Barefoot

Chapter One

The girl at the front desk wore a brass tag that said KEANDRA over GULFPORT, MS, and she had already told me twice that she could not look up a guest.

I laid my phone on the marble between us with a photograph of the statement on the screen. It was the company Visa, the one Royce kept for diesel and tires, and I had done the books on that card for twenty-two years without finding a single charge that did not belong to a truck. He changed the password on the account the week he left. For six weeks I had not been able to see inside our own business, for the first time since the day we bought the first truck. The bank still mailed paper to the house, though, and the statement had come on Wednesday in its windowed envelope. Royce knew that envelope came. He had carried it in from the mailbox himself for twenty-two years and laid it by my plate. The first line on it read DEER ISLAND HTL BILOXI MS, one hundred thirty-nine dollars, dated the fifth of December, two days after he drove out of our yard.

"Ma'am, I can't tell you if somebody stayed here," she said.

"I'm not asking if. I'm showing you he did."

"Then you know more than I can tell you."

She said it kindly, and I had come ready for rude. I had locked the front door at Dr. Pruitt's at five, thrown two days of clothes in a suitcase, and argued with this girl in my head for most of the drive. In every round of it, down three hours of pine trees and log trucks on Highway 49, she gave in before Hattiesburg. She was about twenty-three, with long green nails that clicked on her keyboard, and she waited me out with a patience I knew well. I use it myself on patients who want to be told what their insurance will pay before the claim has gone in.

"He's my husband," I said. "Royce Womack. We've been married twenty-eight years."

"Yes, ma'am."

"I'm not some woman who walked in off the beach."

"No, ma'am. I can tell that."

She could not tell a thing about me, and she was the first person in six weeks who couldn't. I had sat in my pew at First Baptist with a clear foot of oak on either side of me. I had checked in patients at my own front desk who would not look up from the clipboard, and Mrs. Fontenot had called to move her cleaning to my lunch hour.

Behind her the casino opened up past a row of brass rails, and most of it was dark. They had roped off the back half of the floor for the winter and left the machines running anyway, so that a hundred screens went on flashing cherries and sevens at empty stools. The air smelled of cigarettes and carpet shampoo. Far back in the rows a machine paid out in a long rattle of recorded coins, and nobody hollered.

"Then I need a room," I said.

That she could do. Her nails went to work, and she offered me a king or two queens at the winter rate of eighty-nine dollars, which was fifty less than Royce had paid in the first week of December. She turned the screen to show me the total. Under the room and the tax there was a third line.

"What's the twenty-two dollars?" I asked.

"That's the resort fee. It covers the pool and the fitness center."

"Is the pool open?"

"It's heated."

"Is it open?"

"No, ma'am. Not till March."

"Then tell me what my twenty-two dollars is resorting to."

She laughed, looked over her shoulder at an office door that stayed shut, and took the fee off. I signed where she pointed, and winning held me up for about as long as it took to write my name. I have run Dr. Pruitt's front office for twenty years. I can get a late fee waived or a lab bill corrected without raising my voice, and it has never been any use to me after ten o'clock at night.

"Sixth floor," she said. "Elevators are past the gift shop. Ms. Womack, I hope you find him."

I thanked her, took my key card, and went the other direction, out through the side doors to the parking deck.

The charge was six weeks old, and no man leaves his truck in a casino garage for six weeks. I walked all four levels regardless, with my suitcase bumping behind me over the expansion joints and the wind coming in off the water through the open sides. I was hunting a white Ford three-quarter-ton with WOMACK TIMBER HAULING on both doors in green letters, a Louisiana plate, and a crease in the tailgate where Macy backed it into the well house the summer she turned sixteen. Royce never had the crease fixed. He told her at the time that it would remind her to look behind her, and it rode on his tailgate for nine years. He washed that truck every Saturday and would not let a driver climb in it with mud on his boots.

I counted nine white pickups. Two had Mississippi plates and ladder racks, one had a Bulldogs sticker, and the rest were clean enough to belong to men who had never hauled a thing. If I had found his, I would have put my palm on the hood. At home that was how I knew how long he had been in the house ahead of me.

If anyone in Union Parish knew where that Ford was, it was Dewayne Tubbs, who had driven for Royce nineteen years and had been dispatching all three log trucks out of our shop since December. I had called him four times, and all four times he said yes ma'am, no ma'am, and that he couldn't say.

On the top level there was no roof and no cars. Across the beach highway the water lay black all the way out, with a darker strip low on it that I took for the island the hotel was named after. A long pier ran out from the sand with one light burning at the end of it. Royce was somewhere along that black water, or he was a long way past it. For twenty-eight years I had known where that man slept every night of his life, including the nights I came to bed late from somewhere I should not have been. Forty-two nights of not knowing had hollowed me out worse than the shame had. Nearer in, on the far side of the highway, a sign in pink tubing spelled SAND DOLLAR over a building with no windows. I stood up there in my work clothes until my grip went numb on the suitcase handle and my eyes watered from the cold. Then I went in.

Room 614 faced the parking deck I had just walked. It had two queen beds with gold runners across the feet, a desk, and a framed print of a heron over the television. I put my suitcase on the bed nearer the window. Royce took the side by the door in every room we ever slept in, at home, at his mother's, at the Hampton Inn in Ruston the night before Shelby's graduation. I had left him the door side of an empty bed in Mississippi before I caught myself doing it.

I had a speech for him. I had been working on it since the first week of December, in the shower, at red lights, and down the whole length of Mississippi that night, until I had it cut from four minutes to under one. I stood at the foot of his bed in my stocking feet and said it to the heron.

"Royce, I need you to hear me out before you say a word. I need you to know it didn't mean anything. Lamar never meant one thing to me, and you can ask him. I need you to remember that you quit talking to me years before I ever did anything wrong. I'm asking you to set twenty-eight years next to six and look at them both. Come home and let me fix it."

It was a good speech, and every word of it was true. I have always been careful about that. Lamar Aycock wrote the insurance on our house and on all three log trucks. He split a deer lease with my husband for fifteen years, and for the last six of them he met me on Tuesdays at his camp on Lake D'Arbonne, where I took my rings off and set them in a coffee cup on the windowsill. I liked those Tuesdays, and I will not lie to a heron about it. The day his wife found out, he went home to her, and he had not called me since.

My phone buzzed against the desk at eight minutes to one.

anything?

It was Macy, my younger girl, who is twenty-five and keeps the books for a tire distributor in West Monroe. She had no business being awake. I typed that he had been here, in this same hotel, and deleted it, because it would have had her in her car by daylight. I typed that there was no word yet and I would ask around town tomorrow, then deleted that for claiming a plan I did not have. I typed that I was fine, looked at those three words long enough for the screen to dim, and took them out too.

Not yet baby. Go to sleep.

I read it over after it had gone, five hours from home and still telling my daughter when to go to bed. She sent back a heart. Her sister had sent me nothing since Sunday, and I knew better than to count that against her. Their father had not answered a call or a text from either of them since the third of December. I had earned that silence and they had not, which was the reason I was in Mississippi.

I lay down on top of the bedspread in my slacks and listened to the heater tick under the window. I missed him. I had not let myself say it that plainly at home, where it would have sounded like asking for sympathy. I missed the dip he put in a mattress on the door side and the two boots he set together under the edge of the bed. Down the hall an ice machine dropped its load every few minutes with a noise of gravel going into a truck bed. After the fourth time I got up and put my shoes back on.

The Tideline Cafe sat off the lobby behind a half wall of fake ferns, where a sign on an easel promised breakfast twenty-four hours. It was two in the morning. A man in a Saints jacket slept upright in the first booth with a keno card under his hand. In the corner booth at the back, facing the door, a blonde woman had a cup of coffee in front of her, with no phone, purse, or plate on the table. Her hair was cut short, and she wore a dark sweater with the sleeves pushed up. I took her for a gambler waiting out a bad night.

The waitress was near my mother's age, with reading glasses on a beaded chain and DENISE, D'IBERVILLE, MS on her tag. She called me hon and brought coffee without my asking. I ordered two eggs over medium with wheat toast.

She set the plate down in front of me, and it was the wrong breakfast. I do not eat my eggs over medium. For twenty-eight years I scrambled my own in the same skillet, after I had fried two over medium for Royce and slid them onto his plate with the yolks whole. I had ordered his. I held my fork over the plate and let my eyes run, because the napkins came out of a tin dispenser one thin square at a time and I would have needed the whole box.

The lobby doors opened on the beach side and let in a push of cold air.

The woman who came through them was tall, and she was barefoot. She had a pair of black high heels hooked over two fingers, and she crossed that casino carpet in January with no hurry in her. Her legs were long in a pair of faded jeans. She wore a man's gray sweatshirt with the neck cut out of it, and where it hung off one shoulder there was glitter on her collarbone, green and gold under the lobby lights. Her hair was black and thick, down past her shoulders, with one streak of undyed silver running back from her left temple. I am good at ages, because I check birthdates against faces forty times a day, and I would have written her down as thirty-nine or forty. I am fifty-two. I had not looked thirty-nine at thirty-nine.

The security guard at the brass rail touched his cap.

"Evening, Poppy," he said.

"It's morning, Mr. Odom. It's been morning for two hours, and you know it."

"Feels like evening."

"That's the job talking. Go home and tell Loretta I said she's a saint."

I had seen the pink sign from the roof, and I can add glitter to high heels at two in the morning. I had never been in a room with a stripper in my life.

She came around the fake ferns into the cafe, where Denise was already reaching for a mug.

"Your usual?" Denise asked.

"I love you, Denise. Add bacon."

"Love you too, baby."

She said it with no more weight than she had given good morning, and Denise answered her just as easily. I had never heard two grown women say that to each other over a breakfast order. In Farmerville we save it for deathbeds and the ends of phone calls.

She was headed for the counter. She passed my table, went two steps beyond it, stopped, and came back.

"You're crying on those eggs," she said, "and they're already salted."

I wiped under my eyes with the side of my finger. "I'm sorry. Do I know you?"

"No. I'm Poppy. Scoot your purse."

I moved my purse, because she had said it in the voice of a woman whose seat I had been holding. She dropped her shoes on the bench, slid in across from me, and folded those long legs under the table. One bare foot came up onto the bench beside her, gray on the sole from the pavement. Up close she smelled of hairspray, cocoa butter, and the cold she had walked in from. Her eyes were gray, a light clear gray with a darker ring around it. There were a few lines at the corners that the lobby had not shown me.

"Denise," she said, without turning her head, "she doesn't want these."

"I ordered them," I said.

"I know you ordered them. I didn't say you didn't order them. Nobody who wants an egg lets it get that cold." She pushed the plate to the edge of the table with one finger. "Bring her a short stack, and put the butter on the side so she's got a job to do."

"I can order my own breakfast."

"You can. You did. How'd it go?"

I opened my mouth to tell her how it went and had nothing that favored me. Denise came and took the eggs away without asking whether that was what I wanted.

"Who did it?" Poppy asked.

"Who did what?"

"Somebody did. A woman your age in a good blouse doesn't cry in a casino coffee shop over the keno."

I could have told her right then. She had asked a plain question, and I had my answer ready.

"My husband left me," I said.

"How long were y'all married?"

"Twenty-eight years."

"Well, shit," she said.

It was true, as far as it went. It did not go as far as Lamar Aycock, the six years, or my daughters, and I left it there.

"When?" she asked.

"Six weeks ago Thursday."

"What'd he say when he left?"

"Nothing. He got his keys off the hook and went."

"Twenty-eight years, and he didn't say one word to you."

"No."

Royce had not said one word to me. Shelby had done the talking that afternoon, and I was not about to tell a stranger what my daughter said. Poppy looked at me across her coffee longer than the answer called for. I have been on the giving end of that look, with a patient telling me the check is in the mail, and I held still under it until she picked up her fork.

"And you're in Biloxi why?" she asked.

"He was. He stayed in this hotel one night. It's the only place I know he's been."

"Where'd you come from?"

"Farmerville. It's in Louisiana, up north of Monroe."

"I know where Farmerville is. There's a lake and a watermelon festival." She tipped her head. "You drove that tonight?"

"After work."

"When's the last time you ate food that didn't come out of a gas station?"

I had to think back. "Monroe."

"That's not a meal. That's a town."

I laughed. It came out of me wet and ugly, loud enough that the man in the Saints jacket stirred over his keno card. In the corner booth the blonde woman's cup stayed where it was.

"Don't mind Mr. Ladner," Poppy said. "He prays sitting up."

I had not laughed in six weeks, and I had not expected to do it across from a barefoot stranger with glitter on her neck. She watched me with open satisfaction.

"That's better," she said.

The pancakes came, three of them, with the butter in a paper cup and a steel pitcher of syrup. Her own plate held a waffle, two sausage patties, and four strips of bacon, which is a breakfast for a man who works outdoors. She ate with her elbows on the table while I buttered each pancake to its edges and cut the stack in a grid, because she had been right about the job.

"What do you do over here?" I asked, to see what she would call it.

"I dance at the Sand Dollar. You saw the sign, you counted the glitter, and you've been polite about it for ten minutes." She pointed a strip of bacon at me. "What do you do in Farmerville?"

I had expected hostess, or bartender, and a chance to pretend I believed it. She said it in the same voice she had ordered bacon in.

"I run a dentist's office," I said.

"Of course you do. You fought Keandra on the resort fee, didn't you?"

"How do you know that?"

"I didn't. I do now." She grinned and ate the bacon. "Did you win?"

"She took it off."

"Good. That pool hasn't had water in it since Halloween."

I ate, and the first bite went down harder than the ones after it. By the second pancake I was hungry for the first time in days, and she let me eat without talking at me. When I set my fork down to drink my coffee, she lifted two strips of bacon off her own plate and laid them on mine.

"Eat those too," she said. "You can cry and chew at the same time. I've seen it done. You're not going to feel better tonight, so don't waste the effort. Sleep bad, get up, and go ask this town where your husband is. Somebody always knows."

I thanked her, and my voice came out small. Somebody always knows. In my house two of them had, and neither one was Royce. She was being kind to a woman whose husband had walked out on her for no reason. I was in that woman's seat, eating her bacon.

"Let me pay for yours," I said.

"No."

"I'd feel better."

"I bet you would. Denise, she's trying to buy me off."

"Don't let her," Denise said from the counter.

"What's your name?" Poppy asked me.

"Jeri. Jeri Womack."

"Poppy Tullos. I'm in here most nights about this time. Ask anybody, I'm a fixture. They dust me." She picked up her coffee, and over the rim of the mug her eyes went past my shoulder to the back of the room. She lowered her voice. "Don't turn around yet. The corner booth. She's been on that one cup since I walked in, and I don't believe she's had a swallow of it."

"Maybe she's waiting on somebody."

"Maybe so."

I turned around.

The blonde woman was looking at me. Poppy sat across from me with all that height and glitter, and the woman's eyes had passed her over for a dental office manager from Union Parish. They were so dark that from across the cafe I could not find where the pupils began. She did not look away when I caught her.

I did. I picked up my fork and ate every pancake on that plate.

Chapter Two

I finished my pancakes with that woman's eyes on the back of my neck, and Poppy went on working at her own plate. She ate with her whole attention, and she had started making plans for me between bites.

"What's he driving?" she asked.

"A white Ford three-quarter-ton. It says Womack Timber Hauling on both doors."

"Then he's not hiding from anybody," she said. "Here's what you do. You sleep till nine, and you quit hunting that truck yourself. Somebody on this coast has fueled it, and somebody has parked next to it at the Waffle House. I know about half of those somebodies."

"You'd ask around for me?"

"I'd ask around for a truck. A truck I can find." She cut another square of waffle. "I just need the lay of it first."

I had been in Mississippi three hours, and I had found the one person in Biloxi who could do in a morning what I could not do in a month. Her questions came between bites of waffle and sausage, and she asked them without looking up.

"Who was in the house when he left?" she asked.

"The girls."

"Both of them? On a Thursday?" Now she looked up. "Where do they live?"

"Shelby's in Ruston. Macy's in West Monroe."

"That's a drive for a weekday. How old are they?"

"Twenty-seven and twenty-five."

They were a bookkeeper's questions, the ones I ask across my own counter, one small fact at a time, when a patient's story about a missed payment has a hole in it and I mean to find the hole before he knows I am looking. I answered each one truthfully, because I had to, and I knew where they were going before she did.

"They've got jobs?"

"Shelby's at a bank. Macy keeps books."

"So two grown women took off work in the middle of a Thursday and drove to their mama's kitchen." She set a strip of bacon down on the rim of her plate. "Who called them?"

I am careful about the truth. I had been careful for six years, and all of my skill lay in seeing to it that nobody asked me the one question I could not answer honestly. In Farmerville nobody had needed to ask me anything since December, because Gayla Aycock had answered it for the whole town. This woman had known me for forty minutes, and she had walked straight to it with syrup on her fork.

"I did," I said.

It had started that morning at my own front desk.

* * *

It was Thursday, the third of December, at twenty minutes to ten. I was posting Wednesday's payments, and Mrs. Fontenot sat in the waiting room with a Southern Living, half an hour early for a crown, because she is half an hour early for everything. The bell on the door rang, and Gayla Aycock came in wearing her church coat on a weekday.

I have known Gayla since Vacation Bible School at First Baptist, when we were six years old and she ate paste to make me laugh. She has kept the books at her husband's insurance agency for thirty years, which is the same work I did for mine. She is a small, neat woman who has her hair set every Friday, and that morning it had not been combed. She came up to my counter and set her purse on it.

"Jerilyn," she said. "I'm not here for a cleaning."

Nobody had called me Jerilyn since my mother died.

"I drove out to the camp Tuesday to hang the Christmas lights," she said. "I do it the first week of December every year, and you would know that if you had ever thought about me. I saw your car. I sat at the end of that drive for an hour with the lights in my lap."

