl.

“You girls,” laughed M.T. “Why don’t you go show Cissy your room.”

A little shudder of dread went through Cissy. They were not going to be any help.

Cissy stared numbly. She found it tiring and frightening to be so important to someone she barely knew.

“Lord, girl, why are you still up?” M.T. said suddenly. She led Cissy back to the bedroom and tucked her into Pearl’s narrow four-poster bed with a kiss on the forehead. Gratefully Cissy closed her eyes and prayed for sleep.

“You lived in Hollywood?” Ruby’s voice was a whisper from the other bed.

“What’s it like in Hollywood? People really rich there?” Pearl chimed in.

Cissy almost moaned out loud.

“Did you know any famous people, movie stars and all?” Ruby propped herself on an elbow. The two girls were lying head to foot on her bed, and when Pearl sat up a second later, Cissy felt as if she were facing a courtroom.

“No,” she said. “No movie stars.”

“I heard your daddy had this big old fancy bus that your mama caught a ride on, and that was how they met. Your daddy let you go with him on the bus?”

Cissy closed her eyes. She had only been on the bus a few times, and she was not about to say so to Ruby and Pearl. She tried to think of something that would satisfy their curiosity, but nothing occurred to her. All she had ever cared about was her daddy and spending time with him at his house, but Delia had not let her go over there much the last few years.

When Cissy had no ready answers, Ruby and Pearl quickly lost patience. They already resented the child who was forcing them to share a bed. What business did Cissy and Delia have coming in on their new place, turning everything back to front and getting their mama all excited?

“Why is it the famous people always have such stupid kids?” Ruby asked, head in the air, as if she were speaking to no one at all.

Pearl joined in happily. “Yeah, it’s like fantastic numbers of them kill themselves all the time.”

“I heard that too.”

Cissy ran her tongue over her teeth. The sharp edges of her molars reassured her. She turned over on one hip and looked toward Ruby. “What’s your mama’s real name? Don’t she got a real name? And why’d she give you two those silly damn names?”

“Don’t say nothing about my mama,” Ruby hissed.

“Yeah.” Pearl was louder than her sister. “Don’t talk about Mama.”

“Oh, I like your mama,” Cissy said. She put her thumb on her lower lip and rubbed thoughtfully. “I do. But it’s a bit much, don’t you think? Ruby and Pearl, your mama’s little jewels?”

“You are a bitch,” Ruby said.

“Worse than your mama,” Pearl added.

“Stuck up.” Ruby flopped back on the bed.

“Full of herself,” Pearl agreed. She lay down at Ruby’s side. For a moment the two girls glared at Cissy and then turned their backs to her together.

I want to go home, Cissy thought. But she had no home. Stubbornly she bit into the cotton pillowcase. She was not going to cry. She listened to Ruby and Pearl whispering softly so that she couldn’t make out what they were saying. When they fell quiet, Cissy rolled over, keeping the pillow between her and the other bed like a shield.

“I don’t know,” the man said. “An’t she that woman run off and left them girls?”

“She’s my dearest oldest friend,” M.T. swore. “And you know me, Richie. If I say she’s all right, she is.”

“M.T., you are about the silliest thing. That’s what I know. And you an’t going to talk me into renting to no woman couldn’t be trusted with her own babies, much less my old house.”

“Oh, Richie, you don’t mean that.” M.T. batted her eyes and smiled and coaxed until she thought her face would break. In the end, Ritchie rented the house to her, not to Delia, and made her swear he would never have to meet the woman, nor do any work if anything went wrong.

“My wife is gonna skin me,” Richie complained.

“She’s going to be happy to get the money,” M.T. reassured him, hoping Delia had more savings stashed away than she had mentioned so far. Twice in the decade Delia had been gone she had sent money when M.T. asked for it, no questions asked and no mention of repayment. But every time M.T. had mentioned money since she found her friend out at Paul’s house, Delia started to cry as if she had no more than the little roll M.T. had already seen in her bag. That could not be right, M.T. told herself. There would be money coming sooner or later. Delia couldn’t have left California with so little to show for all that time.

