“Jesus Christ,” Delia whispered to the dark. “When does it stop?” It was going on two years now, two years since she had been drunk that last Thanksgiving in California. But her stomach still rolled and her mouth tasted of bitter cotton and old need. A glass of whiskey would clean it away, wash out the bitter and set her to singing again. Delia curled up and hugged herself. The worst mistake she had made was to put together her singing and her drinking. Now she mourned both of them, and dared not do one for fear of what would come of the other.

She could hear Clint muttering and shifting in his bed. The smell of that room was getting worse. She would have to haul him out into the sun tomorrow, scrub the floor again, and wash down the walls with vinegar. She could change all the sheets and spray Lysol in the corners, but the smell would come back in a few days. Was it the cancer that smelled so bad? Or was it Clint himself, the stink of his soul?

The first time Delia touched him was the worst. The feel of his skin made her tongue swell in her mouth and her lower back clench. She had to concentrate to make herself touch him and not recoil. In time, though, she was able to put her shoulder to his to help him to the bathroom without flinching. Clint would set his teeth and fix his eyes in front of him. Delia focused her own eyes on her hands, the floor, anything not to look in his face.

“I’m sorry,” he had said when she bathed him that afternoon. He might have been talking about how awkward he was, how slow and heavy, but Delia knew he meant more. She grunted and pulled him down the hall a little faster than was easy for either of them.

His hands shook, his legs trembled. Red-faced, he told her he’d been pissing in the tub more often than the toilet. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I sit down and I can’t get up at all.”

Delia nodded expressionlessly. There were railings now in the hall and the bathroom, two-by-fours with braces every few feet. One of the guys from the Firestone plant had done the work for a hundred dollars, but Delia could tell they would not be used for long. Clint could barely drag himself forward even with her help.

“You’d be more comfortable in the hospital,” she told him once they got him into the bathtub.

“No hospital, you promised.” Clint’s face was stricken.

Delia said nothing. She pulled off his pajamas while he shivered and tried to help. He stood in the bathtub with his back to her, holding himself up on the railing with outstretched arms. Delia pulled the shower curtain around him, keeping a hand inside it to steady his body.

“This house goes to the girls,” he said. “This house, the insurance. I sold the truck, but there’s that boat out at Mama’s, some furniture and old coins.” His head was bent and his eyes half closed. He was trying not to look at her. There was a lot more gray than blond in his matted hair. His skin was so dry it flaked off at his shoulders and hips. “The papers I drew up for you are at the bank. They’ll give them to you. When I’m dead, they’ll give you all that stuff.”

Delia turned on the tap. When it felt hot enough, she pulled the lever for the shower. Clint lifted his face. The muscles around his mouth and eyes went slack, the loose skin hanging in folds. He urinated gratefully as the water flooded over his trembling frame. As he relaxed a little, liquid shit ran down his legs.

Delia turned away. God had a hell of a sense of humor, she thought. She remembered lying on the floor of this bathroom, pregnant with Dede, pissing herself because she was hurt too bad to stand. Clint was rubbing his left hip where the bone jutted out. She could not see his cock, but she remembered what it looked like. There had been a time when she loved him, a lifetime before he became the man she hated. He had been a different person then, and so had she. All those years ago, when she had bought that gun at the flea market near the Atlanta speedway, she thought she would have to kill him. She had come back to this house and sat at the dining room table with the gun in front of her. Clint had come in on her there and stood looking from the gun to her.

The guy who sold her the gun was a curly-headed Texan who did business from under a green blanket, no questions asked, cash on hand. It was about as big as a handgun could be, that .38 revolver, all blue-black and hot when he slapped it in her hand, laughing when she almost dropped it. Said, “You be careful now, honey. That’s a real weapon, not some toy.” She wanted to shoot him where he stood, but she paid and walked back to the truck. When she got home, she sat down and put the gun, fully loaded, on the table, and waited.

Clint didn’t believe her when she said she was going to shoot him if he ever hit her again. If she had to shoot herself after, it wouldn’t matter. And if he took that gun, she’d just get another. “There an’t no slaves in the South no more,” she said. “You been trying to make a slave of me.” Clint just looked at her, his dirty blond hair hanging in his face, his jaw working, the hatred in him like a black light shining out of his eyes. He laughed a harsh laugh and turned and walked out. She wanted to go after him. She wanted to shoot him then. Instead she put her head down on the table and wept into her hands.

When people asked her why she had run, why she had left Clint and the girls behind like that, Delia was never able to explain. She would think about that gun, the cool chestnut table under her cheek. She would remember the despair that flooded her when little Amanda began to sob and Delia couldn’t pull herself up to go to her. She had left her children long before her body left. She had been gone long before she climbed on Randall’s bus.

Clint swayed forward in the shower and groaned. His flanks shook like a horse’s after a long run. Delia wiped her face with the back of her hand, reached for the soap bottle, and squeezed the gel over his shoulders and down his back. She used a sponge to scrub him, brusquely, her breath hissing as she breathed through her mouth. Her eyes were unfocused, her motions automatic. I didn’t kill him then, she was thinking. I don’t have to kill him now. I just have to get through this little bit here. Next few days, a couple of weeks, maybe a few months. With all I’ve done, I can do that.

When Clint groaned again, Delia turned him impatiently and swiped the sponge down his front. Soap foamed and bubbled on his flabby thighs and shrunken cock. The sparse blond hair on his chest stood up in wet spikes. He put his head back and let the water run down his chin. He was concentrating so hard on not falling that he did not see how Delia looked at him. When she shut off the tap and wrapped him in a towel, he collapsed into her arms like an exhausted child. She staggered but held him until he could manage to struggle with her back down the hall.

That’s the last time I can do that, she thought when Clint finally dropped back on the bed. She wiped sweat out of her eyes and saw Amanda watching them from the hall, the look on her face grimmer than the shame on Clint’s. Lord, they were always watching, one or the other of the girls, always looking at her with faces she could not read.