She was right about that, because in six years of Tuesdays I had thought about Gayla Aycock only as a schedule to be worked around, her hair appointment on Fridays and her mother at the nursing home on Sundays. I had never asked myself what she was to me. She was the girl who ate paste.

She kept her voice at the level she would use to ask for an appointment, and it reached every room in that office. Behind the glass the hygienist's scaler quit whining. In the waiting room Mrs. Fontenot stopped turning pages.

"Gayla, let's step outside," I said.

"No. I've been outside of this for six years, it turns out, and I'm through with it." Her chin shook, and she lifted it. "I typed the policy on your house. I sent you a card when your mama passed. He says you came after him. He says he tried to quit it, and you wouldn't leave him alone."

"Gayla, whatever he told you..."

"He told me plenty. He cried, if you want to know. I have been married to that man thirty-one years, and I had never seen it."

What he told her was a lie, and it was the first I knew that Lamar would tell one on me. I had driven out to that camp two days before, the same as I had on every Tuesday for six years, and he had kissed me goodbye at the door and held the back of my head while he did it. On Wednesday night he had sat in his own den and handed me to his wife to save himself. I was hearing about it across the counter where I take co-payments, with Wednesday's deposit slip half filled out under my pen.

"I'm going out to Royce's shop now," Gayla said. "I thought you ought to get the same notice I got, which was none."

She picked up her purse and told Mrs. Fontenot good morning on her way to the door.

* * *

I told Dr. Pruitt I was sick, which by then was true, and I sat in my car in the lot with the engine off. I called Lamar first, and it rang five times before a voice told me his mailbox was full. I could have driven to the shop and tried to get there ahead of her. I could have gone home and waited for my husband by myself, which is what a decent woman would have done.

I thought about Royce instead, and I went at him as a problem to be managed. In twenty-eight years I had never heard him raise his voice in front of his daughters. He would not curse with them in the room, and he would not walk out of a house that had his girls in it. I believed that. I worked it through in a dentist's parking lot in under a minute, and then I called Shelby at the bank.

"Gayla Aycock just left my office," I said.

Shelby did not ask me what Gayla had wanted. She had known for four years what Gayla would want if she ever found out.

"Does Daddy know?" she asked.

"She's on her way out there to tell him. I need you and Macy at the house."

"Why?"

"Because he's going to need his girls."

"He's going to need us, or you are?"

"Shelby."

The line stayed quiet long enough that I checked the screen to see whether I had lost her.

"I'll go by and get her," she said. "We'll be there by noon."

It was the first time in four years she had asked me why, and I had answered her with her own name, in the voice I used when she was nine. It still worked. I am not proud of how well I knew it would.

* * *

They were both at my table by noon, and we waited there three hours. I got up at every engine on the parish road. Macy had cried in the car, and Shelby had not. Shelby still had her name tag from the bank pinned to her blouse. I made a pot of coffee that nobody drank and wiped down a counter that was already clean.

"Has he called you?" Shelby asked.

"No."

"Has Mr. Lamar?"

"He isn't answering."

She laughed at that, one hard breath, and looked out the window over the sink.

"What are we supposed to say when he gets here?" Macy asked.

"You don't have to say anything. I only want you here."

"That's the same thing, Mama," Shelby said. She turned around from the window. "If he asks me, I'm not lying to him. I have lied to that man every Sunday for four years, and I am not doing it today."

"He won't ask you," I said. "He doesn't know there's anything to ask."

It was true, and it was the ugliest thing I had said all day. Macy put her head down on her arms. I pulled out the chair nearest the carport door for Shelby, where he would see her before he saw me, and I knew what I was doing when I did it.

Royce's truck came up the drive at ten past three. Shelby's car was parked in it, so he knew before he opened the door that I was not alone. He came in through the carport, wiped his boots on the mat, and hung his keys on the hook by the door, a foot from where Shelby sat. He was fifty-five that fall, a big man gone gray at the temples, with his work gloves folded in his back pocket and pine bark dust in the creases of his neck. He set his thermos on the counter with more care than a thermos needs, and he stayed standing beside it.

"Girls," he said.

He had not looked at me. I got as far as his name, and he went on over the top of it.

"I guess she's told you," he said to them. "Gayla Aycock drove out to the landing this morning and stood in the mud in her church shoes to tell me. Six years, she says. I had three trucks loaded and nobody else to send them, so I finished out my day, and I have had since ten o'clock to think about it."

Macy started to cry again. He watched her do it with his jaw set.

"I'm sorry you two had to hear it," he said. "Y'all go on home. This is between me and your mama, and I don't want you in the middle of it."

That was the man I had counted on. He was thinking of his daughters first, as I had known he would, and it was about to send away the two people I had put between us.

"Daddy, don't," Shelby said.

"Go on, Shel. Take your sister."

"Don't be good to us." She stood up out of the chair I had picked for her. "We didn't hear it today. We knew. We didn't know how to tell you."

The refrigerator ran. Royce looked at his oldest girl, and then his eyes went to the refrigerator door behind her, where both of their senior pictures were still held up by magnets from the feed store.

"How long?" he asked.

"Four years, Daddy."

"You'd have been twenty-three." He worked it out aloud, and it cost him to do it. "How?"

"I saw her car at Mr. Lamar's camp. I was out at the lake with some friends from Tech."

He turned his head to Macy, who had both fists pressed against her mouth.

"You too," he said.

"She told me that Christmas." It came out of Macy in pieces. "Daddy, I wanted to tell you. I swear I did."

"But you sat at my table."

"Yes, sir."

"Both of you. Four years of Sundays." He closed his fingers around the edge of the counter. "Why didn't you come to me, Shelby?"

Shelby looked at me then. It was the only time that afternoon that anyone in the room did.

"I thought it would kill you," she said. "I thought if I kept it, it might stop, and you would never have to know."

"I could have stood her doing it. I have been working out since ten o'clock this morning how I was going to stand it." His voice had gone low and rough, and he stopped until he had it back. "I don't know what to do with you two."

I had two sentences ready and could not find either one of them. I would have given a year of my life to have him curse me. I had planned for his voice and had no plan for his back. He took his keys down off the hook again, reaching past his daughter's head to do it.

"Where are you going?" Shelby asked.

"I don't know yet."

He went out by the door he had come in. The screen slapped shut on its spring, and the crease in his tailgate backed down the drive past the kitchen window.

"Mama, go after him," Macy said.

"Don't," Shelby said, and she said it to me.

She poured the whole pot of coffee down the sink. Then she took her sister by the elbow and walked her out to the car, and neither one told me goodbye. I sat at that table until the window went dark. I called Lamar twice more and got the same full mailbox. I called Royce, and it rang until it quit. At ten I went down the hall and got into our bed on my own side, with the door side made up tight beside me, because it was the only place I had ever slept in that house. His thermos stayed on the counter where he set it, and for six weeks I dusted around it.

* * *

I gave Poppy three sentences of that, and every one of them was accurate.

"I was seeing a man for six years," I said. "His wife found out and went to tell my husband. I called my daughters to the house so they would be there when he came in."

It was the first time I had said it aloud to another person. I had practiced a speech for Royce until I had it under a minute. I had never practiced this, and it came out of my mouth sounding smaller and worse than it ever had inside my head.

Poppy had quit chewing.

"You had your girls sitting there when their daddy walked in knowing about your boyfriend," she said. "Nobody does that to children who'd be surprised. They already knew."

Boyfriend. In six years I had never given Lamar a word. He was Tuesday. A stranger had called him my boyfriend over a plate of sausage, and it made him exactly what he was, a married man I met at a lake camp.

"Four years," I said.

"Both of them?"

"Shelby found out and told her sister."

"And you called them over to stand in front of you."

"I called them home."

"That's what I said."

I picked up my coffee cup, found it empty, and set it down again. "You have to understand how it was in that house. He quit talking to me years before I ever..."

"I didn't ask about him."

She laid her fork across her plate. Half a waffle and one sausage patty were still on it, and since she sat down she had not stopped eating with food in front of her. Her bare foot came down off the bench.

"I've fed worse than you," she said. "I mean that. I've bought breakfast for people who did things I wouldn't repeat in front of Denise, and I slept fine after."

"Then I don't see what..."

"It's not the man. People get lonely, and they do what lonely people do. I could have sat here till daylight over the man." Her gray eyes stayed on me, and there was no heat in them at all. "You put your babies in that kitchen."

"They're grown women."

"They're yours. They were yours at twenty-three, and they were yours that Thursday." She pulled the cut neck of her sweatshirt back up onto her shoulder. "I was ten years old once, Jeri. I can't do this one. I'd be lying to you the whole time I sat here, and you've had enough of that at your table."

"You don't know me," I said.

"I know exactly as much as you told me, and you told it straight. I'll give you that. Most people dress it."

"Then give me the rest. You sat down here. I never asked you to."

"I did sit down. That's on me." She rubbed her forehead with the heel of her palm. "I sit down too fast. It's a known flaw, and people have spoken to me about it."

I have been told no by a loan officer and by my own mother's doctor. Nobody had ever refused me and looked that sorry about it.

"Denise," she said. "Both of these are mine."

"Let me at least pay," I said.

"No. You'd feel better."

She put two twenties under the syrup pitcher, which covered both breakfasts twice. She slid out of the booth, hooked her heels over two fingers, and stood barefoot beside my table long enough that I thought she had one more thing to say. She did.

"Call your girls in the morning. Don't tell them a thing. Ask them how they slept."

Poppy took the long way to the lobby, which ran past the corner booth, and she slowed down there.

"You get all that, One Cup?" she asked.

The blonde woman looked up at her and gave her nothing back.

"Night, then," Poppy said.

"Good night, Dr. Tullos."

It was the first I had heard of her voice, which was lower than I expected and in no hurry. Poppy stopped walking, and the shoes swung once at her side before they hung still.

"Do I know you?" she asked.

"No."

I had asked Poppy that same question an hour before and gotten that same answer.

She stood over the booth for longer than was polite, and the blonde woman let her look. Then Poppy laughed once through her nose.

"Well," she said. "That's going to bother me."

She went out through the beach doors into the cold.

Denise came for the plates and took Poppy's first. When she reached for mine she kept her eyes on the table, wiped it down in front of me, and left without calling me hon. The Tideline was a small room, and at that hour a voice reached every corner of it.

Doctor. I have worked for a doctor of dental surgery for twenty years and typed that title ten thousand times, and I could not hang it on a barefoot woman with glitter down her neck who had just told me where she danced. I decided I had heard wrong, or that it was a name they called her at the Sand Dollar for a reason I did not want explained.

Royce had left me at a table six weeks before, and now a stranger had done the same. The pancakes she had bought me lay heavy in my stomach, and I owed her for them. She had also been going to find my husband's truck, and she had taken that offer with her. My face was hot to the ears, which had not happened to me since I was a girl caught passing a note in Mrs. Hattaway's class. I had driven five hours to get away from people who knew, and it had taken me one breakfast to make two more of them.

I should have gone upstairs. I had been turned down by a stripper and cleared by a waitress, and Room 614 had a door that locked. I stayed where I was because the bill was paid and I could not think what a person does next.

The blonde woman got up and brought her cup with her. She was half a head shorter than Poppy, with a straight back, and she came between the tables without touching a chair.

"Is anyone sitting here?" she asked.

"She was."

She sat down in Poppy's place and set her cup down where Poppy's mug had been. She used her right hand, and when the wrist turned, a small black tattoo showed on the inside of it, a semicolon and nothing else. She was younger than I had taken her for across the room, somewhere short of forty. Her sweater was dark gray wool with the sleeves pushed up. She smelled of oranges, and under the orange there was jasmine, which I know from my mother's fence in June.

Up close her eyes were no lighter, and it took the lamp over the table to find any brown in them.

"Juliet," she said.

"Jeri."

"I know. She said it loud enough."

"Then you heard all that."

"Most of it."

"I'm not fit company tonight."

"I didn't come over for company."

Poppy had come to my table with her mouth already going. She had moved my purse, sent back my eggs, fed me, and told a waitress she loved her, all inside ten minutes. This one had brought a cup of cold coffee and her first name. She had not looked at my plate or reached across the table, and she had made no joke to get in the door. Poppy I had understood inside a minute. I had no file for this one.

"Are you a counselor? Because I have had one of those recommended to me by my pastor, my dentist, and a woman at the Brookshire's I hardly know."

"No."

"A preacher, then."

"God, no," she said, and she smiled for the first time, a quick crooked one that took five years off her. "I've been in that booth since eleven. You're the only thing that's happened."

"You called her Doctor."

"I did."

"A doctor of what?"

"Ask her. She likes to be asked."

"I don't expect I'll get the chance. You saw how that went."

"I saw how tonight went," she said.

She had changed one word of mine, and it was the word that mattered.

"I'm going up to my room."

"All right."

She made no move to stop me. My purse strap was in my fist and my weight was on the edge of the bench. I stayed where I was.

I waited. I have sat across a counter from enough people to know the two things that come next. One is the hand on your arm and the soft voice. The other is the look Gayla gave me over my own front desk. I was ready for either, and I had an answer built for each.

She gave me neither one. She let Denise go by without signaling for more coffee, and she offered me no opinion on how hard it must have been. She turned her cup a quarter turn on the table and studied me with plain interest. Her face held no verdict on me.

"Can I ask you a question?" she asked.

"You're going to."

"I am." The corner of her mouth moved. "When you called your daughters. Which one did you call first?"

Chapter Three

"Shelby," I said.

"Why her?"

"Because Shelby does what I ask."

I had not dressed it, and Poppy was not there to give me credit for that. Juliet nodded and asked me nothing more. I had braced for the next question and the one after it. She picked up her cup, looked down into it, and set it back on the table without drinking.

"I'm going to bed," she said. "I'll be in the bar off the lobby tomorrow night around nine."

"Why would I come?"

"You might not."

"And if I did, what would we do there?"

"Drink, I'd think. It's a bar." She slid out of the booth. "The bourbon has to be better than this coffee."

She left a five-dollar bill under her saucer for a two-dollar cup and walked out through the fake ferns without looking back. I sat alone at a clean table until Denise came through with the mop.

* * *

I slept badly, as Poppy had said I would. At eight I sat on the edge of the bed by the window with my phone and did what a stripper had told me to do, because nobody else had told me anything useful in six weeks.

Macy picked up on the second ring.

"How did you sleep?" I asked.

"What?" Her voice came up sharp out of the pillow. "Mama, what's wrong? Did you find him?"

"Nothing's wrong, and no. I'm asking how you slept."

The line went quiet. In twenty-five years I had asked that child whether her homework was done, whether she had gas in her car, and whether she had written her grandmother a thank-you note. I could not remember asking her that.

"Not good," she said. "I keep waking up at four. Where are you?"

"Biloxi."

"Mississippi? Why there?"

"Your daddy stayed a night in a hotel down here in December. It was on the statement."

"Is he there now?"

"I don't know yet."

"I can be there by one."

"You cannot. You've got work, and I don't need you down here. What I need is, if your daddy calls you, you tell him..."

I stopped. I had been about to hand my daughter her lines, with her father six weeks gone on account of the last time I did it.

"Tell him what, Mama?"

"Nothing. If he calls, you tell him whatever's true."

"Okay," she said, and there was no belief in it. "I'm calling Shelby."

"I expect you will."

Shelby's phone went straight to her voice asking me to leave a message. I told the recording that it was Mama, that I was not asking her for anything, and that I had wanted to know how she slept. It sounded foolish said to a machine, and I hung up without adding to it.

Then I opened the bank on my phone. Royce had changed the password on the company card, but he had not locked me out of our joint checking, and I had looked at it every morning since. On the fourth of December, the day after he left, he moved half of it out, to the dollar. There had been an odd cent in the balance, and he left the cent with me. I kept that man's books for twenty-two years, and I knew what I was looking at. He had sat down somewhere with a calculator and made certain he did not take one penny that was not his.

The room was on my own card, and so was everything else I spent that day.

I walked two marinas that day, and I had a reason for marinas. For twenty years Royce talked about taking one week on the coast to fish for redfish. Every year there was a truck down or a tract to cut, and he never went. Water was the only cause I could think of that would bring that man to Biloxi. I had his picture on my phone, the one from Shelby's graduation, where he had already loosened his tie. At each marina I walked the parking lot first for a white Ford, and then I took out the picture. The Small Craft Harbor had a restaurant up on pilings and a row of charter boats, and a boy hosing down a deck told me no ma'am after a short look. Point Cadet had more boats and fewer people. A man selling bait out of a cooler studied the picture a good while and said the fellow looked like half the men he knew. By three the wind had gone through my coat. I had shown my husband's face to eleven strangers, and all I had learned was that I did not know how to look for a person. I know how to look for a missing payment, because a payment stays where somebody put it.

Dr. Pruitt does not see patients on Fridays, so nobody at home was missing me yet. On Monday there would be less of me to miss. The week before, he had come out to my window after the last patient and told me, kindly, that his niece would be taking the front starting the eighteenth. He wanted me on billing in the back, where it was quieter. I had run that window for twenty years. I told him that would be fine and went on filing.

* * *

I went down at ten to nine, telling myself all the way down in the elevator that I only wanted a drink.

The bar off the lobby was called the Schooner. It had a brass rail, a wall of bottles lit from underneath, and four customers. Juliet was not one of them. The bartender was a slight young woman with a pencil through her bun, and her tag said LINH over BILOXI, MS.

"Bourbon and Coke," I said.

She built it and set it on a napkin, and she studied me a little longer than the drink took.

"You the lady Opium bought breakfast for?" she asked.

"Who?"

"Opium. Tall, no shoes. Denise said she sat down with a lady from Louisiana last night, and it went bad."

"Her name is Poppy."

"It's both. She's Opium across the street, and half the campus calls her that too."

I got from the flower to the drug a second late, and I did not think it was funny.

Linh wiped the rail in front of me. "I had her last spring. Death and Dying."