It would take a few weekends to clean the place up, M.T. said when she drove Delia and Cissy out to see the river house, but it would be nice. When M.T. started opening windows and dusting, Delia sat down on a chair in the kitchen. A couple of times she got up as if she would help, but she sat back down before accomplishing anything. After a while she stopped getting up at all and just sat there watching as M.T. chattered and swept out the whole house. “We’ll get my sister to help,” M.T. promised Delia. “She’ll get this place fixed up in no time.” But Sally was too busy to come, and the weeks stretched and became a month.

Every time M.T. walked in on Delia lying in bed and crying, she would coo and nod with sympathy. This was the kind of thing she had felt when Paul took up with that dancer from Augusta. No one had understood that when it was M.T. lying in bed.

“Sometimes a woman just needs a little time,” she told Cissy.

“Harrumph,” Cissy replied. She watched Delia pull a pillow over her head and draw her knees to her chest like a baby curled up in a crib. She told herself she was learning the family language, “harrumph” and contempt and a sneer. Delia could cry. Cissy did not dare. She had already made it through her first few days at Cayro Elementary on sheer tight-lipped determination, ignoring the whispers and pointing fingers.

No, Cissy did not dare relax, did not dare loosen her tightly clenched fists, her closely pressed lips. She took to chewing her fingernails down and picking at her ragged cuticles. She went to school because she could not think of a way out of it and because it was better than staying in the house with Delia crying in bed, and Ruby and Pearl making ruthless fun of her every chance they got, and M.T. patting her head carelessly on her way to get Delia a tissue or a drink of water. Cissy felt as if her nerves had broken through to lie exposed on the outside of her skin. She slept in a tight little ball—under the bed after the girls poured water on her in the middle of the night—and walked around with her arms crossed over her chest, rebuffing even the few people who tried to be friendly, two other new girls in her grade and the teachers who pronounced her name “Cece.” If Delia was going to cry, then Cissy was going to disappear.

The album covers had been passed around at the school, Diamonds and Dust with its long shot of the Hollywood Hills, and the original Mud Dog/Mud Dog with the bus hung all over with flags and flowers. Everywhere she went, Cissy was confronted with her daddy’s band, boys who asked her if she’d ever done any drugs, girls who sang a few bars of the music she didn’t really know and the words Delia had never allowed her to hear. Everyone knew her name, her mama’s name, all about Randall and the band and California and more—all about Clint Windsor and the sisters she had never met. She started wearing her dark glasses all the time, not for protection from the light but to discourage questions she did not know how to deflect.

Bumped into the fourth grade for the last month of school, Cissy sat unblinking at the back of the room the first day, her eyes obscured behind the thick lenses. When the teacher asked her to “tell everyone about California,” Cissy stood rigidly at the blackboard while the whole class focused on her stern face.

“California is the thirty-first state. The capital is Sacramento,” she said, and returned to her desk.

Marty Parish leaned over Cissy’s desk when the bell rang. “Full of sass, an’t you?” he said. His glance drifted across the open notebook under her hand. Cissy had written “Cayro” over and over down the middle of the page. “You got your mama’s talent?” he asked her. “You sing nasty songs and shake your butt when you do it?”

“Leave me alone.”

“Hey, girl. You know stuff, I can tell. You could teach me some stuff, right?” A small group had gathered between Cissy and the teacher, who was rummaging through her desk at the front of the room. The grinning boys and one wide-faced nervous girl looked expectant, as if they hoped Cissy would start crying or run out of the room.

“Women in your family supposed to be good,” Marty said with a leer. “Real good. I heard your sister Dede is real hot.”

Cissy pushed herself up. Slowly she tucked her notebook between her elbow and her side, keeping her eyes locked on Marty’s face. “Get out of my way,” she said to him.

“Marty?” The teacher’s voice was loud. She closed her desk drawer and stepped toward the rows of desks. “Is there a problem?”

“No problem. No problem.” Marty shook his dark head and took one step back from Cissy’s obstinate stance. “We were just discussing Cal-i-for-ni-a.” He smiled at Cissy and gave an elaborate shrug.

The teacher looked to Cissy, but her face was blank. Everyone started for the door, but Cissy made a point of stepping close to Marty. “I know stuff, yeah. I been with the band. I been on the bus,” she whispered in his ear. “I’ve been places you’ll never get in this life.”