Clint lifted his shaking hands and pushed damp hair back off his emaciated features. “Thank you,” he panted. “I could barely stand myself.”

Delia nodded and held the towel to her chest. Maybe she could get a wheelchair, ask about a county nurse. At the door she heard a half sob behind her. Stubbornly she did not look back. Let him pull the sheet up on himself, she thought. Let him die wet in that bed.

It was after midnight when Delia finally lay down on the couch again. Come morning she would have to be at the Bonnet early. She had left everything a mess when she hurried away that afternoon. M.T. and Steph were always picking up after her, but day by day she was falling further and further behind. If she could put Clint in the hospital, she would take two days and sleep straight through. She would have time to talk to the girls, to rake up some of the trash that had blown all over the backyard, go through the bills, and maybe even write Rosemary. She covered her face with her hands. But if she put Clint in the hospital, Grandma Windsor would be there in the hour. She would have a lawyer with her, and Reverend Hillman while she was at it. The old woman had not been to see the girls once since they moved, but Delia could feel her eye on them. And Reverend Hillman was probably upset that Amanda had shifted over to Tabernacle Baptist. No doubt he was watching them too. She could feel them all watching and waiting, eyes on her at the supermarket, oily tongues speaking her name when she passed, teenage boys grinning at each other when they walked by the Bonnet every afternoon. If Delia put Clint in the hospital, she would never get those papers from the bank.

“It’s a bargain,” he had said to her, and she had thought she could do anything she had to do, carry him bodily to the graveyard, bury him with her hands and a teaspoon. But to care for him for week on week, to watch the girls standing outside the door of his bedroom, to see Cissy in there with her face fixed on that man’s eyes. Delia could smell rubbing alcohol on her fingers, the sweet, musty stink of Clint’s skin under it. Her whole body shook with exhaustion.

A dog barked out in the dark, a hound-dog howl as protracted and melancholy as any song Delia had ever sung. In California it would be three in the morning. Rosemary might be up. She was a night person, she had always said so. She might be out on her deck watching the moonlight on that stand of cactus she loved so.

“I’m a cactus rose myself,” Rosemary told Delia once. “I’m prickly and sweet-scented and dangerous to the unwary.” Delia could hear her chuckle, a deep growl of satisfaction. “And I’m like you,” Rosemary said. “I can survive on just about nothing. And nothing’s enough when you know who you are.”

“I need help,” Delia whispered to the night.

She wiped her face with her palms. There was the sound of a door closing, one of the girls going to the bathroom, Delia thought. She pushed herself up. She would fill the kettle before she went to bed, save herself a little time in the morning. In the hall she saw a shadowy figure outside Clint’s open door. It looked like Dede, but the hall was so dark that it was impossible to be sure who was standing there, hunch-shouldered, staring in at the dying man.

“Dede?” Delia whispered. The figure did not turn but walked the three steps to the other bedroom door and went inside. Amanda.

Why was she standing in the hall like that, watching her father in his restless sleep? Delia stood motionless for a moment, listening to the ragged breathing from the sickroom, the silence from the girls. What was this doing to them? What must it be like, watching this happen, unable to get away or change a thing? She had not expected Dede and Amanda to be so angry at Clint, so much banked resentment on their faces every time they passed his room. Some days it seemed they hated him more than she did. Some days it seemed only Cissy felt any pity for the man who lay and watched them all with his burning, desperate eyes.

Oh, Clint was suffering, she knew. He was paying for his sins. Purgatory, M.T. had called it, purgatory in life. But there was no purgatory hot enough for Delia’s rage at Clint. She knew that Cissy thought her cruel. Cissy looked at her now like it was Delia who had sinned against Clint. Some days she wanted to shake the child, to make her see what she really could not be expected to see—that when a woman learns to hate a man the way Delia had learned to hate Clint, she cannot look at him like a human being again in this life. She cannot just forgive him and make peace without some miracle of the soul. What Clint had done to them all, that was the one sin she could not forgive him. Maybe God could forgive, but not Delia.

She walked through the house to the girls’ room and listened to their breathing, steady and strong. Then she looked over to Clint’s room. His door was always partially open, but she could hear nothing.

She went to the door and pushed it gently. It swung soundlessly wide, spilling light from the little lamp on the floor by the bed. The radio was playing so softly she could only make out the murmur of voices from some far-off station. She leaned in and looked at Clint. His head was thrown back and his mouth was open. She could see the stubble on his chin like a scattering of big black grains of pepper. He looked like a corpse. Delia gritted her teeth when she saw his chest rise slightly and sink again. No, he was just asleep, deeply asleep, and that was rare enough to be frightening. Maybe the cancer cells in his bones had undergone one of those miraculous changes, curled up like hibernating frogs and fallen asleep to drift back and forth in his bloodstream. Maybe the cancer was receding like the tide receded, shrinking and dwindling away. Miracles happened—even to evil sons of bitches who deserved to rot in hell.

“No,” Delia whispered. No, not to him. Clint’s mouth worked, gasping for air. His body shifted, and the racked breathing began again, the slow cadence of pain to which Delia counted off the weeks. For a moment guilt sang in her brain. Had there been a miracle starting and had she stopped it?

Delia hugged herself. She had joked one time that she felt as if she had been raised by bears. There was no way for her to know how real people raised their young, how they loved and guided and pushed the child into a civilized state. But if Delia had come from bears, Clint had grown up among wolves. Not even his mother had shown him a gentle hand. When she first met him, it was that need that had charmed her, that boyish hunger for a gentle hand. She had misread it. She had thought they could heal each other. Now she looked at him dying and felt nothing at all.

God will judge me, Delia thought, but she could not change what she felt. She rubbed the knots in her left shoulder. He had twisted her arms up behind her and beaten her head on the floor. She could remember it as clearly as the smell of her babies’ newborn bodies. He had left her helpless on that floor, walked out, and left her with Amanda screaming terrified from the next room. She had to crawl across the floor to get to her girl. She had to swallow her own cries to comfort her daughter.