"You had her for what?"

"For class. At Fort Bayou, over in Ocean Springs. She's Dr. Tullos up there. Anthropology."

She said it as a thing everybody knew. I had heard Juliet call her Dr. Tullos the night before, and I had taken it for a joke between two women who were sizing each other up. I sat over my drink and put it together one piece at a time. That woman had a doctorate, and she took her clothes off for money across the highway, taught college students about dying, and bought pancakes for strangers at two in the morning. She had fed worse than me, by her own account, and I was the one she could not sit across from.

"Is she any good?" I asked.

"At which?"

"Teaching."

"She made me call my grandmother in Saigon and ask what they did with their dead when she was a girl. I'd never asked her one thing in my life." Linh shrugged. "I got a B. She goes on at one on Fridays, if you were asking about the other."

"I was not asking about the other."

"Yes, ma'am."

Juliet came in at nine exactly. She had on a black sweater that night, and she took the stool right beside mine.

"Whiskey, neat," she said to Linh. "You pick."

Linh picked a bottle from the second shelf and poured two fingers of it into a short glass.

"You came," Juliet said to me.

"I wanted a drink."

"So did I."

"What are you doing in Biloxi?" I asked. I had been asked every question there was since I got to Mississippi, and it was my turn.

"Sitting in a bar."

"Before that."

"Sitting in a coffee shop."

"Linh tells me she's a professor. Your Dr. Tullos."

"She is."

"You knew that last night. You could have said."

"I told you to ask her, and you will. She doesn't strike me as a woman who stays gone." She tasted the whiskey and approved of it. "Tell me the affair."

I had known it was coming, and I still looked down the bar to see who could hear. "In here?"

"Linh's heard worse. Haven't you, Linh?"

"I work in a casino," Linh said from the far end, and she went on cutting limes.

"Leave out why," Juliet said. "Give me what happened and what you did, and no reasons."

"The why is the whole thing."

"The why is the speech. I heard the first line of it last night, and so did she, and you saw what it bought you." She turned on her stool to face me. "I'm not asking you to say you were wrong. I only want what happened."

I have never told a thing without its reasons. Reasons are how I get a claim paid. But she was the only person in two states still willing to hear it. I took a long drink and started with the wreck, because that was where it started, and I told it as near to straight as I have ever told anything.

* * *

Six years ago in March, Royce rolled a loaded log truck in the rain on the curve past Bernice. He climbed out through the windshield without a mark on him. He came home, ate his supper, and did not speak of it to me that night or any night after. The truck was a total loss, and the claim was mine to work, as every piece of paper in that business was mine.

Three weeks later I sat across a desk from Lamar Aycock with the adjuster's figures between us. I had known Lamar thirty years. He had written every policy we owned, and he had hunted with my husband from October to January and eaten at my table more Sundays than I could count. He was a tidy, soft-spoken man in a golf shirt with his agency's name over the pocket, and he had a salesman's gift for making you feel his calendar was empty.

"How are you holding up?" he asked.

"Royce is fine. He doesn't have a scratch on him."

"I know he's fine. I asked how you were."

Nobody had. The girls had asked after their daddy, and the church had carried food to the house for Royce. I had spent three weeks on the telephone with a salvage yard and an adjuster in Shreveport. At night I lay beside a man who had nearly died and would not say so, and I had not shed a tear over any of it. I cried in Lamar Aycock's office with the door standing open and Gayla typing on the other side of the wall. She came to the door with the box of Kleenex off her own desk, set it by my elbow, and went back to her typing so I could cry in private.

He came around the desk and put his hand on my shoulder, and that was all he did. He left it there until I was through. Then he handed me the release form and said I could bring it by the camp on Tuesday afternoon, if that was easier than coming back to town, since he would be out that way seeing a timber account.

I knew what he was asking, and he knew I knew. Neither of us said it then or in the six years after. On Tuesday I drove out there with the release in my purse, already signed.

It was easy to hide, and I told her how, since she had asked for what I did. Dr. Pruitt has closed at noon on Tuesdays since before I went to work for him. For six years my husband believed I stayed until six running the week's claims. I let him believe it, and twice I carried a folder home to prove it. Lamar's Tuesdays were his field calls. He wrote the insurance on half the logging outfits in three parishes, and a man with that book of business is expected out at the landings in his boots. Gayla wrote FIELD across his Tuesday afternoons in the office calendar herself. The camp had been his daddy's, two rooms up on cinder blocks at the end of a gravel drive on the D'Arbonne. Gayla hated it for the snakes and went out once a year to hang lights on the porch. There was no telephone signal on that end of the lake, and she had quit trying to reach him on a Tuesday years before.

I gave Juliet one Tuesday to stand for all of them. It was October of the second year, a warm afternoon with the cypress gone rust-colored along the cove. I parked beside his truck under the pines, where anybody who came down that drive or idled past in a boat could have read my plate. For six years I told myself that nobody did.

The camp smelled of propane and cedar and old wood smoke. I took off my rings, as I did every Tuesday, and set them in the coffee cup on the windowsill over the sink. I could not stand for him to touch me with them on.

He did not kiss me at the door that day. He stood me in the middle of the front room and undressed me himself, one button at a time. When I reached to take my blouse from him and fold it over the chair, he held it out of my reach and dropped it on the floor.

"Leave it," he said.

"It'll wrinkle."

"Then it'll wrinkle. Leave it, Jeri."

I have folded every piece of clothing I ever took off, mine and three other people's. I stood in a fish camp in my brassiere with my good blouse on a plank floor, and my skin drew up tight all over.

There was a clock by the door, a giveaway from a bait shop with a largemouth bass on its face, and on the hour the bass sang. I looked at it a dozen times every Tuesday, working backward from six o'clock, so many minutes to drive home and so many to shower and so many to have supper started. Lamar followed my eyes. He took the clock down off its nail, pried the battery out with his thumbnail, and dropped the battery in his shirt pocket.

"I've got to be home by..."

"I know when you've got to be home. I'll tell you when it's time." He hung the dead clock back on its nail. "You don't keep anything out here. You keep it all, every other day of the week. Out here you let me."

That is a reason, and she had told me to leave reasons out. I left it out when I told her. I am putting it here because it is the truest thing in the whole six years. He did not love me, and I never asked him to. He took the list out of my head for four hours a week, and I would have driven to Texas for it.

He unhooked my brassiere and let that drop too. He took his time over my breasts, which were forty-seven years old and had fed two babies. He held the heft of them in his palms and put his mouth on one and then the other. He sucked until I had hold of his belt loops to stay standing. He slid my slacks and my underwear down together, had me step out of them, and left those on the floor with the rest. I was naked in the middle of the afternoon in a room with no curtains, and he still had every stitch on.

He walked me backward into the back room and laid me down on the chenille spread his mother had bought. He stood over me to take off his own clothes, and he let me watch him do it. Neither of us was young. He had gone soft through the middle and gray across the chest, and his cock stood up dark against his belly. I will use the word, since plain was what she asked for. He looked at all of me in the daylight from the window and took his time doing that too.

He knelt on the floor at the side of the bed, pulled me to the edge of it by my hips, and put my legs over his shoulders. I was already wet. He spread me open with his thumbs and looked, and then he put his mouth on me.

I did what I do. I tried to run it. I moved against his mouth to hurry him along, and I told him where and told him harder. When that got me nowhere I told him I was close, which was a lie.

He lifted his head. His chin was wet. "No, you're not."

"Lamar."

"You're keeping time in your head. I can feel you do it." He pressed my hips back down to the bed with his forearms. "I've got till five. I'm not going anywhere, and neither are you."

He went back to it at his own pace, which was no pace I would have picked. He licked me with the whole breadth of his tongue, long strokes from bottom to top, and then he used only the tip of it in one place until my thighs shook against his ears. He slid two fingers up inside me, crooked them, and held them still while his tongue worked. He brought me up to the edge and eased off, twice and then a third time, until I cursed him. He laughed against me, and the laugh went all the way up my spine. Then he did it again.

I do not know how long it went on, and that was the purpose of the battery. Somewhere in there I quit counting. I quit lifting my hips to steer him. My fingers had been knotted in his hair, pushing. I let go of him, and they fell open on the spread beside my head. I lay there with nothing to see to, wet to the backs of my thighs, and let a man do as he pleased with me. It came up through me from the soles of my feet. I came on his tongue and his fingers with my heels dug into his back, hollering loud enough to put the herons up off the cove. Nobody lived within a mile of that camp.

He gave me no time to be embarrassed. He stood, turned me over onto my stomach with a hand on each hip, and pulled me back until my knees were at the edge of the mattress and my face was in his mother's chenille. I could not see the door from there, or the window, or him. He pushed into me from behind while I was still shaking, one long push until his hips were against me.

He closed one hand around both of my wrists and held them at the small of my back. He did not hold them hard, and I could have pulled loose any time I wanted. I did not want loose. Somebody else had hold of the clock, the pace, and me, and there was nothing left for me to do but have it done.

I tried to help anyway. I pushed back to meet him and tightened around him to bring him along quicker. He stopped moving altogether, buried in me, and waited.

"Quit helping," he said.

"I'm not..."

"You are. Quit it. Hold still and take it, Jeri. That's all you've got to do out here."

I quit helping. He started again, long and deep and steady, and the bed frame knocked the wall on every stroke. He kept on telling me what he was doing and what he meant to do next, in the same low voice he used to explain a deductible. He told me how I looked from where he stood. He told me I was soaked and that he could hear it, and I could hear it too. He reached under me with his free hand, found the place his tongue had been, and rubbed it in small hard circles. He said I was going to come again whether I worked at it or not.

I did. It came on me without my doing one thing to bring it, harder than the first, with my wrists held and my mouth open against the spread. He let go of my wrists then and took my hips in both hands. He drove into me fast, a dozen times or more, and finished inside me with a sound I had never heard him make at a Sunday dinner.

He lay down beside me afterward, and we stayed there while the light moved across the spread. I did not know what time it was, and for once in my life I had not asked. After a while he reached over to the chair for his shirt, took the battery out of the pocket, and held it up between two fingers.

"Ten to five," he said.

He had kept it for me the whole afternoon on the watch he never took off. I got up and found my clothes on the floor of the front room where he had dropped them, and I shook out my blouse. He put the battery back in the bass and set the hands. I washed at the kitchen sink, took my rings out of the coffee cup and put them back on, rinsed the cup, and turned it upside down on the drainboard. By a quarter past five I was on the parish road with the windows down to blow the propane out of my hair.

* * *

I told her nearly all of that, in plainer and fewer words. I kept back the hollering and what he said about helping, and I gave her the rest in order: the desk, the release form, the Tuesdays, and the battery.

Linh had found a great deal to do at the far end of the bar.

Juliet had let her whiskey alone the whole time I talked. She had not nodded me along or made one sound of sympathy, and she had not looked away from me either.

"Did you like it?" she asked.

"Yes."

I had said it the night before to a picture of a bird. I had never said it to a living person. I waited for the ceiling to come down. The ice shifted in my glass, and that was all that happened.

"I'll take another," I said to Linh.

She brought me a short pour, a finger less than the first, and set it down without a napkin.

"He told his wife I chased him," I said. "Gayla stood at my counter and said I would not leave him alone."

"Did you chase him?"

"I did not. He asked me how I was. He asked me out to that camp."

"He did. And for six years after that, who drove?"

"What?"

"On Tuesdays. Did he come and get you?"

"No."

"Who drove?"

"I did."

"Every week."

"Every week I could."

She said nothing else about it, and I did the sum myself. It came to three hundred Tuesdays, give or take, and I had turned the key in the ignition for every one of them.

"Were you sleeping with your husband those same years?" she asked.

"He was my husband."

"That's a yes."

"Yes."

"It still didn't mean anything," I said. "I want you to understand that. He never meant a thing to me. I did not love that man one day."

"I believe you."

"Then you see how it was."

"I see that you traded twenty-eight years for nothing," she said. "I don't think you're that bad with numbers."

I had the next line of the speech ready, the one about how he quit talking to me. I shut my mouth on it. I have not told anyone since that it meant nothing, and I have not told myself.

She picked up her glass at last and drank about half of what was in it.

"Tell me about the clock again," she said.

"It was a bass. On the hour it sang."

"What did it sing?"

"'Take Me to the River.'"

"A singing fish."

"On the hour."

"Jesus," she said. She laughed, low and real, with her head tipped back, and I laughed with her, which I had not expected to do in that bar. "And you still went back."

"Every week I could."

She set the glass down, and the laugh went out of her face, though the ease stayed in it.

"Who decided Royce couldn't know?" she asked.

"I did."

"He might have wanted to."

"He'd have wanted to die. I know that man."

"Maybe so. You decided it for him, though, for six years." She kept her voice where it was. "And when Shelby found out. Who decided she couldn't tell him?"

I had my glass halfway to my mouth. I was back in my own kitchen four years before, with Shelby standing in the door and her car keys still in her fist, and I did not get to answer.

A pair of black high heels came down on the bar beside my glass.

"Scoot your purse," Poppy said.

Chapter Four

I moved my purse. It was a little past eleven by the clock over the register. It was also the second night running that I had cleared a seat for that woman on her say-so, and both times I had done it before I thought.

She did not take the stool but stood at the corner of the bar between Juliet and me, with a long canvas coat hanging open over her jeans. Her hair was pinned up on top of her head, black with the silver streak coiled through it. There was no glitter on her yet, and her feet were bare on the Schooner's carpet, which I would not have crossed in my socks.

Linh had told me an hour before what this woman was, and I looked for the professor in her. I could not find the place where one left off and the other began. She had brought the same bare feet and the same loud mouth to the bar that she had brought to the Tideline, and I supposed she took them into a classroom too.

"Linh, did you tell her my business?" she asked.

"Yes, ma'am."

"All of it?"

"The B, too."

"You earned that B."

Linh grinned down at her limes. Poppy turned those gray eyes on me, and they were no warmer than when she had left me at the table.

"I haven't changed my mind," she said. "I want that said first."

"Then why are you standing here?"

"Denise says she was in my seat before it got cold." She was looking past me at Juliet. "And she knew my name. I told you that'd bother me."

So she had not come back for me. I had walked two marinas that day half expecting to turn around and find her behind me with a waffle, and she had come back because another woman knew what to call her. Juliet turned her glass a quarter turn on the bar and did not answer for herself.

"I walked in on a question," Poppy said to me. "Go ahead and answer her. I can wait."

I had the answer, and I had been looking at it since Juliet asked, my daughter in the kitchen door with her keys. I could not say it with one of them at each elbow. I lifted my glass and found nothing in it but ice.

"I'll take one more," I said to Linh.

"I can do you a Coke."

"I asked for bourbon."

"Yes, ma'am. I can do you a Coke."

She said it pleasantly, with the scoop already in the ice. I was not drunk, because two drinks is what I have at a wedding, and I drive my own car home afterward. Nobody had ever refused me a third of anything, and a college girl with a pencil in her hair had just done it in front of company.

"I can't see both of you from here," Poppy said. "Bring it to the round one, Linh, and whatever's left in the kitchen."

She picked her shoes up off the bar and went, and Juliet got down from her stool with her whiskey to follow her. I stayed a few seconds longer with my purse in my lap, and then I went too, because my other choice was to drink a Coke alone with my back to them.

* * *

The round table stood under a framed chart of the Mississippi Sound, and it put the three of us in a ring with nobody at the head. Poppy hung her coat on the back of her chair. Under it she had on a gray T-shirt gone thin at the neck that said FORT BAYOU INTRAMURALS, which I would have read as a thrift store find the night before. Linh brought my Coke and a tall sweet tea that Poppy had not ordered. A few minutes later she came back with a paper-lined basket of fried shrimp and a pile of fries. There were three glasses on that table and half a drink of liquor among them, which was Juliet's.

Poppy set the basket in the exact middle. The night before she had lifted bacon off her own plate and laid it on mine. This time she put the food where anybody could reach it and left my side of the table bare. I was welcome to it on the same terms as the man at the rail.

Juliet had told me twice to ask her, so I asked.

"A doctor of what?"

"Anthropology. What people do with their dead, and with the ones who walk off." She ate a shrimp, tail and all. "You were supposed to ask me that last night."

"You left before I could."

"I did."

She gave me that much and no apology to go with it. Then she wiped her fingers on a napkin.

"What'd you do with your day?" she asked.

"Marinas. Two of them."

"You go over the bridge?"

"What bridge?"

"Never mind."

She reached for the fries. I had been asked so many questions in two days that one more went by me.

"Your turn, One Cup," she said. "How do you know my name?"

"Her name's Juliet," I said.

"I'll get to it."

"You wrote a book," Juliet said.

"I wrote a book four hundred people bought, and I know most of them."

"I was in graduate school. It was on a shelf nobody went to."

"There's no picture on that book."

"The last page thanks the Sand Dollar and a waitress named Denise. Then a woman walked in with her shoes in her hand and told Denise she loved her."

Poppy looked pleased and tried not to.

"Nobody reads the last page," she said. "Where?"

"Berkeley."

"Of course it was. In what?"

"Psychology."

"You finish?"

"Yes."

"And what's a Berkeley psychologist doing in a casino coffee shop in January?"

"I'm not going to tell you that tonight."

"Tonight."

"Tonight."

It was more than I had gotten out of her in two nights. I had asked her what she was doing in Biloxi and been told she was sitting in a bar. Poppy went at her as I go down a new-patient form, one blank after another, and Juliet filled in every blank but that one. Nobody was dragging it out of her. With her forearms on the table and her eyes on that tall woman, she handed over each fact as a person does who wants it known. I had told her my whole marriage, and she had not wanted one thing known to me.

"So it's Dr. One Cup," Poppy said. "And you do what with it?"

"I work with couples. Privately."

"You licensed?"

"No."

"In any state?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"Nobody licenses what I do."

"There's usually a reason for that."