“Oh, they’re looking for you,” Ruby warned gleefully one night. “Everybody knows that. I’d think you’d be dreaming about them all the time, them sneaking through the bushes, climbing in the windows. Carrying rocks and razors with your name on them. You just lucked out getting here after Dede went to seventh grade. If she was still going to Cayro Elementary, she’d have kicked your butt three times over by now.”

“Four times,” hazarded Pearl. “Your whole family is crazy, but them girls are genuinely disturbed.”

“Disturbed, yeah.” Ruby beamed at Pearl appreciatively. “Old Amanda is like this century’s only Baptist Pentecostal nun. Goes around all the time in them high-neck dresses in the hottest weather, wearing them white socks and Mary Janes like she was a first-grader or something.”

“Always praying and telling people they’re going to hell,” Pearl put in.

“And that Dede is like so different you can’t believe it.”

“Oh Lord!”

Pearl put her hand over her mouth and giggled. Ruby nodded wisely. They looked at each other and then gave Cissy slow, pleased smiles.

“Everybody says she’s done it.”

“Uh-huh. Everybody.”

Cissy frowned in confusion. “Done what?’

“It. It. Sex.” Pearl was bouncing on Ruby’s bed.

“She an’t no virgin, you can be sure,” Ruby said. “And her going off to Holiness Redeemer with her sister and grandma every Sunday. Lord should strike her dead. What is she, twelve?”

“I don’t believe you.”

“She sneaks out of her grandma’s place and goes driving with boys. Everybody knows.” Ruby’s voice was adamant, her smile enormous.

Cissy crossed her ankles on the mattress and put her hands behind her neck. “Well, it’s nothing to me.” She closed her eyes. “I an’t never met them and an’t looking to meet them.”

“Oh, you’ll meet them.” Ruby kicked at the side of the bed once, inspecting the room as if she wanted something else to kick. “Like I said, they’re sure looking for you.”

Cissy kept her eyes closed. She didn’t want to give Ruby the satisfaction of seeing that her words were having any effect. The truth was that Cissy did dream about Amanda and Dede, did watch for them. The truth was that she had already run into Dede. And she had Ruby and Pearl to thank for that too.

Every Saturday afternoon for the last month, Cissy had been going downtown to Crane’s, the paperback resale shop, to trade in the books she was steadily pilfering from the twins. Their books were the only things they had that Cissy envied. She had left most of her own books behind in Venice Beach, and the few that Delia let her bring had been stolen. It was a simple matter to run her fingers along their careful stacks and pull a couple out now and then to tuck in a paper bag and hide in the trunk of the Datsun. Crane’s had an inexhaustible need for the books the twins collected, the kinds of books Cissy thought contemptible.

M.T. and her girls shared a common passion, Regency novels full of tightly laced bodices, medieval tales of saints and courtesans, historical melodramas about Roman soldiers bedeviled by women who wielded trefoil daggers and called on the goddess to defend their lives, generational sagas of British aristocrats who chose badly in love or of serving girls who married up and made their children rich. There were boxes of books under every bed, romances of every kind. Pearl and Ruby were not of this world, and their taste in paperback fiction proved it. Cissy found the more contemporary romances—nurses with doctors, secretaries with gentlemen—only under M.T.’s bed. She never touched those, but it gratified her to take one of Pearl’s beloved sixteenth-century Gothics, or one of Ruby’s endless series set in the eighteenth-century Court of St. James, and exchange it for one of Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea fantasies. A world in which terrible curses could be cast on the wicked had a ready appeal for Cissy.

One Saturday Cissy was hovering over the trays picking through the thrillers and science fiction. Just as she reached for a prize copy of Vonda McIntyre’s Dreamsnake, another hand closed over the spine, and she looked up to see a skinny blond girl looking back at her. They stood there, motionless, until Mrs. Crane dropped a stack of books and their heads turned together. Red-faced and shaking, Mrs. Crane bent to pick up the books without taking her eyes off the girls. Each of them frowned in the same way and looked again at the other, and each pulled back her hand.