Delia’s teeth ached. She had been grinding down so hard that her jaw was trembling. She opened her mouth and tried to relax her neck. That was where the tension always got her, in her jaw and neck and the torn muscles of her shoulder. God, she wanted a drink. She wanted to drink whiskey and listen to the old records. She wanted to lie in Randall’s arms and not care when they might die. Delia shook her head and looked again at Clint. She was taking good care of him as she had promised, keeping her side of the bargain. Dr. Campbell told her he was surprised at how well Clint was lasting.

She looked around Clint’s room. The walls were patchy and spotted from all her scrubbing. There was a sour smell of sweat and sickness in the floor itself. The whole room would have to be cleaned and painted. Maybe the floor would have to be sanded. She ran her toe along one of the boards at the doorjamb. She would get a carpet, something with a nice bright pattern. When he is gone, I’ll polish this room until no one will know what it looked like when he was here, Delia thought. When it is good enough, I’ll move Amanda in here. Amanda needs a room of her own. She looked across the hall. What had Amanda been thinking, standing here looking at Clint?

Clint moaned and stirred in his sleep. Bad dream, Delia thought, and watched him rock his head. He pulled his legs up just a little. He was losing the ability to move them much anymore. He wouldn’t get out of that bed again.

“God,” Delia whispered. Maybe she could find someone to help. Not M.T., who gagged every time she came in the house, and not Steph, who made endless terrible jokes about rotting bodies and the fate of men who drank. Maybe Delia could find the money to hire someone.

There had been something frightening in the way Amanda had stood at Clint’s door, something terrible in the set of those shoulders. Delia moved down the hall and gently put her palm on the door behind which lay her girls. Her mouth tasted sour, her eyes felt full of sand and heat. Her whole body wanted a taste of liquor, tequila like a jolt to the nerves, bourbon like a balm for the soul, ice against her teeth and the glass thick and reassuring in her hand. Delia put a knuckle to her lips and bit a fold of her own skin, tasting blood and bitter while her pulse pounded in her ears.

“You can’t do everything on your own,” M.T. had told her. “Let your friends help you. Let me do for you what you would do for me.”

Rosemary had said the same thing. The last time they spoke on the phone, her friend got angry. “There’s something you’re not telling me, Delia. You tell me what is going on now. Tell me what I can do. I could be there in five days. Three, if you gave me reason.” And she laughed full-out into the phone.

That was what Delia needed. Not a drink of whiskey but the sound of Rosemary’s laughter. She went to the living room and dialed the number she knew by heart.

The day Rosemary arrived, she was wearing a pink crepe de chine blouse and a wide gold necklace that covered a scar on her throat, a fine blue-black line along the side of her neck from an inch or so under her chin to a point just below her left ear. Except for that scar, she was flawless, her face clear and glowing. She had dark mahogany skin that gleamed with reddish highlights, and a gorgeously shaped mouth, dark red and pursed like a rosebud. Her short brown hair glistened with sweet oil and showed the delicate shape of her skull. When she climbed out of the rented car, Amanda was startled and intimidated. Dede was simply enthralled.

Rosemary’s eyes were huge and black and glittered like her earrings, small gold scallop shells perfectly positioned on her lobes. Gold jewelry, generous proportions, full hips and breasts set off by that slender waist, makeup that made those eyes seem larger still and the lips dewy even with a cigarette dangling from them—if it were not for the fine crevices at the corners of her eyes and a sadness in the eyes themselves, Rosemary would have looked like a model in one of those glossy ads in Jet magazine. A fantasy creature, that was Rosemary, a chimera from a noir classic—Dorothy Dandridge in blue jeans and a pink crepe blouse.

“You were friends in California?” Dede demanded of Delia while Rosemary settled her luggage in Delia’s room. “Real friends, like you and M.T.?”

“Like M.T. Like family.” Delia nodded. “Rosemary kept me alive out in L.A. Every time I thought I would die, she was there for me. If you’re very lucky, someday you will have a friend like that, a woman you can trust with your life. I’ve been lucky past that. I have two. No woman is safe who doesn’t have one. Any woman who does, well, she an’t never on her lonesome.”

“What we need is God,” Amanda said sourly.

“Well, God is good.” Delia’s expression was solemn. “But Rosemary and M.T. never seemed so far away as God.”

Rosemary was perpetually wreathed in cigarette smoke, though in deference to the sick man in the back bedroom, she smoked out in the backyard. Cissy was surprised that she bothered. The first day, when Delia led Rosemary back to introduce her to Clint, Rosemary only nodded briefly in the direction of his strained features. She did not say anything, and neither did he. Delia did all the talking, nervously babbling her appreciation for Rosemary’s coming to help while her friend’s long, elegant fingers rubbed together like insect legs.

Back in the kitchen Rosemary turned to Delia and spoke bluntly. “I am not touching that man. I’ll do anything else you need. Cook and clean for these girls, lend you money or fight any damn body you name. But I am not touching that son of a bitch till he’s dead.”

Delia leaned on the table. Her face was pale and her mouth rubbery. Exhaustion showed in the set of her shoulders and the bluish shadows on either side of her nose. “You don’t have to stay,” she said. “I’m glad you came, but you don’t have to stay.”

Rosemary put her arms around her friend. “Shush, shush.” She hugged Delia close and rubbed her back. “I’m staying. You know I’m staying. You are about ready to fall out. Don’t you think I can see that? You think I am going to leave you alone with these cranky teenagers and that horrible man? Besides, I need myself some peace and quiet, a little listen-to-the-mosquitoes time. This will be a vacation.”

Delia relaxed a little and let her head rest on the silky blouse. “Oh, Rosemary,” she moaned.

“Yes, darling. Yes.” Rosemary stroked her fingers down Delia’s back. “It will be all right. But you and I have never lied to each other, and I wasn’t going to start now. I hate that man, and I couldn’t take care of him. I’d wind up putting diuretics in his milk.”