"There is," Juliet said. "I disagree with it."

She said it without heat, in the voice of somebody who has been asked before and has quit minding.

"Where did you go?" I asked Poppy. "To be a doctor."

"Fayetteville, and then Tulane. I grew up where there wasn't a school. I took the GED at sixteen and found out I was good at tests."

"Who paid for it?"

"I did. I danced my way through both of them." She said that part straight to my face, and she looked down at the basket for the next. "Nobody at home could sign a loan paper. A club out on the highway paid more in a weekend than work-study paid in a month, and in New Orleans it was Bourbon Street."

"Does Fort Bayou know where you are on Fridays?" Juliet asked.

"I told them at the interview, twenty years ago. The president asked me if it would get in the way of my office hours." She picked a fry out of the basket and ate it. "Potters and painters started that college. There's no morals clause in the handbook, and I checked before I signed. One daddy complained, one time, and they mailed him the handbook."

"And your students know?" I asked.

First Baptist was in my voice when I said it, and she caught it.

"I tell every class the first day. I won't dance for one while I've got him on my roll. After the grades are in they can come if they're twenty-one, and they tip like students."

In Union Parish the school board let a kindergarten aide go over one photograph from a lake party. This woman had told her bosses to their faces what she did on Friday nights, and they had asked about her office hours. Of the two doctors at that table, the one who took her clothes off for money was the one with her papers in order.

"So I'm on the books," Poppy said. "What do you charge?"

"Twenty-five hundred a session."

I ran the figure against the eleven hundred dollars Dr. Pruitt gets for a crown, because I cannot help running one. I clear less than twenty-five hundred in two weeks at his front window, and I had told this woman things at a casino bar that I had not told my pastor, without ever asking what she was.

"Am I going to get a bill?" I asked.

"No."

"An hour?" Poppy asked.

"Sometimes ninety minutes."

Poppy laughed out loud, one bark, and looked put out with herself for it.

"I've got two jobs," she said, "and I picked wrong both times."

She pulled one foot up onto her chair and wrapped an arm around her knee.

"Nobody gets over being left in a room with one stranger and the door shut," she said. "They get over it at a table, with people who knew them before, and it takes about ten years."

"The people I see have a table. They've been lying at it."

A good deal of what those two said to each other that night went over my head, but that did not. I had a table with six chairs and a lazy Susan. I had lied at it for six years, and my daughters had lied at it for four. Farmerville had a table too, and it had brought casseroles to my husband the week he rolled his truck. I had a clear foot of oak on either side of me at that one now.

"And you fix that in ninety minutes," Poppy said.

"No. I get it said. After that they can go find your table."

"Then tell me what she is." Poppy tipped her head at me without looking at me. "She's not paying you. Denise says you sat in that booth three hours on one cup, watching the door. You waited till I was gone, and then you sat down."

"I'd say that's what you did. You got there first."

"I buy them breakfast, and I write every one of them at Christmas for as long as they'll answer. I don't take them apart in a bar." She put her foot back on the floor. "You're not doing this for her. Whatever's wrong with you, you're working on it, and you're using her to do it."

I've been in that booth since eleven, Juliet had told me. You're the only thing that's happened. I had taken it for a compliment.

I looked at her, and Linh was looking too from behind the rail. I expected her to do what I would have done, which was to explain. She picked a french fry out of the basket, considered it, and ate it.

"Some of that's true," she said.

"Is that what this is?" I asked.

"Partly. It doesn't make what you told me less true."

I ought to have been angry, and I tried to be. Six weeks earlier I had sat two grown daughters in my kitchen for my own use and called it bringing them home. A woman who has done that cannot get up on her dignity over being of use to somebody else.

What held me was how she had taken it. Poppy had said a hard thing about her to her face, in front of a witness, and she had weighed it and agreed to the part that was so. She had not reached for a single reason. I had driven five hours with a speech that was made of nothing else.

"I never told her not to," I said.

They both turned to me.

"Shelby. You asked."

* * *

It was a Saturday morning in October, four years back, four days after the Tuesday I had described at the bar. Royce had left before daylight for the deer lease with Lamar Aycock, as he did every Saturday of the season. I was at the counter with my grocery list when the carport door opened and Shelby stood in it with her car keys in her fist. She was twenty-three, a year out of Tech, and she had driven over from Ruston without calling. The clock on the stove said fourteen minutes past nine.

"Where's Daddy?" she asked.

"At the lease. He won't be in till dark."

"With Mr. Lamar."

"Yes."

"I saw your car at Mr. Lamar's camp. Tuesday. We had a boat out on the cove."

I had parked under those pines a hundred times and told myself that nobody reads a license plate from the water. Sound travels a long way over that cove. I did not ask her what time of the afternoon they had come by, and I have not asked her since. I capped my pen and laid it across the list.

"Sit down, Shelby."

She stayed in the door. "Is it what I think it is?"

"Yes."

I did not deny it. I have always been careful, and in the four minutes that followed I did not say one false word to my daughter.

"How long?"

"A while."

"How long, Mama?"

"Two years."

Her mouth came open, and she shut it. I know that look from my own counter. It belongs to a person who has been handed a figure larger than the one she came in ready to argue, and it is the time to start asking questions, before she finds her feet. Shelby found hers quicker than a patient does.

"He was here Sunday," she said, and her voice cracked on the day. "He sat in that chair and said the blessing, Mama. You passed him the gravy."

"I know where he sat."

"Does Miss Gayla know?"

"No."

"Does anybody?"

"You do."

She braced her free hand against the door frame. I had told her the truth again, and I had told it so that she would feel how much of it she was holding.

"What are you wanting to do?" I asked.

"I don't know. Tell Daddy."

"All right. Think it through with me. He's in a deer stand this morning forty yards from that man. Do you tell him tonight when he comes in, or tomorrow at dinner in front of your sister?"

"Mama."

"Lamar carries the paper on all three trucks. Your daddy has known him since they were boys. I'm asking what you see happening to him Monday."

"You're asking me?"

"I'm not going to tell you what to do. You're grown."

That is how I work a balance ninety days past due. I never tell a patient he has to pay. I lay out what it costs him to pay today, what it costs him to pay over six months, and what it costs him to go to collections. Then I wait with my hands folded while he picks the one I wanted. I did that to my child across my own kitchen, and I kept my voice kind from start to finish.

"Are you going to quit?" she asked.

"That's mine to settle. I'm not going to promise you a thing just to get you out of this kitchen."

She looked at the refrigerator, where her own senior picture hung under a feed store magnet, and she was quiet long enough for the ice maker to drop. I used the quiet to count who else might be holding it.

"Does Macy know?" I asked.

"No."

The stove clock said eighteen past.

"I'm not going to tell Daddy," she said.

"Thank you."

It came out in the voice I use when a check slides across the counter to me. She had spent enough afternoons at that counter after school to know the voice, and her chin came up when she heard it.

"I've got to get back," she said.

I walked her out to her car and told her to have her oil checked before she drove that far again. She stayed away from dinner the next day. The Sunday after that she sat at my table and passed her father the rolls.

* * *

I gave them that in four sentences.

"She came to the house and said she'd seen my car. I never told her to keep it. I asked what she thought it would do to her daddy, and I kept asking until she said she wouldn't tell him. Then I said thank you."

"Thank you," Poppy said.

"Yes."

"How long did it take?"

"Four minutes. I looked at the stove."

Poppy laid a shrimp back in the basket uneaten.

"Does Shelby know that?" Juliet asked. "Or does she think she decided it?"

"She thinks she decided it."

"For four years."

She did not make a question of it, and I did not answer it. That was the truth of who decided. I had decided it, and I had arranged for my daughter to believe the deciding was hers. I had a sentence for this, about two grown women who made their own choice, and I had tried a piece of it on Poppy the night before. It was right there in my mouth. I drank some of my Coke and kept it there.

Poppy pushed the basket away from her with the back of her hand.

"And I'm supposed to go find that man's truck for you," she said.

"I didn't ask you to."

"No. You'd ask me what I thought would happen to you if I didn't."

She had known me two nights, and she had my method down to the wording.

Juliet had eaten nothing but the one fry. She had her forearms on the table and her sleeves pushed up, and when she spoke it was to Poppy.

"Chapter six of your book is a woman in Pass Christian who cooked every Friday for men whose wives had gone."

"Miss Earline."

"You ate at her table for years. Everybody in that book got left by somebody, and you fed them or watched them get fed. Last night one sat down across from you, and you paid for her pancakes and walked out."

"Jeri didn't get left. Jeri did six years of leaving, every Tuesday, and then put her kids in front of her."

"She did. Her husband also took his keys off the hook six weeks ago, and he hasn't called her since. She can be both."

Poppy had her tea halfway to her mouth. She held it there, and then she set it down.

"Shit," she said.

They had been at it across a basket of fried shrimp for a quarter of an hour, arguing over what I was, and neither had asked me. I had no opinion to give them. Both of them were right about me, and the two things did not cancel.

* * *

Poppy turned her chair to face me, and she did not touch the food again while she talked.

"I walked out on you last night and didn't say why," Poppy said. "She's right that I owe you that much. It won't change my mind."

"All right."

"My mother left when I was ten," she said. "We lived on a hill in Newton County, Arkansas, with thirty other people and some goats. She went down it in a man's van and didn't take me."

"Who raised you?" I asked.

"Everybody. I ate at eleven different tables and never went hungry one night. That's where the book comes from."

She said it as dryly as she had said everything else, but she had quit moving. Since the minute I met her some part of that woman had been in motion, a fork or a foot or her mouth, and every bit of it had gone still.

"When I was nineteen she wrote me. It started out 'Seed.' That's what she called me. Poppy seed."

Nineteen from ten is nine years, and I am a mother, so I counted them.

"What did she say?"

"She said she was sorry, and I believed that part. I could forgive the leaving. I could forgive the man. I'd met him."

"What couldn't you?"

"She said she'd known I would be fine. She said I was a strong little thing, and the hill would do better by me than she could." Her voice had not risen at all. "She wasn't there one day of it, and she wrote down how I took it."

"Did you answer her?"

"I wrote her back one time. One line."

"What did it say?"

"I was ten."

Her whole answer was three words. I had cut a speech from four minutes to under one and been proud of the work.

"Last night you sat there and told me what your girls could stand," she said. "That's why I got up. It had nothing to do with your lake camp."

"I said they were grown."

"That's what I mean."

I had told Shelby the same thing in my kitchen at eighteen minutes past nine, and I had told it to her so that she would do my deciding for me. The Schooner had emptied down to the three of us and one man at the rail. Linh had turned the music low, and out on the floor the machines went on paying nobody.

"Whoever leaves gets to tell it first," Juliet said. "Whoever stays has to live in the telling."

I took it for mine, since Royce had left and I had stayed, until I turned it over. Royce had gone without telling anybody one thing. Gayla Aycock had told it first in Farmerville, on Lamar's word, and for six years ahead of them both the only person telling anything in my house was me. I could not settle which of us Juliet had put on which side.

Poppy's hand had stopped on the table.

"Say that again," she said.

Juliet said it again, the same words in the same order. On the second half Poppy's lips moved along with hers, as mine do on the third verse of a hymn I have sung all my life.

Juliet saw them move, and the glass she had been turning a quarter turn at a time all night stopped under her fingers. She looked down at the table and up again with color in her face, which I had not thought that face could do.

Down at the rail Linh had stopped cutting. She was staring at our table with the knife in the air and her mouth open to speak. Poppy looked over at her once.

"Cut your limes, Linh," Poppy said.

"Yes, ma'am."

"Where are you out of now?" Poppy asked Juliet.

"New Orleans."

Poppy leaned back in her chair. She studied that woman for a long time, from the short blonde hair to the half glass of whiskey. Juliet let her do it, as she had from the corner booth the night before.

"Juliet," Poppy said.

"Yes."

"Huh."

It was the first time she had used the name, and she did not say One Cup again that night or any other. The two of them knew a thing I did not, and it had happened right in front of me, between one sentence and the next.

"Do you two know each other?" I asked.

"No," Poppy said. "I'm fixing to, though."

She stood and took her coat off the chair. She hooked her shoes over two fingers and waited by the table with the coat over her arm.

"You've had my book since graduate school, and you've got my supper tables down," she said to Juliet. "You haven't said what you think of the other."

"I haven't seen the other."

"I'm on at one. Come see what I do before you tell me what it is."

Then she looked down at me. I got ready for whatever was coming, and it was a question about my children.

"Did you call them?"

"Macy. Shelby didn't pick up."

"How'd Macy sleep?"

"Bad. She wakes up at four."

"Call again tomorrow."

She went out through the lobby barefoot, calling good night to Linh over her shoulder, and Mr. Odom touched his cap to her at the brass rail.

Juliet stood too, left the rest of her whiskey in the glass, and put a twenty under it.

"Get your coat," she said.

"I'm not going in that place."

"I'm not crossing four lanes by myself at midnight. Get your coat."

She had crossed a coffee shop to sit down with a stranger, and she had not blinked at one word I said about a fish camp. I did not believe a highway worried her. What I did believe in was Room 614, with its heron, its two made beds, and a telephone my older daughter would not answer. The only two people in Mississippi still speaking to me were both going across that road. I signed my Coke to Room 614 and went up for my coat.

Chapter Five

The highway ran four lanes with a strip of dead grass down the middle, and at midnight in January we had it nearly to ourselves. Juliet walked with her coat collar up and her chin down against the wind off the water. I kept up with her and did a sum I should have done at the table. Poppy had taken a GED at sixteen and two degrees after it, and she had told us herself that Fort Bayou hired her twenty years ago. I could not make that come out to forty no matter where I started.

"How old do you make her?" I asked on the median.

"Fifty-five."

"You sound mighty sure."

"Her book says what year she was born. It's in the note about the author."

"And you remembered it."

"I read all of it."

"I had her at forty."

"So did everybody in that cafe."

I am fifty-two. I had sat across from that woman two nights running and envied her for being young, and she had three years on me. Juliet could not have been past thirty-seven, which put most of twenty years between the two of them. I worked that out too, because I work everything out.

The Sand Dollar had one door under the pink sign and no windows anywhere. Inside the door a heavy man sat on a stool with a cash box on his knee and NECAISE stitched over his shirt pocket.

"Ten apiece," he said. Then he looked at us a second time. "Y'all the two ladies? Opium said two ladies. She's got you down front."

I paid my own ten dollars. I had not paid to walk into a room since Macy's last volleyball game, and I went in with my purse held against my stomach in both arms.

I had expected it darker and worse. It was a low room about the size of our fellowship hall, with a stage along one wall, a brass pole at each end of the stage, and a rail where men sat with their elbows up as they would at a lunch counter. It smelled of beer and fog machine and the same cocoa butter Poppy had brought into the Tideline. It was half full. A table of airmen from Keesler had their hair cut to the skin, two tables of men wore the white rubber boots of the shrimp boats, and five or six old men sat by themselves along the rail. Counting the waitress, I was one of three women in the place with her clothes on.

The chairs down front had wooden arms. Juliet sat down in hers with her coat still on. The waitress brought me a Coke and Juliet a club soda and charged us eight dollars apiece for them.

On the stage a girl of about twenty-two was working her way around the near pole in shoes with four inches of clear plastic under them. She was pretty and bored, and she looked over the men's heads at the clock above the bar. Half of the men had their telephones out. It took me a full verse to place her song. It was the one the bass clock sang at Lamar's camp.

"That's the fish," I said.

Juliet tipped her head and listened through to the chorus. Then she laughed out loud with her head back, as she had at the bar, and one of the airmen looked over to find out what was funny in a place like that.

"Of course it is," she said.

I laughed too, a little, with my purse in my lap. The song that had kept the hours on the worst thing I ever did was being danced to by a child in plastic shoes, for men who were checking the scores. It did me some good to learn how little the song cared.

* * *

At one o'clock the lights over the stage went from white to amber, and the man in the booth leaned into his microphone.

"Gentlemen," he said. "And ladies, I see you down there. Opium."

I had my eyes on the rail when he said it, and every one of those old men laid his telephone face down on the wood and sat up straight on his stool.

She came out from the side barefoot. She had on a short slip the green of a new leaf, her hair was down past her shoulders with the silver streak loose in it, and the glitter was back on her collarbone. Her black heels were hooked over two fingers. She walked to the front of the stage, set the shoes down side by side at the edge of it, and left them there. Every other woman who took that stage was up on four inches of plastic. She was the tallest person in the room on her own bare feet.

She passed the pole by and went down the rail.

"Mr. Seymour," she said over the music, to an old man in a windbreaker. "How's that knee?"

"They're cutting on it the ninth."

"Then you tip me now, while you can still get your wallet out."

He laughed and laid a five on the stage. She moved on, swaying to the song as she went, in no more hurry than she had been in crossing the casino carpet.

"Dale. Your mama get moved?"

"Tuesday," a man in rubber boots said.

"You go see her Sunday. I'll ask you."

"Yes, ma'am."

That was the first song. She danced every bar of it. Her hips did not stop, and she used that long back with a skill I had no word for. But she talked the whole time she did it, to one man after another, by name. On the second song she quit talking.

She crossed her arms, took hold of the hem of the slip, and lifted it over her head. She had nothing on under it. She let it fall on top of her shoes. Then she stood in the amber light without a stitch on and let every man in the room look.

I looked too. I am good at ages, and I could not find fifty-five on her until I knew to hunt for it. She was long in the thigh and hard there, with the legs of a woman who walks everywhere. Her breasts were small and sat a little low, dark at the tips, and no child had ever pulled at them. Below the navel her belly went soft, as mine has, and she let it. The hair between her legs was black with silver through it, because she did not dye that either. Where the skin had loosened across her hips it showed in fine lines, and she turned those to the light along with everything else.