Why hadn’t Cissy said something? But what could she have said? Dede had looked like any other raw-faced teenage girl, blond hair pinned back, blue eyes piercing and cool. What bothered Cissy later was that her half sister looked so ordinary, that there was no aura of mystery about her, no electrical shock when they touched. In any book the twins owned, there would have been an ominous scent in the room, a flash of sisterly recognition. Cissy stood there wondering what to do. Were they supposed to speak? Dede took the book in hand and added it to the other she was holding, a dog-eared copy of Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter. Her eyes went to Mrs. Crane, then dropped back to the bin of books. She moved down the aisle, not looking at Cissy again. Cissy put down the two books she had selected and left the shop without a word. When she got home, she went straight to M.T.’s makeup mirror to see if there really was a resemblance, if any stranger could tell at a glance that she and Dede were related. Despite her dark red hair and hazel eyes, she saw in the mirror what anyone else would see—that both of them looked like Delia, with her nose, her chin, and the same fine arched brows above clear eyes.

The immediate difference between them was that Dede was pretty. For the first time Cissy wondered what she would look like when she got older. Back in Venice Beach, Rosemary had once showed Cissy how she did her makeup, pointing out that they both had the same heart-shaped face. “Better than those square-faced ugly women,” she laughed. “Makeup can only do so much. You wait. With that face, you’ll be pretty as your mama.”

Cissy had paid no attention. But gazing into the mirror with the memory of Dede’s features still imprinted on her own, Cissy saw what pretty looked like. What she could not puzzle out was the other thing she had seen in that face. Dede had looked at her with curiosity, not hatred. Her face had been neutral, cool, and distant, not hostile. That face that was Cissy’s face had been almost as unreadable as her own.

Over a June weekend, M.T. and Sally tackled the house in earnest and got most of it ready in short order. It was the bathroom that stymied them. They sprayed bug killer everywhere, let it sit a few days, and scrubbed down the floors and walls with bleach twice, airing the room out between cleanings. It still reeked.

The next Saturday, Sally stepped in, took a deep breath, and pronounced, “Crap!” She climbed up on the toilet, drew back her leg, and with two well-placed kicks knocked the window out of its frame. Light and air poured in, and a small army of roaches poured out. Sally nodded and called in her crew from Dust Bunnies, the cleaning service she ran. They pulled the rug out of the living room and burned it out back. Then they sealed all the windows with plastic and set off industrial-strength bug bombs. Two days later they took all the furniture out and scoured the place while Sally’s husband put a new window in the bathroom. Using paint left over from various jobs, Sally and her crew redid the walls in the bathroom and kitchen and touched up the bedrooms. When they were done, they put the furniture back in and laid down a rug M.T. had provided in the living room.

M.T. drove Delia and Cissy over the next day with their few things and some new curtains, a bright yellow one for the bathroom. While M.T. told them how Sally had kicked out the bathroom window, Cissy nodded balefully and walked around the kitchen feeling the linoleum buckle under her shoes, wishing Sally had kicked out all the windows. She would rather camp under the stars than live in this horrible house, so ugly compared to the cottage in California. But Delia sat right down at the kitchen table and wept at how clean and bright everything was.

Sally offered Delia work with Dust Bunnies, and Delia took it gratefully. It was night work, and she didn’t have to speak to a soul to do it. Every evening she went out in the same T-shirt and jeans to clean offices in Cayro’s claim to an industrial park, and came home before dawn with her hair pulling loose from the rubber band at the back of her neck. She would sit at the kitchen table with her blank face until Cissy got up, then make the only breakfast either of them could stand, apple butter on untoasted bread. When Cissy went off to her room to read, Delia would put her head on the table and cry for an hour or so before she went to bed to sleep till late afternoon.

“Crying season,” Cissy called it when M.T. asked her how they were doing. Some days Cissy envied Delia her free-flowing tears. Some days she hated her for them. Cissy’s tears had dried up after that one outburst at M.T.’s.

Cissy passed her eleventh birthday at the river house, immersed in a biography of Elizabeth I that Pearl had grudgingly given her. When M.T. was moving them in, she had asked the girls to give Cissy some of their old books as a housewarming present. When the two went through their prized collections and complained loudly that their favorites were missing, M.T. caught the smirk that flickered across Cissy’s face and quickly declared that she had borrowed them herself and loaned them to some of the ladies from the church.