Delia giggled, then put her hand over her mouth. Rosemary grinned.

“You be the saint,” she whispered in Delia’s ear. “You do what I can’t, and I’ll do the rest. We’ll be fine, just fine.” She pulled Delia closer and grinned wider. “And when he dies, I’ll get drunk for both of us.”

“You knew her in Los Angeles?” M.T. asked Cissy. “What did she do out there?”

“I don’t know.” Cissy blotted sweat from her forehead with a napkin.

“How can you iron in this heat?” M.T. asked Dede, who shrugged and spritzed a blouse with the spray bottle. She squirted some of the water on the iron so that it sizzled and steamed.

“It needs to be done, and once I’m this hot it don’t seem to matter.” Dede turned the nozzle around and sprayed her shoulders and stomach. “Want some?” she asked, waving the bottle at M.T. with a grin.

“I’m wet enough, thank you.” M.T. turned back to Cissy. “Rosemary was with the band, wasn’t she?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

M.T. frowned. “Well, has she said how long she’s gonna stay?”

“Long as Delia needs her.” Cissy looked over at Dede. “Couple of weeks or a month, Delia said.”

“Well, I don’t know what kind of woman can just pick up and take off like that.” M.T. sighed elaborately and looked around the kitchen. A stack of crisp cotton sheets leaned against a neatly piled mound of faded jeans and T-shirts on the shelf beside the washing machine. The dish rack held four glasses and one bowl. There were no more pots sitting around half full of the soupy potatoes that were Clint’s mainstay, and the smell of blood and sick that was omnipresent from the first day Delia moved here had been replaced by a bleached austerity. The room looked clean for the first time in months.

“At least it looks like she’s being a help while she’s here,” M.T. said.

“Rosemary’s a house afire,” Dede said. “She puts on the radio and gets to work first thing in the morning. Don’t stop either. About the time I think she might be ready to sit down and rest, she starts making lists of things that still need to be done. Delia says she don’t know what she’s going to do when she leaves.”

M.T. looked down at the material pulled tight over her thighs. “Is that a fact?” She drank the last of the Coke and stood up. “You tell her hello for me, say how glad I am she came.”

Cissy and Dede watched M.T. walk out to her car. “It’s eating her up, Rosemary taking care of Delia,” Cissy said.

“Oh, she’ll be all right.” Dede went back to the ironing board. “M.T.’s as tough as they come.” She turned the spray bottle up and squeezed into the air so the water droplets rained down on her upturned face.

“She’s from Los Angeles,” Richie Biron said, drawing out the syllables.

The men around him laughed. “Still a Yankee bitch,” one of them said.

“Oh, come on, son,” Lyle Pruitt said to Richie. “She’s just helping out old Delia Byrd and Clint.”

“That Delia’s another one.”

“Delia Byrd was born right here in Bartow County,” the bartender threw in. “I knew her daddy before he died.”

“Maybe he was born here, but his child got the soul of a Yankee.”

“I don’t know. You ever listened to that band, old Mud Dog? Woman could sound just like Maybelle Carter.”

“Naaa, her voice is deeper. Reminds me of Rosanne Cash.”

“Chrissie Hynde,” Pat, the waitress, cut in.

“Who?”

“The Pretenders, you know that song. ‘Got brass in pocket?’ That deep-voice angry kind of song?” Pat whacked her order book against her hip and tried a Chrissie Hynde chord. The men snickered. “Well, that always reminds me of Delia on Mud Dog,” Pat insisted, “like she sings on ‘Lost Girls.’ ”

“You crazy.”

“I never liked that one.”

“Still say she’s just another nigger bitch.”

“Delia?”

“No, dammit, that colored girl she’s got staying with her.”

“Oh, Harold, hell. Leave it alone.”

Harold Parish’s racial views didn’t stop him from trying to flirt with Rosemary at the Piggly Wiggly one Sunday afternoon. “How you doing?” he asked her.

She gave his sweaty features and beady black eyes a carefully blank look. “I’m in the market for greens, pork shoulder, and red potatoes.” Rosemary studied Harold’s acne-scarred cheek. “Don’t need any trouble or any big-shouldered men,” she said, and stepped past him.

Harold went red. There was something in the look Rosemary gave him that made him feel not only big-shouldered but handsome and appreciated. He felt as if someone had finally seen past his gangly body and bad skin. After that Harold discouraged the vulgar talk.

“It an’t as if I’d date a black girl,” he told his friend Beans. “But if I was going to, that’s one I’d go for.”

In the second week of the visit, Stephanie bought herself a costume choker that was almost a match for Rosemary’s gold necklace. “Everybody in Los Angeles has one,” Steph told the women who came into the Bonnet and complimented her. M.T. was conspicuously silent. When Dede saw the choker, she blushed. She had been thinking about buying one for herself.

M.T. was polite whenever she saw Rosemary, but she stayed away from the house and even took a few days off to go visit her cousins in Tallahassee. “Ecological niche,” Rosemary joked. “I would probably like M.T. if we’d met first, and she might even like me. But I can tell she’s worrying I’m going to talk Delia into moving back to Los Angeles.”

“Are you?” Dede was hopeful.

“Lord, no.” Rosemary beamed at the girl. “M.T. would hunt me down and rip my heart out.”

It was not simply that Rosemary was magazine-model gorgeous, with those enormous eyes and that fine neck. She was also outrageous. She ignored custom and prejudice, going around in a gossamer skirt. Sometimes she covered her scar with that gold necklace, sometimes with a creamy scarf. Once, when she saw Amanda staring at her as she was washing dishes in the kitchen, Rosemary confided that she was thinking of outlining the scar with eye makeup and glitter.

“It adds character to have a flaw in a precious stone,” she said, and when Amanda hurried outside, Rosemary leaned over and yelled out the door after her. “Don’t you think I’m a character?”