She was fifty-five. I had not undressed in front of a lamp since I was forty. On Tuesdays I let Lamar look at me because he told me to, and I spent the first ten minutes of every one wanting a sheet. This woman stood naked before a roomful of strangers as easily as she had ordered bacon.

What she did next was no kin to what the girl before her had done. The song was an old one, a woman's voice dragging behind a horn, and Poppy let it pull her down. She went to her knees at the front of the stage and opened them. She leaned back by inches until her shoulders touched the boards and her hair spread out behind her head. She stroked up her own ribs and held her breasts, and her back came up off the floor. Every man on that rail had the whole length of her laid open at the height of his eyes, from her throat to the dark hair between her thighs, and not one of them said a word. A chair scraped, and somebody set a bottle down. She rolled onto her stomach and came up on all fours facing them, with her back swayed deep and her breasts hanging. She crawled the length of the rail without hurrying and looked each man in the face as she passed him. Mr. Seymour took off his glasses and wiped them on his windbreaker. At the far pole she stood, put her back against the brass, and slid down it with her knees wide and the sweat shining between her breasts. From there she looked over the heads of the men at the rail to one chair down front, and she kept that look until the song ended. It was not my chair. My face had gone hot, and I blamed the room for it.

When the song was over she sat down on the lip of the stage with her feet hanging and nothing on, and the men came up one at a time to lay their bills on the boards beside her. She thanked each of them by name. She asked a boy from Keesler where he was from. He told her Dayton, and she asked whether his mother knew where he was tonight. He went red to the scalp and said no, ma'am.

I had come across that highway sure of what I would find, which was men looking at a woman as they look at a plate of food. Some of them did. But Mr. Seymour was telling her about his surgeon, and the man in the boots was telling her the name of the nursing home. They were answering her. A woman had asked each of them one plain question about his own life, and he had been waiting all week for somebody to do it.

Lamar Aycock asked me how I was holding up, one time, across a desk, and I drove to a lake camp for six years on the strength of it. I sat in the Sand Dollar and tried to think when I had last asked my husband that. I had asked him what time he would be in. I had asked him whether the number two truck was out of the shop. I knew the day his truck went over on the curve past Bernice, and I could not find one evening in the six years after it when I had asked that man a question that was only about him.

I turned to say some of this to Juliet, and I kept it to myself. She had not touched her club soda. She was sitting forward with her forearms on her knees and her face turned up to that stage, with her lips a little apart. Two nights ago she had told me I was the only thing that had happened in that cafe all night. Tonight she did not know I was in the room.

* * *

Poppy came down the side steps with the slip back on and her heels left where they were. She stopped at two tables on the way. Then she pulled a chair around backward at ours and sat astride it with her arms folded on the back. Up close the glitter ran down between her breasts.

"Twenty a song," she said to Juliet. "I'm cheaper than you."

Juliet took a fifty out of her coat and laid it on the table. "I don't have change."

"I don't make it."

The bill stayed where it was, between my Coke and the ashtray.

"Why do you do it?" I asked.

I had meant to ask since the bar, and I had expected it to come out of me in my Sunday voice. It came out curious. She gave me a long look to find out which it was.

"You mean a woman with a doctorate," she said.

"And a pension, I'd guess."

"I've got a pension. Where I grew up nobody wore much from May to September, Jeri. Grown people hoed beans in what God gave them. I was twelve before I found out a body was supposed to be a secret, and by then it was too late to teach me."

"That's why you can. I asked why you do."

"Listen at you. Two nights with her and you ask follow-ups." She rubbed the glitter on her collarbone with her thumb. "Fort Bayou pays me forty-one thousand dollars a year. I made six hundred in here last Friday."

"And that's all it is?"

"No." She turned on her chair to face the rail. "Look at them. Half those men haven't been asked a question at home since Easter. I ask. That's all I do in here that the girl ahead of me doesn't."

"Do you write about them?" Juliet asked.

"Not one word. That's a rule I made. In here I'm not taking notes."

She said it to Juliet and did not soften it. Then she smiled, and the smile had a dare in it.

"You run people for a living," she said. "I walked in on you running her tonight, and you're good at it. When's the last time somebody ran you?"

"A while."

"House rule. Your hands stay on the wood, and mine go where I want."

"And if I move them?"

"Lyle walks you to the door."

A big man in a black shirt by the bar nodded once.

Juliet took off her coat and hung it on the back of her chair. She pushed the chair out from the table and turned it to face the room. She laid a forearm along each wooden arm and closed her fingers over the ends.

"All right," she said.

Out here you let me, Lamar had said, in a fish camp, with a clock battery in his shirt pocket. I knew what had just been asked of that woman better than anybody in the building. I did not know what it would cost her, and I did not look away to spare her.

* * *

The next song came on with a bass line that came up through the seat of my chair.

Poppy stood, crossed her arms, and took the slip off over her head for the second time that night. She dropped it in my lap.

"Hold that," she said.

It was warm from her and damp at the back, and it smelled of cocoa butter, hairspray, and clean sweat. I held it in both fists on top of my purse.

She stepped between Juliet's knees. Standing there she put Juliet's eyes level with her navel, and she stayed long enough for that to be understood. Then she set a palm on each arm of the chair, an inch outside Juliet's own, and bent from the waist until her breasts hung a few inches from Juliet's mouth. She swayed there to the bass. Her nipples had drawn up tight and dark, and each pass brought one of them close enough to brush the wool at Juliet's collarbone. Juliet could have reached either one by lowering her chin.

She kept her chin where it was, and her face was the one she had worn at the Tideline while I told her about my kitchen, interested and patient, with no verdict in it. Her grip had not shifted on the wood.

Poppy took that for an answer and went to work on it. She had said her hands went where she wanted. She put them on Juliet's knees and ran them up the tops of her thighs to the hip, pressing hard enough to drag the cloth of her slacks, and brought them back down the insides to the knee. She did that three times, each pass higher up the inside than the one before, and she stopped the third a thumb's width short of where the legs of the slacks met. Then she laid both palms on Juliet's stomach and slid them up the front of the black sweater. She covered Juliet's breasts through the wool and closed her fingers, and Juliet's chest lifted into her grip.

I had sat down in that room expecting to be embarrassed for all three of us. I had seen my husband naked and Lamar Aycock naked, and I had not thought there was any looking left for me to learn. In my whole life I had not wondered about a woman, and I cannot say I was wondering about one then. It was the rule that had hold of me. One of them was allowed everything and the other was allowed nothing, and I knew from six years of Tuesdays what a relief it is to be the one who is allowed nothing. A warmth had started low in my belly when the slip came off on the stage. It had not gone away, and I had quit pretending it was the Coke.

Poppy turned around, set her bare feet wide on the floor outside Juliet's shoes, and sat down in her lap with her back against the black sweater. She laid her head on Juliet's shoulder, so that her throat was open to the room and her mouth was at Juliet's ear. Then she began to move, a long roll of her hips that started in her knees and lifted her breasts with it. She reached back and laid one palm on the nape of Juliet's neck, in the short hair there. With the other she took hold of her own breast and squeezed it, and she let her knees fall open until every man in the place had the whole of her to look at. She ground herself down into Juliet's lap in time to the bass. The muscles in her thighs stood and eased with each roll, and the glitter on her chest ran with sweat. She was talking into that ear the whole while, too low to cross three feet of loud air. Whatever she said, Juliet shut her eyes for the length of one line of it and opened them again.

Juliet looked straight ahead over Poppy's shoulder. A flush had come up out of the neck of her sweater and reached her jaw. Her knees had moved apart to take the weight, and her fingers were spread on the ends of the chair arms, each one apart from the next. She was breathing through her mouth, and between the beats of the bass the sound of it reached me.

The song ran down, and Poppy opened her eyes.

"Nothing?" she asked.

"Not nothing," Juliet said.

Her voice came out lower than I had heard it yet, and rough at the edge. Poppy laughed, short and pleased, with her head still on that shoulder.

The man in the booth came on to say the kitchen was open until two and to tip the waitresses. In the quiet under him Poppy got up, turned, and came back down astride, facing her, with a knee on either side of Juliet's hips and her forearms laid across Juliet's shoulders. She was breathing hard from the work, and a line of sweat had run down her spine to the cleft of her backside. She sat naked in a clothed woman's lap, with no dance left in it, and looked at her from six inches off. When she spoke it was in the voice she had used to tell me my eggs were cold, and every word of it reached my chair.

"You've been working since you sat down in that booth," she said. "You can quit. Nobody in here needs one thing from you."

I have seen the look that came over Juliet on the other side of my counter perhaps twice in twenty years, on a patient who has braced for a bill and been told it was written off. Her eyes went over Poppy's face once, quickly, hunting for the catch. Then the music started, and she closed them.

Poppy came in against her. She pressed her breasts to the black wool and her belly to Juliet's belt, and she moved on her in a tight circle, hips only, with her back curved and her fingers pushed up into Juliet's short hair. She laid her cheek against Juliet's cheek. She drew her open mouth along Juliet's jaw to the corner of her lips and stopped there, a finger's width off, breathing, and went no nearer. She did it again on the other side. Then she put her mouth to Juliet's throat, still not touching, and let her breath go down the neck of the sweater.

Her hands came down out of the hair and found the hem of that sweater at the waist. She slid them under it onto bare skin and up Juliet's sides as far as the ribs. The wool rode up over her wrists and showed a strip of pale stomach above the belt, drawn tight and moving fast. Juliet's head tipped back against the top of the chair with her lips parted, and the cords stood out in her forearms. Her hips lifted an inch off the seat to meet the ones riding her. She pressed them down again by her own will, and her grip stayed on the wood.

I knew that fight. I had lost it face down on a chenille spread with a man telling me to quit helping. My breasts had drawn tight inside my brassiere, and I was wet. I will say it plain. I was fifty-two years old, in a strip club in Mississippi with a Coke going warm, holding another woman's slip in my lap, and my body had answered what it was looking at as it used to answer a Tuesday.

Poppy rose on her knees, took Juliet's head in both arms, and held that face against her breastbone, between her breasts, with her own back arched. She kept her there for four or five beats of the bass. When she let go, Juliet's eyes were open and black in that light, and her mouth was wet. She looked up the length of the body over her, and Poppy looked down. Whatever those two had been arguing about since the Tideline, neither one of them was winning it. Then Poppy came down again along the whole front of her, belly to breast to hip, and Juliet let go of the chair.

There was no grabbing in it. She laid both palms on the small of Poppy's bare back. She drew them up the length of her spine to the shoulder blades in one long stroke, with her thumbs pressing in beside the bone, and brought them down again over the ribs to the waist. That stroke told me she had done a great deal of touching in her life and was very good at it. She did not stop at the waist. She went on down over the hips, filled both palms with Poppy's backside, and pulled her in tight. Poppy's back arched under it. Her mouth came open, and the breath went out of her in a sound that came through the bass. Her hips lost the beat and found another one that had nothing to do with the song.

By the bar Lyle had come off the wall and started across the floor. Poppy did not turn her head. She lifted two fingers off Juliet's shoulder, and he stopped where he was and went back.

She did not put Juliet's hands back on the wood.

With Lamar it had only ever gone one direction. He told me to hold still and I did, for six years of Tuesdays. In that chair the one who had been told to hold still had reached, and the one who made the rule had let her. Neither of them was in charge of the other anymore. I had not known two people could do that.

The second song ended and a third began. Poppy had not looked at the fifty on the table or asked for another twenty, and I do not believe she knew the music had changed. She had quit dancing. Nobody who worked in that club would have called it that.

She had her arms locked around Juliet's neck and her face against the side of Juliet's head, and she rode that lap in a short hard rhythm of her own. Juliet held her by the hips and moved her. She pulled her down and forward on every stroke, and Poppy let herself be pulled. The chair creaked under the two of them. Poppy's breath came out in small pushed sounds against Juliet's ear, one to a stroke, and she did nothing to keep them quiet. Her thighs had begun to shake. Sweat had darkened the black wool between them in the shape of her.

Juliet took one palm off her hip, ran it up the wet length of her back, and closed it on the nape of her neck, under the hair. She held her there with her own mouth against Poppy's temple. Their mouths were an inch apart for most of that song. Twice Poppy turned her face toward Juliet's and stopped with their lips a breath apart and her eyes shut tight. Twice she turned away again. Neither of them closed that inch, and it took all either one had not to.

A table of shrimpers had turned their chairs around. One of the airmen said a word to the boy beside him, and neither of them laughed. It had gone past what that room sold, and the men in it knew the difference. So did I.

Nobody had touched me in six weeks. I had told myself that part of me was finished and good riddance. It was not finished, and it had no place to go. Lamar had handed me to his wife. My husband was somewhere on that coast taking care not to be found, and upstairs there were two beds with nobody in either one. I sat three feet from two women who had found each other in the middle of a quarrel, near enough to smell them. I pressed my knees together under a borrowed slip and learned that a body does not care what you have done.

Near the end Poppy put her forehead down on Juliet's shoulder and stayed there. Juliet turned her face into the black hair and held on. Neither of them moved after that except to breathe. Around them the men went back to their beers, and the girl in the plastic shoes was up on the stage again with nobody looking at her.

When the music stopped, Poppy sat back. Her hair was damp at the temples, and I could have believed any age anybody told me. She got up off Juliet's lap with a hand on the chair arm, came to me, and reached for the slip.

"Thank you for holding that," she said.

She put it on over her head. She had turned away and gone two steps toward the stage when Juliet spoke.

"You forgot your money."

Poppy stopped. She looked at the fifty, which had not moved since before the first song.

"That was three," she said.

"I can count."

Poppy came back and stood over the table with her arms crossed under her breasts.

"Well?" she asked. "You've seen it. Tell me what it is."

Juliet had put her hands back on the arms of the chair, though nobody was making her now. Her color was still high. She took her time, and when she spoke she had her own voice again, low and in no hurry.

"Everybody in this room pays you first and leaves at closing," she said. "Nobody can walk out on you in here. They were always going to."

Poppy did not say a word. Mr. Seymour called good night to her from the rail, and she lifted a hand to him without turning.

"You haven't been left since you were ten," Juliet said. "You saw to it."

Poppy's mouth had gone thin.

"And you just stayed a song for free."

"And what makes you the expert?"

"I've kept a bag packed for fifteen years."

I took it for a thing a woman says who travels for her work. Poppy took it for more than that. She studied her without blinking for as long as she had studied me over the pancakes, and then the fight went out of her shoulders.

"Fifteen," she said.

"Yes."

"So you go before they can."

"Every time."

"Well," Poppy said. "Now we've both been told."

She put one finger on the fifty and pushed it back across the table until it touched Juliet's glass.

"Keep it. That last one was on my own time." She picked up Juliet's club soda, drank half of it, and set it down. "Go to bed, Jeri. I've got a set at two."

She went up the side steps and through the curtain. Her shoes were still on the stage.

* * *

We crossed the highway a little before two with the wind behind us. Juliet had her coat buttoned to the neck.

"You broke the rule," I said on the median.

"I did."

"Did you mean to?"

"No."

In two nights I had heard that woman say a great many true things, and every one of them had been said on purpose. That was the first time she told me she had done a thing without meaning to. I asked her nothing else. I had trouble of my own to take upstairs, and I meant to take it into a cold shower.

Mr. Odom touched his cap to us at the brass rail. The casino floor was still flashing at nobody. I dug my key card out of my purse, and my telephone lit up underneath it. It showed three missed calls from Shelby, all of them between a quarter past one and half past. I had sat through every one of them with a stripper's slip on top of that purse. I was headed for the elevators with my thumb over her name when Juliet stopped walking, and I looked where she was looking.

Behind the fake ferns Denise stood at the second booth with the coffee pot in her hand. The young woman in the booth had a plate of eggs in front of her that had gone cold and a white blouse with a bank's name tag still pinned to it. Her car keys were in her fist on the table. She had her father's shoulders, and she sat as I sit, straight up, with her purse in her lap.

Denise saw me first. She did not call me hon. She put a hand on the girl's shoulder, said a word to her, and went back to the counter.

My daughter turned her head.

"Mama," Shelby said.

Chapter Six

"Mama" was all my daughter said, and she did not get up. I went to her across the lobby carpet with my coat buttoned and my telephone in my fist. I had crossed that highway aroused, with nowhere to take it. It left me when she spoke.

I had not laid eyes on Shelby since the third of December, when she walked her sister out to the car by the elbow. She had lost weight in six weeks that she did not have to spare. She had put her face on for the bank that morning, and by two o'clock the next morning it had worn off everywhere but her eyes.

I slid into the bench across from her. The warm air of the cafe brought the Sand Dollar up off my coat front and my hands before I was all the way down, cocoa butter and hairspray with the fog machine under them, and her nostrils drew in. That child has had my nose since the day she was born.

"Denise says you were across the road," she said.

I could guess how Denise had come by it. Linh had been at the rail when Poppy told us to come see what she did, and I had signed for my Coke in front of her and gone up for my coat. Nothing said in the Schooner stayed out of the Tideline past closing time.

"I was."

"At that place."

"Yes."

For as long as she has known me I have put a reason behind every yes, and she sat braced for this one. I let the word stand by itself. Her eyes went over my face hunting for the rest of it, and then they went past my shoulder.

"Who's that?"

Juliet had followed me as far as the ferns and stopped there, with her coat buttoned to the neck. I had known that woman two nights. I could have told my daughter her first name and what she charged, and that was all I knew of her. She answered for herself.

"Juliet," she said. "I'll be over there."

She said it to Shelby, in the low voice she had used on me, and Shelby had no more answer for it than I'd had. Then she went down the row of booths to the one in the corner and sat facing the door, where she had been sitting the first time I ever saw her. Denise took her a cup of coffee without being asked. It was forty feet from our table, and I knew what that was worth in the Tideline. Two nights before, every word I said to Poppy had reached that corner.

"Is she from over there?" Shelby asked.

"No. She's a guest here. I met her in this room."

"And she went with you."

"She did."