“I’m sorry, baby,” she told Ruby. “We’ll see if we can’t get you some new copies, replace your favorites.” At her insistence, Ruby and Pearl picked out the most battered and boring titles they had, and M.T. cadged a couple of cartons of used books from friends.

“Delia’s girl’s a reader,” she told people, “and you know Delia an’t got a dime to her name.” No one believed her—all Cayro thought Delia was rock-star rich—but they were willing to part with some worn paperbacks, a couple of King James Bibles, and a shelf’s worth of Reader’s Digest Condensed Books. That was fine with Cissy. Taylor Caldwell and A. J. Cronin weren’t bad, and as for the rest, they were worth their weight in trade-ins for Kate Wilhelm and anything at all by James Tiptree. Cissy would never admit that she had read Ruby and Pearl’s books before she took them to Crane‘s, but she spent most of crying season away in her head, talking Regency French and swishing her skirt, or Creole patois and fingering a knife. Now and then she made cat’s-cradle designs with her fingers and tried hard to believe in the power of a curse.

Steph asked Cissy for something to drink, “some tea if you got it, sugar,” and settled down at the kitchen table to tell Delia all the gossip, ignoring M.T.’s warning looks. First on her list was Clint Windsor.

“Man has never looked well since you left,” Stephanie said, smiling as though it pleased her to say so. “There’s a lesson in that, you can bet your life. A lot of people blamed Clint for how you had to take off, you know. Everybody knew he was just like his daddy, only crazier.”

M.T. leaned over and put a hand on Delia’s arm. “Don’t start worrying yourself now. Wasn’t nothing you or no one could have done.”

“That family’s been stiff and mean forever,” Stephanie went on. “Old man Windsor, holier-than-thou Louise, they knew what was going on, and what did they do, huh?”

M.T. squeezed Delia’s arm again. “Steph’s right, honey. You remember what Clint was like. He didn’t change. Lord, none of us could keep up with Clint after you left. Everybody knew he was drinking, working out at the Firestone place and drinking himself into the ground.”

“Yeah,” Steph said. “Got all skinny and rangy like an old man, gray-faced and drunk all the time. I heard he was sleeping on the porch at your old house, showering in the backyard, not using the inside at all. Probably wasn’t no room with all them empty whiskey bottles stacked up in there.” She beamed at Cissy.

“Drinking men, they like to live alone, all lazy, messy, and evil-hearted, full of hatred for everything an’t drunk or dead.”

M.T. tried a grin. “Lord, yes, crazy drinking men. Only wise thing Clint did was keep it at home. It’s good that the girls were with Grandma Windsor, Delia. She took care of them better than he ever would have.”

Delia sat up and looked at M.T. as though she had just woken from a trance.

“I thought Clint had Mama Windsor come live with him,” she said. Randall had hired an Atlanta lawyer. There had been investigations, reports, an official notice of abandonment, and rude letters from the county social services people. Old man Windsor had judges in his pocket and righteousness on his side. Nothing Delia and Randall did made any difference. But through the whole struggle Delia had always thought of the girls in their house, the old tract house on Terrill Road that she and Clint had fixed up together. As much as she disliked old lady Windsor, she had been comforted by the thought of her girls in that kitchen eating meals on those carnival-colored plates Delia chose when she and Clint first married. It was a fantasy, Delia realized now. It was all a dream she had created to ease her fear. All that time her girls had been with Grandma Windsor, out at that farm where Clint swore even the ground was dry and sad. Delia put her palms flat across her eyes.

“Way Clint was, old Louise probably saved your girls, honey,” Steph continued blithely. “They’re doing just fine, good-looking as you ever were, towheaded and smart. That Dede is your spitting image. An’t that right, M.T.?”

Delia looked over at M.T. Her mouth opened and closed several times as if she wanted to speak but could not. Steph did not notice. “Well, I’ve got to get back. Did you hear I got a settlement from the fire we had? Got us a great set-up now, two trailers side by side, and a big old screened-in porch. You got to come see the place sometime.” She drained the glass of tea, then set it down and wiped her upper lip.

Delia rose from her chair without a word and walked straight back to her bedroom. M.T. stared after her, her frown a match for Delia’s stricken face.