The two of them sniped continually. Amanda complained that there was not enough room for Delia’s friend, and Rosemary talked out loud about how some people might do better to cut back on their praying and do a little more picking up around the house.

“I pick up after myself,” Amanda huffed.

“Rosemary is our guest and she’s helping us out,” Delia said. “Don’t be rude to her.”

“I am not rude!” Amanda shouted.

“Maybe she’s scared I’m going to steal you away,” Rosemary said to Delia after Amanda announced she was going to yet another prayer meeting and stalked off.

“No,” Delia told her. “I don’t think Amanda would mind me leaving. You just shake up her simple notions of how the world is supposed to be.”

“Well, then, I am a blessing in disguise, because from where I stand, your girls are entirely too certain how things are supposed to be.” Rosemary was forcing cooked potatoes through a sieve for Clint’s dinner. She wouldn’t feed him, but she had taken over all the cooking.

“No, Rosemary, that’s not the problem. They’re not certain of anything, anything at all.” Delia, who had slowly been getting more rest, sounded tired all over again. “Think how they’ve grown up. As far as Amanda and Dede know, there an’t nobody in this world they can trust to be there for them the way you are here for me now.”

Rosemary frowned and went back to shoving potatoes through the tiny holes in the sieve.

“That’s a fact,” Dede said as Amanda left the yard in disgust.

“Thank God, I’m not that touchy.” Rosemary smiled at Dede as Amanda left the room. “She’s always on her way somewhere, isn’t she?”

Dede grinned. She and Rosemary had bonded over teasing Amanda and then discovered a mutual passion for fashion and style. Rosemary had shown Dede how to highlight her eyes with a blue-black pencil and shape her brows to follow the line of her eyes. They had taken over the bathroom for hours and set up a mirror on the kitchen counter so Dede could check her makeup in daylight.

“See, you don’t wear that blush before sunset,” Rosemary told her. “It’s perfect for night. Make you look like a clown in sunlight.”

“Makes you look like a fool any hour of the day,” Amanda said. “Excuse me, could I please get to the sink?”

Amanda grew steadily more furious the more Dede followed Rosemary around. Good Christian girls in Amanda’s tiny universe went barefaced until they were married. Wearing makeup was just further evidence of Dede’s intention to sin.

“She’s fourteen, not forty,” Amanda protested to Delia.

Delia did not see the problem. “It’s perfectly all right to try things out at home,” she said. “I’d rather she learned how to do makeup from Rosemary than copy some of the girls I see coming in the Bonnet.”

“She shouldn’t be messing with that stuff at all.”

“Amanda, your sister has her own ways. She’s not like you, and she doesn’t have to be.” Delia did not want to fight, but she had discovered that it was better to be firm with Amanda than to try to avoid arguments.

“Ways! What ways? The devil’s ways!” Amanda pointed her finger at Delia. “See what you say when she’s running the streets. See what you say when she comes home pregnant and can’t even name the father.” She crossed her arms under her breasts. This was something she knew about. She had been going to the special family programs with the Grahams over at Tabernacle Baptist. She sat with Lucy Graham and her brother, Michael, the young man everyone said was going to replace Reverend Myles when he was ready to retire. They shared the study guides on the power of prayer and the very real dangers the devil put in the way of teenagers. Michael wanted Amanda to be his partner in the young people’s class on miracles in everyday life, and he had already told her how much he loved her bright scrubbed face and her disdain for worldly vanities, makeup and powder and flowery scents. Amanda knew she could never tell Delia and Dede about Michael, how he smiled into her eyes and how he made her feel. When he touched her, she knew in a way she had never known before the real danger that Dede was courting.

“Dede’s going to get in trouble, just you wait and see,” Amanda declared.

“I’m not deaf, you know,” Dede yelled from the bedroom. “And I’m not going to get pregnant. I’m not a damn fool.”

“She’s not running the streets.” Delia tried to keep her voice level.

“Wait and see, just you wait and see. I know what I know.”

“She keeps that up, she’ll kill him.”

Cissy jumped. Dede was standing in the hall behind her.

“’Course, that wouldn’t be such a bad thing, would it?” Dede nodded in Clint’s direction. The man was starting to rock slightly under the impact of Amanda’s implacable recitation.

“You hate him that much?”

“Oh yeah,” Dede said with a blinding smile. “Grandma Windsor always said it took blood to know blood. My blood knows his blood and hates every drop that moves through his veins.” Her smile flattened into a look of cold assessment. “You don’t hate him at all, do you?”

Cissy looked back at the narrow bed and the body huddled under the sheets. Clint’s head was turned to the door. His lips were pulled back from his teeth, and his eyes searched Cissy’s.

“No,” she said. “I don’t hate him.”

“More fool you,” Dede laughed, “more fool you.”

Rosemary laughed, a full, joyful tone that Cissy heard in the next room. She knew that laugh. For an instant she could see it all again, Rosemary in California in a tiger-striped bikini and big purple heart-shaped sunglasses. She went to the door of the bathroom, where Dede and Rosemary were still giggling.

“You were with Booger,” Cissy said, not thinking how she knew.

“That silly man?” Rosemary waved an arm and Dede cocked her head expectantly. “I was never with that man. I let him hang out with me for a while, be seen with me. That was all. Booger had talent but he didn’t have style. My men have style, always have had style.”

“Amen,” said Delia, coming down the hall with an armload of sheets.

What was she? Amanda wondered. Some kind of prostitute? In her mind, that was the only way Rosemary made sense. If not, where did it come from—the arrogance, the jewelry and clothes, the glossy look of that skin? Sin, it had to come from sin.

“Doesn’t she have a job she has to go back to?” Amanda asked Delia, echoing M.T.’s question.

“Rosemary owns things,” Delia said. “And she’s always been good with money.”

“Owns what?” Dede was fascinated.

“Shopping centers, mostly,” said Rosemary in a bland, honey-coated voice. “I’m partial to commerce, not just property. I like my money to make money. That was what my father told me, that money is meant to be put to work or given away.”