"To watch women take their clothes off."

"Yes."

"Jesus Christ, Mama." She had not said that in front of me since she was sixteen, and I had sent her to her room for it. "Daddy's been gone six weeks. Macy's not sleeping, and I drove all night thinking you were down here by yourself hunting him." She kept her voice down, as she was raised to, and it shook from the work of it. "It's two o'clock in the morning, Mama. I called you three times. I thought you were upstairs asleep with the ringer off."

"The calls were on the screen when I came in the door. The phone was in my purse, and my purse was under a dancer's slip. She handed me the slip to hold while she worked. I held it for three songs."

She had come ready for a lie. I know that readiness from my own window, on a patient who has already decided what I am going to say about his balance, and it leaves a person with no place to stand when the lie does not come. Shelby looked down at her eggs.

"I drove five hours," she said, "and my mother walks in at two in the morning smelling like a whore. I don't know who I'm looking at."

The smell belonged to a college professor, and I could have said so. It would have been one more reason, and I let the word stay on me. The clock over the pie case said eight minutes past two.

"How did you find me?" I asked. "I never told Macy which hotel."

"I've still got my key."

She turned the ring over on the table, and it was there among the others, the brass one I had cut for her at the hardware store the summer she went off to Tech.

"Macy got me at the bank yesterday morning, before I'd listened to your message. She said you were in Mississippi over a hotel charge. So when we closed I drove to the house. The statement was on the counter by Daddy's thermos." She stopped there and started again. "You dusted around it."

"I did."

"There's dust on the lid, Mama, and the counter's wiped clean right up to the bottom of it."

"I know what the counter looks like."

"I sat at that table an hour. Then I drove."

I worked it out, since I have never been able to stop myself. The bank lets out at six on a Friday. Forty minutes to Farmerville, an hour in my kitchen, and five hours of pine trees put her at the front desk around a quarter to one, with a full day's work behind her and no supper. She had made the same drive I made, off the same sheet of paper. Royce had let that envelope come to the house, and I had left it lying open in a kitchen my daughter had a key to.

"The girl out front wouldn't give me your room," Shelby said. "She said she couldn't look up a guest."

"She told me the same."

"So I left my car out front and walked that parking deck till I found yours, and I stood beside it and called you. Then the girl at the desk felt sorry for me and said the coffee shop never closed." She tipped her head toward the counter. "That lady read Womack off my name tag and asked was I Jeri's girl. I asked her where you were, and she told me."

Denise had told her straight. In two days I had not found one person in that town who would lie for me.

Denise came by then with the pot. She set a cup in front of me and filled it, warmed Shelby's, and went away again without a word to either of us.

"You left me a message asking how I slept," Shelby said.

"I did."

"Who told you to do that?"

"A woman I met down here."

"Her?" She did not turn her head toward the corner.

"No. Another one. She dances across the road, and she's the one I went to see."

"A stripper told you to call and ask how I slept."

"Yes."

"It sounded like somebody told you." She put her thumb through the key ring and closed her fist around it. "You want to know how I sleep? About three hours. Then I wake up and tell him. I've told him in the yard and in his truck and on the phone from the bank parking lot, a hundred different ways. I get it right every time."

I had asked the question and gotten an honest answer. Poppy had told me to ask, and she had not said what a person does with what comes back. I kept my mouth shut and both palms around the cup.

"Four Christmases, Mama," Shelby said. "I sat across from him and passed him things."

"I know."

"You don't. Two years ago he gave me a set of tires. He had them put on my car while we ate, so I wouldn't lose a Saturday at the shop. I hugged his neck and thanked him, knowing what I knew." Her voice had gone thin. "This year Macy and I ate at her apartment, and neither one of us said his name."

Royce bought tires for those girls as other men buy flowers. I had written the check for that set myself and filed the receipt under her name.

"Then you called me at work, and I came," she said. "I picked up Macy and I came. I knew what you wanted us for before I got in the car."

"I know you did."

"I asked you. I said is it him that needs us or you, and you said my name at me. And I went and got my sister."

She was looking at the table now, and the words were coming faster.

"He was sending us home. He'd known since ten o'clock that morning, and the first thing he did when he walked in was try to get us out of that room. He was being good to us. I'm the one who stood up."

I let her name alone, since I had said it at her once too often already.

"He hasn't answered me in six weeks. I text him every morning. I tell him what the weather's doing in Ruston, because I don't know what else you say to him now." She pressed her lips together until they went white, and then she let them go. "He left because of what I said."

She was wrong, and I could have told her so in one sentence, but I held it back. I have been cutting that child off at her second sentence since she learned to talk, and she had not driven five hours to have it done to her again.

Neither of us spoke for a good while after that. Far back on the casino floor a machine paid out to nobody. Denise came around with the pot a second time, found two full cups, and kept walking. The clock over the pie case went from a quarter past two to twenty past, and for once I was not working backward from anything.

Shelby did not raise her eyes for what she said next.

"We'd cut the motor that day, Mama. I didn't just see your car."

Sound travels a long way over that cove. I knew what a warm October afternoon is on the D'Arbonne with a motor cut, when a person can make out a screen door from one bank to the other. I knew what had come out of that camp through the open windows, because it had come out of me. She had been twenty-three years old, in a boat with friends from Tech, and there was not one place on that water for her to go.

I had kept one small question unasked since the morning she stood in my kitchen door. What time did y'all come by? It was right there for me, and I looked at her name tag. I did not ask her what she heard, and I did not ask what she told the others in that boat. I had gone four years without asking, and across that table I was still at it.

She gave me long enough to ask. Then she nodded, once, as a person does who has had a figure confirmed.

"I never asked you why," she said. "I didn't in the kitchen, and I haven't since. I'm asking."

I had a why, under a minute of it, cut down from four, and I had said it to a picture of a heron two nights earlier and been pleased with the work. The first line of it had cost me Poppy's help. Juliet had told me at the bar to leave the rest of it out.

"I've got a speech," I said. "I drove down here with it."

"I don't want a speech."

"Then I don't have anything fit to hand you tonight. That's the truth."

There was another reason under the speech, and I had not yet said it aloud to anybody. I was not going to try it out first on my child.

She had waited four years to ask me, and I had given her nothing. Her eyes filled. Macy cries in cars and in kitchens, and Shelby had not let me watch her do it since she was eleven. She did not let me then. She held her eyes wide open until it went back down.

"I've had six or seven of them for you," she said. "You were lonesome. Daddy wouldn't talk. Mr. Lamar talked you into it. I'd pick one, depending on the day, so I could stand to sit at your table."

Two of those were in my speech, close to word for word.

I kept my hands on my own side of the table. I had been kind to that girl in a kitchen door four years before, and I had done it to get what I wanted.

"I can't give you a reason," I said. "I can tell you one true thing, and it isn't a reason. That morning in the kitchen. You think you decided not to tell him."

"I did decide."

"No. I asked you what it would do to him, and I kept asking till you said what I wanted. It took four minutes. I looked at the stove clock."

"You said you weren't going to tell me what to do."

"I know what I said. I do it to people all day at that window. I did it to you."

"And then you said thank you."

"Yes."

"In your office voice."

"Yes."

Her chin had come up, as it did that morning. I went on quickly, so that I would have no time to make it smaller.

"He didn't leave over what you said. He left over what I did, and over where I sat you when he walked in. I pulled that chair out for you on purpose. I wanted you to be the first thing he saw."

I had told two strangers about the stove clock at a bar table the night before, and it had come easier than this did. She sat back against the booth and studied me. I have been studied that way by an auditor.

"So I didn't even do that," she said. "Shit, Mama. Four years I've been sick over what I decided, and you're telling me I never decided a thing. You worked me like one of your past-due accounts. I sat behind that counter every afternoon after school and listened to you do it to grown men, and I didn't hear it when it was me."

"No. You weren't supposed to."

"That doesn't give me one Sunday back."

"No."

"And I still sat there. Whoever did the deciding, I'm the one who passed him the rolls."

"You are. I can't take that part off you."

"And I told Macy. I couldn't hold it by myself past Christmas, so I gave half of it to my little sister. You didn't make me do that."

"It started with me."

"Don't." She said it as she had said it to me in my kitchen, with her sister crying beside her. "You don't get to have all of it, Mama. Some of it's mine, and I'm keeping it."

For twenty-seven years I had sorted out what belonged to that girl. I let her keep what she claimed.

She picked her purse up out of her lap and put a ten-dollar bill under the rim of the plate, for eggs she had not touched.

"You've been down here two nights talking to a stranger," she said. "You haven't talked to me in four years."

Since that Saturday I had asked my daughter about her oil, her raise, her light bill, and whether she was seeing anybody.

She stood up with her keys.

"Where are you going?" I asked.

"I don't know yet."

It was her own question from the third of December and her father's answer to it. She had his voice for it too, low and rough. She stopped with her purse strap halfway to her shoulder, and her face told me she had heard whose words they were. Then she settled the strap and walked out through the gap in the ferns. I started up off the bench after her.

She went for the beach doors, and they opened before she got to them.

Poppy came in out of the cold with her canvas coat hanging open and her hair wet at the neck. She was barefoot, and her black heels were hooked over two fingers. They had been sitting at the edge of that stage when I left the Sand Dollar, so she had danced her two o'clock set and gone back for them. The clock said half past two.

She stepped aside to let a young woman by, and she read the name tag and then the shoulders. Then she looked across the half wall at me, and my face told her whose girl it was.

Shelby went past her without a glance and out into the strip of parking between the hotel and the beach highway.

"That yours?" Poppy asked.

She did not raise her voice to send it across the ferns, and she did not need to.

"That's Shelby."

Her eyes went once to the corner booth and came back to me. Those two had not spoken since she pushed a fifty-dollar bill across a table, and they did not speak then.

"Sit down, Jeri," she said.

She turned around on the carpet and went back out by the doors she had come in.

I was still halfway up, with one palm on the table and my purse on my arm. For most of her life I had followed that child to the door with a coat, or a sandwich, or the last word.

"Let her go."

It came from the corner, and it was the first thing Juliet had said since she gave my daughter her name. I did not know which of them she meant. It made no difference, since I had no say over either one. I sat back down on the end of the bench, facing the glass.

Shelby had gotten as far as her own front bumper. Her Honda was nosed up under the lot light, and she was down on the curb in front of it in her bank clothes with her arms around her knees. She had not put on a coat. I had one on my back, buttoned, with a lobby and a set of glass doors between me and her.

Poppy crossed the asphalt to her without hurrying. She set her shoes on the hood of the car and took off the canvas coat, and she laid it over my daughter's shoulders without asking first. Then she lowered herself to the curb beside her, in a T-shirt, in January, and put her bare feet down in the gutter.

She talked, and I could not hear one word of it. I had sat in that club an hour earlier while that woman spoke into another person's ear, and I had not heard that either. She kept her forearms on her knees and her eyes on the highway, as a person does who is talking to somebody in the next seat of a car, and she did not turn to see how it was being taken. Shelby kept her back straight and her face toward the pink sign across the road. She has sat that way since she was small, and so do I. The coat lay on her as it had been put, with the sleeves hanging empty. Mr. Odom, the security man, had turned around at the brass rail to watch them through the doors.

I looked once at the corner. Juliet was not watching me. She had her eyes on the glass too, and on the tall woman in the gutter, and her coffee was going cold in front of her as it had on the first night.

Out on the curb Poppy held up one hand with the fingers spread and then both of them, and I knew the count without hearing it, because she had given it to me at a table in the Schooner. She was telling my daughter how old she had been when her own mother went down that hill. Shelby turned her head then, for the first time, and looked down at the bare feet in the gutter and up at the face above them. She said a few words. Poppy answered with fewer and went on looking at the road.

Then Shelby's back gave. She bent over her knees, shaking under the lot light, and she caught the front of that coat in both fists and pulled it shut at her throat. Poppy did not put an arm around her. She reached over and drew the coat back up onto the shoulder it had slid from, and she put her hand back on her own knee. My daughter had driven five hours and sat half an hour across from her mother without letting that happen. It had taken a stranger with no shoes on about ten minutes.

Two nights earlier that woman had left my table because she had been ten years old once. She had offered to find my husband's truck and taken the offer away. Nobody had asked her to find my daughter.

I had driven to a lake camp for six years to be told to hold still, and out there it was easy. On that bench, with my child crying where I could see her and another woman beside her, it took all I had.

After a while Shelby wiped her face with the heel of her palm and asked a question. Poppy answered it and tipped her head east, up the highway. Shelby looked back once at the glass doors. The lobby was lit, and I was sitting in plain sight. She looked at me for about as long as she had looked at her eggs, and then she turned around.

They got up off the curb together. Poppy took her shoes down off the hood and left her coat on my daughter's back. She walked to an old square Volvo wagon two spaces down. I supposed she left it on the hotel side every night, since her nights ended at Denise's counter. When she backed it out one of the brake lights was dead. Nobody had told her, or somebody had and she had not minded.

Shelby's headlights came on, and the two cars went out of the lot one behind the other and turned east on the highway, with the wagon in front. It was ten minutes to three.

* * *

Denise came for the eggs. She scraped them onto a saucer, stacked the plate under it, and picked up the ten.

"She'll feed her," she said. "Twenty years I've seen her walk people out of here. She keeps a bed made up in the back of her house for it."

"Where?"

"Over in Ocean Springs."

"Will she bring her back?"

"That's up to your girl."

She did not call me hon. She wiped Shelby's side of the table and left mine as it was.

For six years I had decided what each person in my house was told and when. Now a woman who would not lift a finger for me had my child in her car, and Shelby would decide whether I was told anything.

I could have gone upstairs to a room with a heron in it and two made beds. I looked down the row instead. Juliet had her coat folded on the bench beside her and her cup in front of her, and she was looking at me as she had on the first night. She had not come to me this time, and I did not think she was going to.

I picked up my own cup and went to her. I sat down across from her with my back to the glass, where I could not watch the lot, and I left it to her to tell me who came in.

Chapter Seven

I had sat down with my back to the lobby doors on purpose, and inside of five minutes I knew what it was going to cost me. The corner booth left me the lunch counter along the wall at my right, with the pie case and the clock over it, and it put the lobby, the casino, and every door in that hotel behind me. Every time the glass slid open the cold came across my neck, and I had to read Juliet's face to learn who it was. Three times in that first quarter hour her eyes lifted over my shoulder and came back to me with nothing in them.

Denise came down the row with the pot and filled my cup. Juliet's was full to the rim, and it had been full since my daughter was still in the building.

"Do you ever drink that?" I asked.

"No. It's rent."

"On what?"

"The booth."

On the first night she had left five dollars under her saucer for a two-dollar cup, and I had put it down to carelessness with money. She had been paying Denise for the table.

"Is she going to bring my girl back?" I asked.

"I don't know. Neither do you. That's the part you can't stand."

She had that right. I could have stood a no. I have taken no from a loan officer and from my mother's doctor, and I knew what to do with each of them by the time I reached the parking lot. I had not been handed an I-don't-know in twenty years that I did not go to work on until it was a yes or a no.

I opened my mouth to ask her what I ought to do. It would have been one more request, and I stopped with my lips apart, because I was thinking of Mr. Seymour's knee.

Every old man on that rail had sat up straight for one plain question about his own life. I had watched it happen from a chair with wooden arms, and I had gone hunting through six years for a question I had asked my husband. I had not thought to hunt any nearer. I had told the woman across from me about my kitchen, my husband's keys, a Tuesday on a chenille spread, and four minutes by a stove clock. In two nights I had asked her what she was, what she was doing in Biloxi, and whether she had meant to break a rule. I had asked the first two to find out what use she could be to me. Everything I knew about her Poppy had gotten out of her at a bar table while I drank a Coke.

I did not know how it was done. I ask questions all day at my window, date of birth, insurance carrier, any change of address since your last visit, and not one of them is about the person standing there.

"Are you all right?" I asked. "After that. Over there."

It came out stiff, and she gave it more thought than it had earned.

"No," she said. "Not especially."

I had been ready for fine. I have said it myself in a pew with a clear foot of oak on either side of me.

"Nobody's asked me that in a while," she said. "Thank you."

She said it without the crooked smile, looking straight at me, and then she looked down into the cup she was not going to drink. I could not remember being thanked for a question.

"You told me on the median you didn't mean to," I said. "Does that happen to you much?"

"Almost never. That's the trouble with it."

"What did she say to you? In your ear."

"I'm keeping that one."

I had been refused all that week. Keandra could not look up a guest, Dewayne Tubbs couldn't say, Linh could do me a Coke, and Poppy had put two twenties under a syrup pitcher. Each of them had stood between me and what I was after. This woman was only keeping what was hers, and she had said so plainly. I did not mind that half as much.

"Why do you sit facing the door?" I asked.

"So I see who's coming."

"Who's coming?"

"Nobody. Not for a long time. I still sit here."

She said it in the same voice she had used to order whiskey, and it was plain that I had been given the one line I was going to get. I let it be. A woman does not learn to watch a door for nobody. Somebody had come through one once.

My own back was to that door for the first time since I could remember, and I had lasted a quarter of an hour before it began to itch between my shoulder blades.

* * *

By half past three the coffee had quit doing me any good. I had been up since eight o'clock on Friday morning, and my eyes stung with it. The blouse I had put on Friday evening gave off another woman's hairspray every time I moved my arms. My feet had swelled in my good shoes until I worked them off under the table with my toes and set my stocking feet on the cold tile. I was hungry, too, and I would not ask Denise for so much as toast, because the last plate she took from in front of me she had carried off without a word.

Juliet looked as she had looked at nine o'clock in the Schooner. She pushed her cup an inch to one side and laid her forearms on the table.

"You told your daughter you didn't have anything fit to hand her," she said. "What's the thing that isn't fit?"

She had been forty feet away for that, and she had it word for word.

"You told me to leave out why. At the bar."