“Well, Lord!” Stephanie stared blankly at M.T. and Cissy. “Was it something I said? Was it the girls? Lord knows she should be over that by now. How long has it been? Lord, must be at least ten years.”

Most of Cayro felt that Delia’s condition when she came home— the empty grief that burned on her face, the months she spent working on Sally’s cleaning crew—was penance for a woman who had abandoned her girls. Opinion had not shifted enough in Cayro to forgive or understand the sin, not enough to consider that a woman in danger might have lost her girls running from a man who would have surely strangled her in Parlour’s Creek if he had caught her before she climbed on Randall’s bus. No, Cayro still believed Delia a sinner, and crying season was a penance they understood. They liked to see it, Delia with her mouth soft and her eyes sore at the corners.

M.T.’s smartest move was to drag the unresisting Delia to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle week after week. Every Sunday, Delia sat on that hardwood pew, sallow and pale, eyes vacant, hands raw and swollen from scrubbing floors and swooshing toilets.

“God surely keeps track, don’t he?” Reverend Myles said to M.T. the first Sunday. M.T. linked her arm with Delia’s and gave one careful acknowledging nod. She knew what she was doing.

On the tenth Sunday, Mrs. Pearlman put one hand on Delia’s shoulder as she pushed herself painfully up the aisle. It was an accolade. No matter arthritis, hip replacement surgery, or pain past comprehending, Marcia Pearlman would never have touched the sinner without proof of repentance. It was a promise of forgiveness, if not actual forgiveness as yet. In the way of things, women screwed up just as men did, but women’s sins were paid for by children and women friends. The debt had a ready and simple dimension. The woman who had run off and fallen into the good life could never be forgiven, but the woman who came back ruined and wounded, painfully sober and stubbornly enduring, the woman who suffered publicly and hard—that woman had a chance. That woman could be brought back into the circle.

Suffer a little more, girl, Marcia Pearlman’s hand said, we understand this. It was fortunate that Delia was beyond understanding. Her pride could not have survived that touch. The Delia of Mud Dog would never have stood it. The Delia who had fought and fled Clint would never have endured it. Only the Delia of crying season could sit, head down, and never notice when the hand of God reached toward her. Not forgiven but understood. Not forgiven but enjoyed. Oh, the simple pleasure in seeing her like that. No woman in the congregation would speak it, but all knew. Look at her now, Lord. Look at her now. Marcia Pearlman’s hand on Delia said more than all M.T.’s whispered justifying on the steps outside.

M.T. was a rock for Delia in those first months back in Cayro, proving her friendship by a hundred good works. There were times when Delia would not speak to her, but M.T. refused to take offense. She would check in with Cissy every few days, asking only, “How you doing?” It was a code.

“We’re fine,” Cissy would say, and M.T. understood that Delia was not better.

“That’s good, honey. Just give her time. It takes what it takes.”

Every day in Cayro took Delia back to her adolescence. She sank into herself and became again the wild girl no one dared approach. The odor of her own rank body never registered. The pitying looks she drew from the other women on Sally’s crew passed her by. Delia had no energy to think about anything but moving one foot in front of the other. She wore the same loose T-shirt and cutoff jeans over and over, pulled them off and put them on again until Cissy switched them for clean ones. If she could have, Cissy thought, Delia would have showered in them and gone to bed wet.

Safe. What Delia needed was to be safe. Who would touch her in those clothes, her skinny, stooped body leaving its imprint in the shape of the worn cotton and faded denim? Who would speak to her, look at her, hair pulled back and face bare? Who was this woman? Not Delia Byrd. Leave this one alone, her look said.

In the county library Cissy found a book of martyrs. There had been saints, the book revealed, who went years in one garment. One robe. No mention of how or when it was washed. Perhaps it never was, or only incidentally, the face turned up to the rain, the body rolling briefly in a summer stream. The robe would tatter and rot and fall off the gaunt and fervid frame, to be replaced by another the same as the first. No vanity, no thought. No fear, no desire. The garment served to mask the flesh, not adorn it.

Maybe the saints had some disease, and maybe Delia had caught it.