“You given a lot away?” asked Dede.

“Oh, honey, I’ve given away more than most people ever get.” Rosemary put her arms around Dede’s shoulders and laughed like a bird, high and bright. “Isn’t that right, Delia, haven’t I given away more than we could count?”

Delia nodded, and Amanda glared. Dede leaned back into Rosemary’s embrace. Delia shifted the sheets in her arms and gave her friend a long look. Cissy wanted to ask about all that money and all those years in California, and all the things she thought she remembered from when she was a little girl, but the look in Delia’s eyes stopped her. The gleam there implied a world of story behind the tale Rosemary was spinning. Treasured daughter, careful education, loving daddy, California shine—there was something else, another story, not so simple, from the look in Delia’s eyes.

Rosemary picked up her glass of soda and drank deeply. “Can I have a sip?” Dede asked.

“You don’t need none of that,” Rosemary said curtly.

“I’ve never understood that comment.” Delia held a towel over the wastebin and shook out crumbs. She gave the towel one last flick and then folded it half over half. “It’s just the strangest thing to say. You imagine fish absorb water like taking in air?”

“Maybe it’s the way she consumes as much as she would displace if she was dropped in a pool.”

Delia put the kettle under the faucet and ran cold water into it.

“Well, she drinks at night, don’t she?”

“You don’t know that,” Delia said.

Amanda appeared in the doorway. “She does. I been keeping track. She did a fifth the first two weeks, another bottle half gone since last Saturday. Talks big, but look at what she’s doing. That woman is drinking herself drunk every night after we go to bed.”

Delia slammed the kettle down on the burner and then turned to Amanda and Cissy. “Rosemary is my friend,” she said. “Maybe you haven’t figured it out, but this is no place a woman like her comes to visit for fun. She’s here to help me. If you’d look a little closer, you would see what kind of woman she is.” Delia paused for a moment, her eyes dark in her pale face.

“God,” she said, and it was not a curse. “God knows you could look a little closer, see yourselves now and then. While Rosemary is here, you will treat her with respect. You will not make rude comments on what you cannot understand.”

Cissy dropped her eyes. Even Amanda looked abashed as Delia turned her back on them. Cissy sat at the table for a while trying to figure it out, why Delia would get so angry so fast. Amanda had said worse, far worse, many times over. But this was clearly the straw on Delia’s back.

Cissy was still thinking about Delia’s outburst that evening as she sat in Clint’s room reading Tim O’Brien’s Going After Cacciato, another loan from Nolan. She looked out the window to the shadowed backyard. A thread of smoke hung in a line above the stoop.

Rosemary was sitting on the third step, big eyes catching the reflection of the lights from the house. Cissy went outside to join her, took a breath, and smelled the liquor on the night air.

“You still have that striped bikini and the purple sunglasses?” she asked.

Rosemary laughed. “You remember that? But hell, why wouldn’t you. Every woman in Los Angeles has a striped bikini, and for a while there we all had those sunglasses too.” Rosemary stubbed out her cigarette and shook another out of the pack lying next to her hip. She tapped it on the back of her wrist.

“Yours were heart-shaped,” Cissy said. It had been another hot day. The wooden step under Cissy’s thighs was just beginning to cool as the night came on.

“Uh-huh.” Rosemary put the cigarette in her mouth. With graceful motions she used her silver lighter to spark a flame.

Cissy watched her inhale, remembering when Delia gave Rosemary that lighter at a party in Venice Beach. It had an inscription on the bottom, Cissy knew, something about friendship and laughter. “Why’d you come?” Cissy asked.

“Well, Clint’s dying, isn’t he?” Rosemary blew smoke in a pale stream, then leaned over and reached for the bottle of bourbon that was between her legs. She took a sip. “That’s cause enough for a party. And your mama asked me to come. She doesn’t ask for help easily, you know.”

“You knew Clint?”

Rosemary looked into Cissy’s face, her eyes glittering. Then she turned and stared out at the yard. “I knew about him. I think I knew a little more than most. When he had that abandonment notice served on Delia, she just about killed herself. Your mama might have run off and left your sisters, but she tried for years to work something out with that man. He wouldn’t even let her send presents to them, but she did anyway. Wouldn’t let her have pictures or tell her anything about how they were doing. His idea was that she should crawl back here and beg his forgiveness, let him knock her around and use them girls against her all over again. A whole lot of reasons to hate a man I never met.”

“He’s not so bad.” Heat rose in Cissy’s cheeks.

“No? You sure of that?”

“He’s sorry, anyway.”

Rosemary’s face did not soften. “Maybe. The preachers say people can change. Me, I don’t know.”

“People change.” Cissy said it with more certainty than she felt. She remembered what M.T. had told her. “You the way to her heart. He can’t get there through Dede and Amanda because they hate him so much. But you. You the way. Get you and he’s got her. Don’t you think the man knows what he’s doing?”

“Maybe,” Rosemary said again in a voice as dark as her eyes, as silken as her hair. “Mostly, though, I think people die and start over. Get another chance next time.”

“Next life?” Cissy almost laughed. Another Buddhist come to Cayro. She started to speak, but Rosemary waved her cigarette in the air and the gesture stopped her. The brown cheek was wet.

“Go inside,” Rosemary said. “Nights here are too hot to be sober. And I can’t properly drink with you sitting there watching me.”

She remembered Delia’s angry words. You should look close and see. She looked close. Pain, and stubbornness. Who was Rosemary?

“This an’t bad,” Cissy said. “It’s almost cool now. You should have been here last August. It was so hot I thought I’d melt out of my underpants.”

Rosemary shrugged and took another little sip from the bottle.

Cissy propped her elbows on her knees and rested her chin on her hands. She listened to the crickets and the cars pulling into the gravel parking lot by the convenience store just past the Reitower house. Nadine Reitower had complained so fiercely about people using her driveway when they stopped at the little store that the owners had created the lot. No one ever turned in the driveway of Clint’s house except Deputy Tyler, who sometimes idled there to watch who was buying beer. Delia swore one of these days someone was going to kill themselves pulling drunk out of that store on their way back up to the highway. The deputy seemed to agree.