"I did. You were using it to get out from under what happened. I've got what happened now."

I turned my cup around by the handle. I had kept this from her on Friday night with a bourbon in me, and I had kept it from my daughter an hour ago stone sober. I had never in my life said it aloud, because it is the smallest reason a woman ever had.

"I didn't love him," I said. "I didn't even like him much. He took the list out of my head."

"What list?"

"Pick any Tuesday. Payroll for three drivers was due Thursday, and one of them had a garnishment that came out first. The note on the number two truck. Two hundred recall postcards for Dr. Pruitt that had to go out by the fifteenth. Macy's car insurance, which was written at Lamar's agency, God help me. My mother's headstone, where they cut the wrong year and I fought the monument company from Easter to Thanksgiving. Which piece of the company mail Royce needed to see, and which I could answer myself and not trouble him with. What was for supper." I stopped for breath. "It runs all day. It runs in church. I have stood up for the doxology working out whether a check would clear by Monday."

She did not say a word, and I went on into the quiet.

"Out there he took the battery out of the clock, and for four hours I didn't have it. He had it. He was four hours a week when somebody else kept the time."

"Why him?" she asked. "Anybody can take a battery out of a clock."

"He asked. He was the only one who ever did." I thought about the rest of it. "And nothing out there was mine to keep up. It wasn't my roof or my spread or my skillet. If that camp had burned to the blocks on a Wednesday, I would not have had a call to make."

"Could you have put it down at home?"

"With Royce? He'd have dropped it."

"Did he ever?"

My answer was ready, and it was yes. Then I went looking for the occasion, so I could give it to her with the date on it, and I looked for some time.

"He asked me one spring to let him do the quarterly taxes," I said. "He said I had enough on me. He sat at the kitchen table two nights with the adding machine and got it done, and it was right. I know it was right because I checked it after he went to bed. I ran every figure again and recopied the form in my own hand before I mailed it. He saw my copy in the file. He did not ask me for the taxes again."

"So he never dropped it."

"I never left it with him long enough to find out." I turned my cup around again, and I said the rest of it to the cup. "I told Poppy on the first night that he quit talking to me, and it's in my speech in nearly those words. He did quit. I had also been answering that man's mail before he saw it for twenty-two years, and I don't know what I left him to talk about."

"He still went quiet," Juliet said. "That part's his, and you can't have it."

She gave me time to take that in, and then she went back to the list.

"What's on it right now?" she asked.

"Whether she ate. Whether that dead brake light gets the two of them pulled over. Whether I call Macy before Shelby does, or let Shelby have the telling of it. What I say first when those doors open. I've got two ways to say it, and I was choosing between them while you talked."

I shut my mouth.

"Who on that list did you ask?" Juliet asked.

"Ask what?"

"Anything. Whether they wanted it handled."

I thought about it honestly, which took longer than it should have. Royce never asked me to answer his mail. Macy never asked me to renew her policy. My mother, as far as I know, did not care what year was on her stone.

"Nobody," I said. "That's what the list is. It's me deciding what everybody can stand."

Poppy had said nearly those words to me over a basket of shrimp. This time I had said them myself.

"That's why it lasted six years," Juliet said. "It doesn't make one of them all right."

"I know that."

"Good. Then we can use it."

Every reason I had given anybody since December was meant to buy me a little room. This one bought me nothing, and I was grateful to have it treated as a fact.

"That's what I'd have handed her," I said. "Her mother did it for four hours of quiet."

"She asked you why. She didn't ask for a good one."

"She'll hate it."

"She might. She's been making up better ones for you for four years, and they haven't done her any good."

Shelby had six or seven reasons for me, and mine was smaller than any of them. If she asked me again, I would have to give it to her at that size.

* * *

It was four o'clock, and she had let me finish a cup of coffee. Somewhere behind me a cleaning crew had started a vacuum on the casino floor. The Tideline was kept cold for a crowd that had not come since October, and I had not had my coat off since I walked in from the highway.

"Say the speech," she said. "All of it."

"You've heard it. In pieces."

"I want to hear how it's built."

I sat up straight, as I had at the foot of a hotel bed two nights before, and I said it to her.

"Royce, I need you to hear me out before you say a word." I stopped there. "Two lines go here that I don't say anymore. One of them asks him to believe me about Lamar, and you answered that one at the bar. The other one tells him to go ask Lamar."

She nodded for me to go on.

"I need you to remember that you quit talking to me years before I ever did anything wrong. I'm asking you to set twenty-eight years next to six and look at them both. Come home and let me fix it."

Said across a table to a living person, it took about fifteen seconds. I had worked on it for six weeks.

"Now count what it asks him for," she said. "Count the two you skipped."

There was a wire caddy of sugar against the wall, white packets and pink ones. I count a deposit by laying the checks out in a row where I can touch each one, and I did the same with the sugar. I laid down a white packet for hear me out. I laid one for what he was to believe and one for asking Lamar. I laid one for remember, and one for setting the years side by side and looking at them. Come home was the sixth. I was reaching to put the caddy back before I saw that let me fix it was a seventh.

Seven packets lay in a row on the Formica. I had gotten seven requests into six sentences, and for six weeks I had admired the economy of it.

"How many of them say what you did?" she asked.

I went down the row with one finger. The word wrong was in there one time, in a clause I had hung on the back end of his fault.

"None," I said.

"Then say one that does. No packet."

I have written a past-due letter to a deacon and a letter of condolence to a patient's widow on the same morning, and I have never been stuck for a sentence. I folded my arms on the table and thought for a minute.

"I had an affair with Lamar Aycock, and I need you to know I never loved him."

She took a pink packet out of the caddy and slid it across to the end of my row.

"All right," I said. "I did it for six years, and I'm sorry, and I'm asking you to forgive me."

A second pink one came across. I started to tell her that sorry was not a request, and then I heard the last six words of what I had said.

Behind me the vacuum went the length of a row of machines and came back.

"I went out to that camp because you quit talking to me," I said. "That one doesn't ask him for anything."

"It asks him to take half."

She laid the third pink packet at the end of the row and squared it with the others. Ten packets of sugar lay between us, and my face was as hot as it had been on the night Poppy walked out. I took my arms off the table and put both palms on my knees, where they could not reach for anything.

The next one was a long time coming. When it came there was nothing to it.

"I went to that camp every Tuesday for six years," I said. "I liked it. I let you believe I was at work."

I looked at the caddy. She had not moved toward it.

"That one he can use," she said. "The rest is a bill."

I know bills. I have mailed ten thousand of them, and I know what a person does with one he cannot pay. He lays it on the kitchen counter by the telephone and walks around it for a month. I had been getting ready to find my husband and hand him seven.

Then I heard the three plain sentences as he was going to hear them. I had told a picture of a bird that I liked those Tuesdays, and I had told this woman at a bar. In neither place had I put Royce Womack on the other end of the word. He was going to stand somewhere on this coast with his work gloves in his back pocket and listen to his wife of twenty-eight years say she liked it.

"I can't say that to him," I said.

"You just said it."

"To you. You don't have to go on living after you hear it." My voice had gone up, and at the counter Denise quit wiping. "I know what the speech is. I counted it myself. But it leaves him a road home. It says I was lonesome and he was hard to live with, and a man can come back to that. You tell me what man comes back to a wife who looks him in the face and says she liked it."

"I don't know that he does."

I had braced for her to argue with me. I had my next three sentences lined up, and she had taken away what they were meant to push against.

"He might hear that and never come home," she said. "I won't tell you different. The speech has had six weeks, though, and he isn't home."

"He hasn't heard the speech."

"He's heard it for six years. Every Tuesday you came home with it already worked out, where you'd been and why."

I had carried a folder in from the car twice to prove I was running claims. I had stood at my own stove with my rings back on and told that man what a long day it had been at the office. He had been listening to my speech since before I knew I was writing one, and the three plain sentences were the only ones in me he had not already heard.

I cried then, for the first time since the wrong plate of eggs. It was not pretty crying, and my face felt boiled by the end of it. The napkins in the Tideline come out of a tin dispenser one thin square at a time. Juliet did not pull one for me, and she did not tell me it would be all right. She slid the whole dispenser across the table to my side and left it there, and I went through nine of them.

"What happens after you say it?" she asked, when I was through.

"He says his piece."

"And you?"

"I answer him."

"No. You listen. You've had six weeks to write yours. He gets to say his without you fixing it while he talks."

"I don't fix what people..."

"You were choosing between two openings for your daughter while I was talking to you."

I had nothing to say to it.

* * *

I put the white packets back in the caddy one at a time and left the three pink ones where they lay.

"Poppy says ten years at a table," I said.

"She's right about the mending. It does take a table, and it does take years. You're not at the mending. You haven't said it to him yet."

"And you think I ought to."

"I think I've never seen a true thing get easier to say by waiting." She had her forearms on the table, and she had not looked at the door in some time. "I've known people who waited. One man was going to tell his wife after the holidays, and he said so for eleven years of holidays. One woman had it written out and kept it folded in her Bible until her husband died. Every one of them believed they were being kind. What they were doing was deciding it for the other person. You know how that goes."

"I know how it goes," I said. "Is that what people pay you for? One sentence with no packet on it?"

"Most of the time. Some of them take four months to get there."

"And then what?"

"Then I go home."

"You don't find out how it came out?"

"Sometimes they write."

"Do you write back?"

"No."

Poppy wrote to every one of hers at Christmas for as long as they would answer. I had heard her say so at the round table, and I had heard the pride in it.

"That's a hard way to do it," I said.

"It's a clean one."

"She'd call it cold."

"She called it worse. Friday, in front of you." She came near to smiling. "Cold gets it said. I've watched warm go eleven years."

"You get it said and you go back to New Orleans. I have to live in Farmerville afterward. I have to stand in line at the Brookshire's behind Gayla Aycock."

"Yes. That's the part I don't do, and she does. I can get you to the door. I've never been much good on the other side of it."

"He might not want to hear it," I said. "He drove five hours to get away from me."

"He might not. Then he'll tell you so, and that will be his to say. Right now you've guessed what he can stand to hear, and both of you are living by it."

"I don't know where he is," I said.

"No. Somebody does."

A question about a bridge came back to me then, one that had gone by me at that round table between the shrimp and the sweet tea. I turned it over and could not find what it was fastened to.

"For what it's worth," she said, "that's the worst speech I've heard since a man proposed with a spreadsheet."

I laughed. I had my elbow on the table and my forehead in my palm, two nights from my own bed, and I laughed until Denise looked over from the counter.

"I wrote most of it in the shower," I said.

"It has that sound."

"Did she say yes? The spreadsheet."

"She asked to see his assumptions."

* * *

I knew it was getting light by her face. The gray came up on one side of it, along the cheekbone and the short hair over her ear, and I turned around on the bench for the first time since I sat down. The beach doors had gone the color of dishwater. Across the highway somebody had turned off the pink sign.

It was half past six. Mr. Ladner had come in behind my back in his Saints jacket and taken the first booth with a fresh keno card, and Denise was counting her drawer. The telephone on the wall by the pie case rang, and she let it go three times while she finished a stack of ones.

"Tideline," she said.

She listened a good while. She said uh-huh twice and looked down the row at the two of us. Then she took the pencil off her ear, wrote on her order pad, and tore off the slip. She brought it to the corner booth and held it out to Juliet.

"That was Poppy," she said. "Dinner's at two. She said, 'Bring her.'"

"Is Shelby..." I asked.

"She ate. She's asleep." Denise put the pencil back. "Waffle and both sausages."

It was Poppy's own breakfast, the one she had eaten across from me on the first night with her elbows on the table. Denise still did not call me hon. She had told me what my child ate, though, and no one had made her.

Juliet read the slip and turned it around on the table so that it faced me. It gave a number on Ruskin Avenue in Ocean Springs, in a waitress's quick square hand, with the two o'clock underlined. My name was nowhere on it. For twenty-eight years I had said who came to dinner at my house and where each one sat, and I was going to this one as her.

"Go sleep four hours," Juliet said. "You're driving."

"Don't you have a car?"

"I have a car. I want to look at the water."

I worked my feet back into my shoes, which took some doing, and got up. My knees had set while I sat there, and I held the edge of the table until they would take me. I picked the three pink packets up off the table and put them in my coat pocket with my key card.

At the gap in the ferns I looked back. She had turned the slip around again and was reading the address a second time, with her lips a little apart. Then she lifted that cup of cold coffee and drank from it.

Chapter Eight

I slept four hours on top of the bedspread and woke at a quarter to eleven with the heron looking at me. I showered until the last of the Sand Dollar had gone down the drain, put on the one clean blouse left in my suitcase, and sat down on the door side of the bed with my telephone. I did not let myself work out what I was going to say. Juliet had caught me choosing between two openings at four in the morning, and I dialed so that I would have no time to build a third.

Macy answered on the first ring.

"Mama? Is it Daddy?"

"No, baby. I haven't found him. I'm not calling to ask you for anything. I want to tell you one thing, and then you can hang up on me if you want to."

She was quiet, and a television that had been going behind her went off.

"It was mine, Macy. Start to finish. I went out to that camp for six years because I wanted to, and when it came apart I put you and your sister in that kitchen so I would not have to stand there by myself. I can't tell you why your daddy left. That's his to say, and I've quit saying it for him. I can tell you what I did, and none of what I did was yours."

At two o'clock that morning I had told Shelby what her father left over, as though he had told me. I had learned since then to leave that man's reasons to him.

"Is Shelby with you?" she asked. "She's not answering."

"She's on the coast. She's safe, and she's been fed, and she's asleep in a house across the bay. She'll call you when she wants to. I'm not going to tell you what she'll say."

"Did y'all fight?"

"She said what she came to say. I had it coming."

Macy started to cry, as she has done easily since she was a baby. For twenty-five years I have told her to hush, or to blow her nose, or to go lie down. I held the telephone and listened to all of it.

"Are you coming home?" she asked.

"Not today."

"Okay." She blew her nose without being told. "Mama? You sound different."

"I've been up all night."

"That's not it," she said, and she told me she loved me and hung up without waiting to hear it back.

I sat there with the dial tone. I had not told my daughter to go to sleep, and I had not told her what to tell her father if he called. It had taken three minutes, and I was more tired from what I had kept from doing than I had been from five hours of Highway 49.

* * *

Juliet was waiting under the awning at one o'clock with her coat over her arm. She had on a white shirt with the cuffs turned back twice. In three nights I had seen that woman in nothing but dark wool, and the white made her look younger and less sure of herself. She had dressed for somebody. I did not suppose it was me, and I kept my mouth shut about it, which I am learning to do.

"I called my younger girl," I said, when we were in the car. "I didn't put one packet in it."

"How was it?"

"Short. She said I sounded different."

"You do."

I let that ride for a block. Then I tried the other thing I had learned in that booth.

"Are you nervous?"

"Yes."

"Of her?"

"Of her table," Juliet said. "I've read about it for a long time. It's been a long time since I was asked to one."

She had turned her face to the window, and I did not ask whose table the last one had been. The beach highway ran east past the Sand Dollar, which by daylight was a cinder-block box the color of a Band-Aid, and past the marina at Point Cadet where I had shown my husband's picture to a man with a bait cooler. The bridge stood right over that marina. I had walked under the foot of it on Friday without it entering my head that a person might go across.

It went up high and white over the mouth of the bay, a mile and a half of it, with the water gray on the left and gray on the right and the island lying out low to the south. Juliet turned in her seat to look, as she had said she would. She watched a line of pelicans the whole way down the far side.

Poppy had asked me a question at the round table on Friday, between the shrimp and the sweet tea. You go over the bridge? By the top of that bridge I thought I had it placed. Her town was over here, with her college and her house, and she had been asking whether I had strayed onto her side of the water. I was satisfied with that. I was wrong, and I would not find out how wrong until Sunday.

Off the end of the bridge the road came down among live oaks. Back to the right, over the roofs, I could see the outriggers of three or four shrimp boats standing up out of a harbor I had not known was there. I had hunted two marinas on Friday and never thought there was another town to look in. I took my foot off the gas.

"You want to stop?" Juliet asked.

Royce had talked for twenty years about one week of fishing on this coast, and I could have walked that harbor and its parking lot in a quarter of an hour. On Thursday night I would have. I had gone over four levels of a parking deck with a suitcase bumping behind me, wanting nothing in this world but a white Ford with a crease in the tailgate.

It was Saturday now, and I did not know what I would do if I found one. I had three plain sentences and no speech. I did not know whether that man was eating, or whether he slept, or whether six weeks by himself had done him good or harm, and for the first time I was afraid of the answer for his sake and not for my own. My daughter was in a house somewhere up that road, besides, behind a door I had been told I could come to at two o'clock.

"No," I said. "Shelby's up there. I'm not going to be late to the one door anybody has opened for me."

* * *

Ruskin Avenue was a short street of old houses set back under oaks, with oyster shell for driveways. Poppy's was a raised cottage, up on brick piers high enough for a dog to sleep under, with a porch across the whole front and paint the gray of a dove. A row of clay pots stood along the porch rail, every one a different shape and none of them quite round, and I took them for the work of the potters who had started her college. The Volvo wagon sat in the drive with my daughter's Honda pulled up close behind it.

I put my palm on the hood of the Honda going by. It was cold, having sat there since three in the morning, as I knew perfectly well, and I had to touch it anyhow.

Poppy came to the screen door before we reached the steps. She was barefoot on the porch boards in a pair of men's khaki pants rolled at the ankle, with a dish towel over her shoulder and flour up both forearms. Her hair was tied in a knot on top of her head. No glitter was on her anywhere. She looked from me to Juliet and wiped her hands on the towel, and then she wiped them again.

She had walked into the Tideline and the Schooner with her mouth already going. On her own porch, at one-thirty on a Saturday, she did not have a joke ready, and I watched her look for one.

"You look different in daylight," she said to Juliet.

"So do you."

"I look fifty-five in daylight."