Sometimes Delia’s dreams were not nightmares but memories of what had been, the loved bodies as they had first been given to her. Amanda, still flecked with blood and mucus when the nurse handed her to Delia, was shockingly tiny and desperate. When the nurse shifted that elfin creature to Clint’s hands, his eyes widened in panic.

“My God,” he gasped, unable to believe that anything so vibrant and powerful had come out of the numbed and passive creature Delia became in the last months of pregnancy. He had thrust the infant back to her in a reflexive movement, then looked uncomprehending at the tableau of mother and resistant child. Amanda would not take Delia’s bursting nipple. The baby cried and kicked and wailed while Delia sank into the overstuffed pillows and sobbed blindly, heartbroken. Their misery had drawn Clint back to the bedside, his callused hands awkwardly patting and comforting, first Delia, then the infant girl.

That moment was among the most awful and tender Delia had ever known. She could not make peace with the contradiction, the bloody-minded horror of the Clint who stormed strange and dangerous through the house and the Clint who so feared harming Amanda that he wept at the sight of his rough fingers near her baby-fine cheek.

Maybe it was the smell of milk and blood. At each birth there had been that fleeting instant of tenderness. When Dede was born and latched immediately onto Delia’s nipple, her little fists bright pink against the creamy breast, her cheeks pumping like bellows, Clint leaned forward in awe, his hand coming down on Delia’s hip. She hissed in startled pain, dislodging the baby’s mouth, the greedy tongue still outthrust and hungry for the love-tit. Delia flinched when the cool air struck the burning, cracked nipple, and Clint jerked back, looking up at Delia’s face with red-rimmed eyes. Their glances locked, and Delia felt her heart thud stubbornly with hope.

Once he recaptured Delia’s look, Clint had seemed oblivious to those two yeasty warm bodies. It was Delia he breathed in and out, Delia he bruised and dreamed of lying limp in his arms. It was her wet, broken flesh that called to him, the children they had made together ghostly, distracting. Delia knew she was the only thing in that house that had ever seemed real to Clint. Only when she was gone did the girls register, and then only for the piece of her they were. Clint had held on to Amanda and Dede because they were anchors for Delia’s heart.

“He doesn’t want them,” Delia told Randall after the judge in Atlanta gave Clint full custody. She clutched her few pictures and ranted like a madwoman. “What he wants is to hurt me, bleed me from every pore. That is the sin God will judge him for, that is the crime. The man could open his veins on the throne of heaven and no mother would ever forgive him what he has done. He is damned, by God, damned forever.”

In the little house by the river, Delia dreamed Randall and Clint, Dede and Amanda, her babies and her rage, and woke to lie in bed with her eyes burning and her hands in her fists. How would she explain? Her girls would have so many questions, and how could she face them? Delia rocked in the bed, her breasts as swollen and painful as they were on the day she left ten-month-old Dede dreaming in her crib at the house on Terrill Road. “God,” Delia prayed, “let them forgive me. Let me have the chance to make them forgive me.”

“Damn,” she told Cissy. “This thing smells.” She peeled the shirt off in the kitchen, balled it up, and wiped it once down her bare midriff. Her small breasts startled Cissy, too small, it seemed, to have nursed babies.

Delia saw Cissy’s expression and laughed. “Nothing here you won’t have soon enough.” She dropped the shirt in the garbage and went to shower, staying under the hot water for a long time.

When M.T. came over later that day, she did not ask questions. She saw Cissy’s face as she was walking up the steps, nodded, and said, “I’ll get us a chicken. We’ll cook something special.”

Cissy had wondered what was going to happen. The old Delia had never been one to cry or fall on anybody’s neck. The returned Delia wasn’t either. She gave her friend one kiss and stepped back, and the surprise then was that nothing changed. It did not seem to bother M.T. that Delia no longer joined in her tears or held still to be comforted. M.T. wept and laughed and cooked her chicken, as happy with the recovered Delia as she had been with the tragic heroine. She didn’t even mind when Delia refused to go to church with her that first Sunday after she came back to herself.

“Got things to do,” Cissy heard her tell M.T. over the phone as she made a big breakfast.

“What kind of day you think it’s going to be, Cissy?” Delia asked as she set a plate of ham and eggs in front of her daughter with a smile.

“Good day to leave,” Cissy said.

Delia laughed. “Lord, girl. We barely got here.”