Rosemary seemed to be listening too, as she hugged that bottle against her hip. Her head moved slightly, as if she were counting time to some music only she could hear, and her gold necklace glinted.

“How’d you get that scar?” Cissy asked suddenly.

Rosemary paused with the bottle lifted slightly. “Why do you care?”

“Just curious.”

“You tell people how your eye got hurt?”

Cissy’s face burned. “Nobody asks.”

“Oh, people that polite around here?” Rosemary took another sip.

“I’m sorry,” Cissy said.

“Uh-huh.” Rosemary swirled the liquid in the bottle.

“Really, I’m sorry I asked.”

“Yeah.” Rosemary used the stub of her cigarette to light another and took a deep drag. “It was like your eye,” she said after a long silence. “Stupid damn accident. I ran into a wire fence in Rio when I was a girl. Just about cut my throat.” One finger traced the scar delicately.

“Most people see it, they think somebody did it to me.” The finger stroked the dark line under the necklace. In the light from the house it might have been a crease of skin or a shadow’s edge. “I always hated telling people I did it to myself. Used to make up lies about it, anything to avoid saying I got it doing something my mother had told me a hundred times not to do, running in the dark, just running in the dark.”

“Must have been scary.” Cissy watched Rosemary’s long fingers wrap around her throat.

“It was not a good time,” Rosemary said.

“It’s kind of dramatic.” Cissy wanted to comfort Rosemary in some way, give her back what she felt she had taken. “Dede thinks it’s kind of cool, sexy even.”

“Your sister has a lot of romantic notions.” Rosemary flicked ashes into the grass, her voice without inflection.

“She likes you,” Cissy said.

“I like her.”

“She says you coming here is the best thing that ever happened, that you are just what Cayro needs. I told her I couldn’t see why you came in the first place. You told Delia you would never come to Georgia.”

“You remember that too? Didn’t think you were paying attention.” The tip of Rosemary’s cigarette glowed brighter than a firefly. “But Delia warned me you never forgot anything. Trust a child, she told me, to remember what you want to forget.”

“Why don’t you have no children of your own?”

The cigarette drooped. Rosemary took it out of her mouth and exhaled smoke. “I just don’t,” she said. “And now I never will. Delia tell you about that?” She ground the cigarette out on the step and tossed the butt into the grass.

“No. She said you had your own reasons for coming.”

The sprinkler at the side of the house came on. Delia or Dede watered every other evening in the height of summer. A cool pocket of air drifted over them, and Rosemary waved her hand again, in the same arresting gesture as before.

“All this,” she said. “You with your hard little pinball eyes, that man in there eating her up every minute, Amanda with her pinched mouth and nasty looks, Dede like a big old sucker snake swallowing the air wherever she goes—all this, and still Delia is happy.” She shook her head slowly. “Happiest I’ve ever seen her.”

Cissy raised her chin. Pinball eyes. She did not have pinball eyes.

“Maybe there is something to all that stuff people say about making babies. Sure looks like it’s pretty much taken over whatever it was that Delia wanted before you came along. I don’t think she even remembers who she was before she made you girls.”

“You don’t know who we are,” Cissy sputtered.

“And you don’t know who your mama is.” Rosemary cupped the neck of the open bourbon bottle in her palm and rocked it on the step.

“And you do.”

Rosemary rocked the bottle again. “Maybe not. Hell of the thing is, I’m not sure I do know anymore. I look around at this, and it doesn’t make sense to me. There isn’t enough money in the world to make me do what Delia’s doing.”

“She’s just doing what she’s supposed to do.”

Rosemary laughed. “Yes, exactly. Being Mama, and Lord knows I do not have any of that. Oh, I had a baby, you know. That was part of what your mother and I had together. She’d left hers and I’d given mine away. She was always talking about getting hers back, and I was just grateful somebody else was raising mine. For being so much alike, we were nothing alike, your mama and me.”

Cissy was confused. “You lost a baby?”

“No, no.” Rosemary tilted the bottle and spilled some of the bourbon out. Cissy wrinkled her nose. “What I lost was a life. One I wasn’t intending to have anyway.” The tea-dark liquid trailed down the steps.

“Damn,” Rosemary said softly. “Goddamn. All that time I was saying I didn’t want any children, I was thinking I could have them someday. When I was ready, when things got right for me. Now here I am, no children, no husband, no settled family. None of it. Just a curse in the belly and a song in the air. My grandma’s never-to-be grandchild.”

A door slammed behind them in the house. Amanda’s voice and Dede’s rose together. “You’re driving me crazy,” Dede shouted. “You’re crazy already,” Amanda yelled back. Then Delia’s contralto spoke something low and soothing and unintelligible.

“Family,” Rosemary whispered. “Sounds like a family sure enough.” She upended the bourbon bottle and emptied it, shaking the last drops onto the grass. Then she extended the bottle to Cissy. “You want to give this to your sister? Let her add it to her list?”

“No.”

Rosemary put the bottle down on the step, and they sat listening to the wet swish of the sprinkler as it got cooler and darker. When Cissy finally spoke, she surprised them both.

“Delia says you are her best friend.”

Rosemary grunted.

“She says you are the only person in California she ever trusted.”

“Only person she should have trusted. I was about the only one wasn’t trying to get something out of her or off of her.”

“You were in the band.”

“God, no.” Rosemary lit another cigarette. “I can’t sing. Not all of us can, you know. I can dance, but why would I do that? No. But I gave her that yellow convertible.”

“With red seats.”

“Red leather seats.”

“I remember.” Cissy closed her eyes and saw the car, seats gleaming in the sunlight, the back full of boxes and bags with Christmas wrapping.

Rosemary looked at her. “You don’t,” she said. “You were a baby. But it was something to remember. Best damn car I ever owned.”

“I do remember,” Cissy said stubbornly.

Rosemary ignored her. “It was Randall’s car first. He gave it to me, I gave it to Delia. Bothered the hell out of Randall.”

Cissy was getting lost. “Randall gave it to you?”

“Sort of. Traded it for something I had that he needed. And don’t ask, ’cause I am not going to tell you.”

“Drugs.”

Rosemary laughed. “You’d think that, but you’d be wrong. There was more than that going on. Ask Delia.”

Cissy shrugged. “She won’t tell me nothing.”

Rosemary took a drag on the cigarette and stroked her forehead thoughtfully with her free hand. “Mud Dog’s second album, the one called Diamonds and Dirt. You know that one?”

“The one where Delia sings ‘Lost Girls’? The one that made all the money?”

“Made some money. Made some of us almost rich.”

Rosemary ran her hand over her head. Her short hair had kinked up in the damp. As Cissy was thinking it was the first time she had seen Rosemary look less than perfectly put together, that hand reached out and touched Cissy’s cheek.

“ ‘Lost Girls,’ ” Rosemary said. “ ‘Minor Chords of Grief.’ ‘Walking the Razor.’ ‘Tall Boys and Mean Dogs.’ All of those songs are mine. I wrote them, the parts that Delia didn’t write herself. It was another thing she didn’t care about. It was Randall busy being the legend. We’d get a little stoned and she’d start it. It would come out of her like a river, and I would write it down. After, she wouldn’t remember a bit of it, though sometimes she’d cry when she heard one part or another. It all came from what Delia said. She’d get to me so badly I’d go write my own version of it. I wanted her name on those songs, but Randall and the record company guys were all over me. Hell, it all had to be Randall. Another Jim Morrison snake-eyed boy poet with a direct line to a woman’s heart. Shit.”

Rosemary lifted both hands, then dropped them, like a conductor setting a tempo, music in the way her hands moved in the air.

“Delia didn’t care. Randall did. I did a little. Half the songs say ‘Randall Pritchard and R.D.’ Nobody said R.D. was me, but I had a good lawyer. I got my cash. Delia got nothing. When she brought you back here, I was glad to help her with that damn shop. It was only a piece of her share anyway. It was us, you know. We were the ‘poets with a feel for female grief.’ ” She sighed.

“But Randall was why the record made money. He was so damn pretty, and so good at working the game. The rest of us didn’t even know enough to care. That’s why Delia is here and not in Los Angeles. She never cared the way Randall did.”

“She don’t care a thing about Los Angeles.”

“Oh yeah, right.” Rosemary raised one classically shaped brow. “Like I said, you don’t have any idea who your mama is.”

Cissy flinched. “You never understood my daddy. He was special. He did understand the heart. He understood a lot of things.”

“Oh, hell.” Rosemary put her arms around her knees and pulled her legs up to her breasts. “It’s probably just as well I can’t make babies anymore. I’m not any good even talking to you.”

“Delia’s happy, you said so.” Cissy pushed up off the steps. Her legs were all pins and needles from sitting still so long. She stood in front of Rosemary and scowled.

“Happier than she was in Los Angeles, yeah.” Rosemary nodded. “She’s doing what she always wanted to do. Doesn’t make any difference to her that she could have walked away from Randall anytime, made her own music, and been more famous than he ever got to be. That wasn’t what your mama cared about.”

“She wanted to come home,” Cissy said. “She wanted to be here more than she wanted any of that.”

“Yeah. That’s right, sugar biscuit. She wanted to drag her butt back to Georgia and pick up after you and your sisters till the day she dies.”

Cissy’s breath hissed between her teeth. “It’s you don’t know who Delia is,” she said. “You don’t understand her at all.”

“Maybe not.” Rosemary hugged her knees. “Maybe there’s a whole lot I just am not designed to understand. Look at me here talking to you like you some grown-up, and you are nothing of the kind. Can’t understand a thing I am saying.”

“I understand plenty.” Cissy felt like crying but was too angry to let herself show it.

“I swear, you are just like your daddy. You think Delia doesn’t know what she threw away? You think she didn’t throw anything away? You think all she amounts to is what you need her to be?” Rosemary’s voice was hoarse.

“Diamonds and dirt, legends and rude boys, poets that are no poets at all, babies that never get born or get lost through no fault of our own. Life sweeps you away like a piss river. Saddest thing I know is that there isn’t anybody who knows who Delia is, not even her girls. Saddest thing I know is that she is in there with that evil man, burying herself alive to save you and your sisters, and not a one of you knows what she is doing. Nobody knows who my Delia really is.”

Rosemary stood. “Nobody,” she repeated, and went up the stairs and into the house.

Cissy sat unmoving on the step. She heard Dede’s cheerful “Hey, Rosemary!” and then a door opened and closed. “Where’s she going?” Dede asked plaintively. Delia’s voice said, “Leave her alone.”

Cissy tilted her head back and looked up at the night sky, the stars that were slowly brightening as the dark became deeper. The stars in California had not been so clear and big. The night had not been so still. The sky was always glowing and the night full of noise and movement. Cissy used to sit out behind the cottage in Venice Beach and stare up at that bright sky and listen to Delia’s low crooning inside the house. Drunk or sober, Delia moaned out melody, the words slurred and painful, that voice of hers as rich and strong as melted chocolate. People came to the house and offered her work, wanting her to sing with other bands or make her own records. Cissy remembered their eager expressions, the way they spoke Delia’s name, and Delia’s flat refusal. She could have done something different. She could have made a different life altogether.

Maybe Rosemary was right. Maybe Delia was a bigger mystery than Cissy had ever imagined.

Cissy started counting stars. She began at the eastern horizon above the pecan tree. She counted bright and dim, ignoring the constellations and working in quadrants, sixteen, seventeen, eighteen, stars in California, stars in Georgia, all the stars between, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one.

When I grow up, Cissy promised herself, I’ll never have children. And if I do, I’ll give them away.