"I know. I read the note."

Poppy laughed through her nose. They had not said a word to each other since she pushed a fifty-dollar bill across a table in a strip club, and those four lines were what they had found to say. Neither of them had moved to shake hands. I do not think either one knew what she was allowed to touch.

Daylight was her word, and I knew what it does to a woman past fifty. I had kept my clothes on in it since the year of my operation, when I was forty, and in twelve years only one man had gotten them off me with the sun up.

Then Poppy turned those gray eyes on me, and she had no trouble finding what to say.

"I'm feeding you," she said. "That's not the same as helping you, and I want it said at the door."

"All right."

"Your girl's in the back bedroom. She's asleep, and that door stays shut till she opens it. You don't knock on it, and you don't stand outside it listening."

"She's my daughter."

"Yes, ma'am. And in this house she's company, and company sleeps till it wakes up."

"I only want to look at her."

"I know what you want. I've got a pretty good idea what she wants, too, since she told me, and looking wasn't on it." She held the screen door open with her hip. "Come in or go back to Biloxi, Jeri. The dumplings won't wait on either one."

A girl at a desk had kept me out of a hotel register, and my husband had kept me out of the company's books. Being kept out of a hallway with my own child at the end of it was worse than both. I went in. Her canvas coat hung on a peg inside the door, so I knew at least that Shelby had been warm enough to take it off. The house smelled of chicken broth and black pepper and old pine boards, and under those it smelled of cocoa butter.

* * *

The front of that house was one long room with a kitchen at the far end of it, and nearly all of the room was table. It was pine, scrubbed pale, as long as a church pew, with fourteen chairs around it by my count, of which no two matched. Along the back wall ran shelves from the floor to the ceiling, and the shelves held cardboard file boxes, one after another, each with a year written on the end in black marker. I counted those too and got twenty-two. I keep a clean house, and I looked along the tops of them for dust and found none.

"Christmas," Poppy said, when she saw me doing it. "One box a year. Don't open any, they're not mine to show. And quit hunting dust. I dust those boxes and not one other thing in this house, so I'll thank you not to look up at the fan."

A hall opened off the wall across from the shelves. Down it I could see three doors, and the last one was shut.

Juliet took a chair that gave her the front door. I took the one across from her, which gave me the hall. I had been sitting in it under a minute when Poppy looked down the table at me with a spoon in her fist.

"You can't sit," she said. "Look at you. You've counted my chairs and my boxes, and you've got your purse in your lap in my house. You'll be counting the dumplings next. Plates are in the cupboard left of the sink. Set the table."

"For three?"

"Four. She may get up."

I have set a table for my family ten thousand times, and it never cost me a thought. I laid four stoneware plates at the kitchen end of fourteen chairs, with a fork and a spoon and a paper napkin folded in a triangle. The fourth one I set at the place nearest the hall. I did not know whether a soul would sit down to it, and for once it was not mine to say.

She had made chicken and dumplings in an iron pot, with a skillet of cornbread, a bowl of greens, and satsumas in a blue dish with the leaves still on them. It was hill food and no kin to anything they served across the bay. There was a pitcher of sweet tea on the table.

"What will you drink?" she asked Juliet. "There's tea, there's water, and there's buttermilk. That's the whole cellar."

"Water."

"I don't keep the other. I never have."

She gave no reason for it, and Juliet asked for none. Poppy served the three plates herself and left the fourth one bare. Then she sat down at the head of her table and picked up her fork, and she saw that I had not picked up mine.

"You're waiting on a blessing," she said. "Go ahead, if you've got one. Nobody's said one at this table since a Baptist from Laurel, and that was before the storm. He went nine minutes. The gravy skinned over."

I bowed my head, since I had been raised to and could not eat with it up. Then I found that I did not have one. In twenty-eight years I had not asked a blessing at my own table. Royce said it, the same short one at every meal unless there was company to ask, with his cap on his knee. I knew it by heart in his voice and no other way.

"Lord, we thank you for this food," I said, "and for the hands that fixed it. Amen."

It came out of me in his order, with his stop in the middle. I had fixed that food for twenty-eight years and heard my own hands thanked over it morning and night, and most days I had been reaching for the gravy before he got to amen. When I looked up, Poppy had her fork down and her eyes on me, and Juliet was watching me with her water glass stopped halfway up.

"That's a good plain one," Poppy said. "Whose is it?"

"My husband's."

"I figured."

She ate then as she had eaten her waffle, with her elbows on the table and her whole attention.

I was hungrier than I had been in six weeks. I ate two helpings of dumplings and was ashamed of the second until I looked across the table. On Friday night Juliet had taken one french fry out of a basket and considered it. Now she cleaned her plate, mopped it with cornbread, and peeled a satsuma, and Poppy watched every bite of it go down with a satisfaction she did not try to hide.

"Lord, look at her," Poppy said to the room. "Denise told me she ran on coffee she doesn't drink. I've had hogs that were pickier."

"I've been told I'm a pleasure to cook for," Juliet said.

"By who?"

"Nobody recently."

"Well. Have another, then, and I'll tell you myself."

She ladled it out without waiting for a yes. She did not offer me a third, and I did not ask for one.

"I saw shrimp boats coming off the bridge," I said. "Back in behind the trees. I never knew there was a harbor on this side."

Poppy had the ladle over the pot. She set it down in the dumplings and reached for the cornbread.

"There's two," she said. "Eat that while it's hot."

Since Thursday I had not seen that woman let a subject go by her without chasing it, and she had let that one walk right past her. I had been told to eat by her before, though, and I ate. Juliet had stopped chewing. She looked at Poppy for some time, and Poppy did not look back.

* * *

I had learned one thing at four in the morning, and I meant to find out whether I could do it twice.

"Did you never marry?" I asked.

Poppy looked up from her greens. On Friday I had asked that woman a dozen questions to find out what I was dealing with. This one I asked for no use of my own, and she heard the difference.

"No."

"Did you want to?"

"I got asked. Twice by men who meant it." She pulled a satsuma toward her and dug her thumb into it. "I'd have had to let one of them stay."

She tipped her head toward Juliet without looking at her.

"She told you why on Friday night, in front of God and Mr. Seymour. I'm not going to say it any better than she did, and I'm not going to say it again."

It was the only time I saw that woman give anybody the last word on herself, and Juliet had the grace to let it lie.

I might have left it there. But there was one more box in that room, and I had been looking at it since I set the table. It sat on top of the refrigerator by itself, a boot box with the lid on and no year written on it anywhere.

"What's in that one?" I asked.

She did not turn around to see which one I meant.

"Those are my mother's."

"Is she living?"

"Seventy-nine. She's in Harrison, Arkansas, in a duplex behind a Methodist church. She's written me every Christmas since I was nineteen. There's thirty-six in there. I answered the first one."

"Do you read them?"

"Every one, the day it comes. I stand right there at that counter with my coat on."

I thought of ten packets of sugar on a table.

"Does she ask you for anything?"

Poppy quit peeling. She gave me the long measuring look she had given me over the pancakes.

"Now who taught you to ask that?" she asked. "Every year. It's the same every year. She wants me to write back and say I turned out fine."

"And you did turn out fine."

"That's not hers to be told."

"She's seventy-nine years old."

"I can count."

"She'll die, and you'll have a box."

"I'll have a box either way." Her voice had not gone up. "You'd take her side."

"I'm not taking it. I'm sitting on it. I'm at your table with a child down the hall who walked out on me, and you're telling me a woman can write for thirty-six years and not get one line back."

"I'm telling you she's written thirty-six letters and every one of them still tells me how I am." She set the satsuma down in its peel. "She could send one with no asking in it. One. I'd know it if I got it. I've been waiting on it thirty-five years."

"What if she doesn't know how?"

"Then she can learn. You did, and it took you one night and some sugar."

So Denise had told her that as well.

"Somebody showed me," I said. "That one sat up with me till daylight and slid a packet across the table every time I got it wrong. Who's showing your mother? You read every letter standing at that counter, and you put it in a box. You wrote her three words when you were nineteen. She has been getting it wrong for thirty-five years to a woman who has never told her what's the matter with the letter."

Poppy opened her mouth to answer me, and nothing came out of it. I had not seen that happen. She picked up the satsuma she had peeled, looked at it, and laid it back in its skin.

I looked down the hall at the shut door. I had driven to Mississippi with a speech that asked a man for seven things. Until that minute I had not thought past him to what I would write my daughter if she quit answering, or how many Christmases I would go on asking her to tell me she was fine.

"I write eighty-one letters every December," Poppy said, after a while, and she said it to the table. "It takes me from Thanksgiving to the fifteenth. I've never written that one."

Juliet had not spoken in some time. She had gone still, with half a satsuma in her fingers, and she was looking at the boot box on top of the refrigerator. Poppy saw her looking and let her alone.

* * *

Poppy cleared the three plates and left the fourth where it was. She went to a teacher's canvas book bag by the front door and came back with a book. She did not hand it to Juliet. She laid it on the pine in front of me and sat down again.

It had a navy cover with silver letters and no picture. The spine was broken white in two places, and slips of yellow paper stuck out of it along the whole edge.

"Read me the cover," she said.

"The Architecture of Intimacy." I read the line under it, and then I read it again. "Juliet Winters."

At First Baptist the word intimacy is said from the pulpit and nowhere else, and I could not think what a book would be doing with it on the cover. Across the table Juliet's eyes were on those silver letters, and that color had come up in her face that I had seen once before, at a round table, when another woman's lips moved along with hers.

"I know who you are," Poppy said to her. "I've known since Friday night. I didn't say it in front of Linh because she'd have come over the bar."

"You wrote a book," I said.

"One," Juliet said.

It was what she had said to Poppy across a basket of shrimp, and it was out of my own mouth now. For three nights I had sat across from that woman without her last name. I had told her about a chenille spread.

"You let me sit there," I said. "Thursday and Friday and all last night. You had your name on a book, and you let me buy my own Coke and tell you what I did on Tuesdays."

"You didn't ask."

"I asked what you were. The first night. I asked were you a counselor."

"And I told you I wasn't. That was true." She did not look away from me. "You asked what I was so you'd know what I was good for. I answered what you asked."

I had come to the same count myself at three o'clock that morning, and it did not sit any easier for being handed back to me. I was angry, and I had no place to put it down. She had not told me one lie. I am careful about that myself, and I know how much a person can keep back without telling one.

"How long have you had this?" I asked Poppy.

"Three years this Christmas. A woman in Lafayette mailed it to me. I fed her nine years ago, when her husband went to Houston with the church organist, and she's written me every December since. She put a note in it. It said, 'This one says what you say and charges more.'"

Juliet laughed out loud. It was the laugh I had heard in the Sand Dollar, with her head back, and Poppy looked pleased with herself for getting it.

"I've taught the fourth chapter two years running," Poppy said. "I've got a course called Who Gets to Tell It. It's the best I've read on leaving by somebody who has plainly done it, and I'd have told you so Friday if I had liked you better then. All I had was a name on a cover. There's no picture on yours either."

"No."

"Open it where the fat flag is, Jeri. Read me what's underlined."

The book fell open there by itself. A sentence was marked in pencil, with a line down the margin and one word beside it in a slanting hand. The word was yes.

"Whoever leaves gets to tell it first," I read. "Whoever stays has to live in the telling."

I had heard that on Friday night. I had taken it for a thing a clever woman says across a table, and I had turned it over trying to find my side of it while the two of them looked at each other. Down at the rail a college girl had stopped with her knife in the air and her mouth open.

"Linh knew," I said.

"Linh had that on a midterm."

"And you sat there and let me think you two had never laid eyes on each other."

"We hadn't. I'd laid eyes on her sentences." Poppy leaned back in her chair. "You heard it Friday. I asked the whole class this in October, and I'll ask you. Which one are you?"

I had not been able to settle that on Friday. Royce had gone and I had stayed, and the sum would not come out even. I put my finger on the page under the line and went at it as I would a column that will not foot.

"I left first," I said. "Every Tuesday for six years I left that house, and every Tuesday I came home and told it. Where I'd been, how late the claims ran. I told it first three hundred times, and he lived in it." I had to stop and get my breath. "Then Gayla Aycock told it first, in my own office, and now it's me that lives in hers. I've been on both ends of your sentence. I didn't like the second one."

"Nobody does," Juliet said.

It was the first she had spoken about her own book, and she said it to the table.

"My mother told mine first," Poppy said. "She wrote down how I took it before I'd opened my mouth. That's why I teach that page. It's the only time I've seen it said in under twenty words."

* * *

"Have you got mine?" Poppy asked.

She said it lightly, but she had her bare feet hooked around the legs of her chair.

Juliet reached into the coat on the back of her seat and brought out a small gray hardback about the size of a hymnal. She set it on the table beside the navy one. The Long Table, it said on the front, and under that, Poppy Tullos. The cloth was worn through at the corners.

Poppy picked it up and opened it to the title page, where a library had stamped it in purple ink. WITHDRAWN. She turned to the back, where the slip for the due dates was still glued in with three stamps on it.

"Two of those are mine," Juliet said. "They put it on a sale cart my last year. It cost me fifty cents."

"I got nine hundred dollars for that book and a line on my vita." Poppy ran her thumb over the stamps. "You and one other soul, in how many years?"

"It was on a shelf nobody went to."

"So you keep telling me."

I had been promised an answer on Friday night, or Poppy had, and I had heard the promise made. I put my question in before either of them could get past me again.

"You told her you weren't going to say why you were in Biloxi. You said tonight. It isn't night."

Juliet moved her water glass off the wet ring it had made and set it down on dry wood.

"I'm taking some time off," she said. "I had a hard year. I wanted to sit at a table where I wasn't the one working, and the only one I knew of was in the back of a book."

"The last page," Poppy said.

"It thanks the Sand Dollar and a waitress named Denise. So I drove over from New Orleans and found Denise."

"And sat three hours on one cup, watching the door."

"You told me nobody was coming," I said. "At four o'clock this morning you said nobody had come for a long time."

"Nobody I was afraid of." She said it to me, and then her eyes went to the head of the table. "Thursday I was watching for her. That's a different way to watch a door. I'd forgotten I knew how."

Poppy had the gray book open in both hands. She closed it, got up, went to the sink, and ran water into a pot that was already clean, with her back to the two of us. It ran a good while.

I am not quick about such things. I had needed the whole of a lap dance to see what was between those two, and I needed that pot of water to see that time off was the least of what Juliet had driven ninety miles for.

"What did you think you'd find?" Poppy asked, without turning around.

"I had you dead."

Poppy shut off the water.

"Dead."

"It was an old book, and there was no picture. I thought dead, or eighty in Vermont."

"I'm fifty-five, and I took my clothes off for you."

"Yes. That wasn't in the book."

Poppy came back to the table laughing, with a dish towel in her fist, and she had to sit down to finish.

"I had you sixty," she said. "A gray bun and a cardigan, and somebody's widow. You write like a woman who's buried people."

Juliet did not laugh at that, and she did not answer it.

"I had you at forty," I said to Poppy. "And I had her for a gambler waiting out a bad night."

"Well, you weren't far off on that one," Poppy said.

* * *

I turned the navy book over. The back had four lines of print and no photograph. I had given this woman my kitchen, my Tuesdays, and four minutes by a stove clock. She had a name printed in silver, and for three nights I had not thought to ask what she did with what people told her.

"Am I going in one?" I asked.

"No."

"She doesn't," Poppy said. "I checked. Two hundred pages, and there's not one name in it but hers."

Down the hall a pipe knocked, and water ran in a bathroom. I came half out of my chair. The water stopped, and a door opened. My daughter's bare feet crossed the boards, four steps, and I have known the sound of them on a hall floor since she was two.

"Sit," Poppy said.

The far door closed again, and the latch clicked.

I sat down beside the fourth plate, which lay at my elbow with its napkin folded in a triangle and had not been touched.

Poppy reached over to the empty chair beside her and brought up a laptop computer. She opened it on the table where her own plate had been and turned the screen so that all three of us could see.

"There's forty thousand strangers who do write about her, though," she said. "We're not through."

Chapter Nine

The page on that screen had Juliet's name across the top in plain black letters, with a small r and a slash in front of it. Under the name it gave two counts, as a bank statement gives a balance and then what a person can draw on. The first was forty thousand, one hundred and twelve. The second was three hundred and six, and the words beside it were here now.

"Here where?" I asked.

"That's what I said, at four o'clock this morning." Poppy pulled one bare foot up onto the seat of her chair. "Your girl went down about a quarter till. I sat right here with this thing until it was light enough to call Denise."

That accounted for a telephone ringing at the Tideline at half past six, from a woman who had danced until two.

"I don't look up the people I teach," she said. "I read what they put on the page, and that's the deal. I'd had her name on a cover three years and never typed it into one thing."

"You typed it last night."

"I did. I didn't care for how bad I wanted to."

She said it to me and kept her eyes off the other side of the table. Juliet was reading the two counts, and she went on reading them a good deal longer than two numbers take. On a Saturday afternoon in January, three hundred and six people had found nothing better to do than look at a page with her name on it, and she was sitting in a kitchen in Mississippi with cornbread crumbs on her cuff.

Down the hall the latch clicked.

I did not come up out of my chair this time. I took hold of the edge of the seat on both sides and stayed in it. Shelby walked up the hall barefoot, in the gray slacks she had worn to the bank on Friday and a green sweatshirt that hung to her hips, with FORT BAYOU across the front of it. Her hair was wet and combed straight back. The name tag was off. She'd had it on in my kitchen on the third of December, having come straight from work, and she'd had it on in the Tideline, and without it she looked about nineteen.

Her eyes went past me to the iron pot on the stove.

"Is there any of that left?" she asked Poppy.

"Sit. That one's yours. Your mama set it."

Shelby stopped behind the chair at my elbow and looked down at the plate. I fold a paper napkin corner to corner, as my mother did, and that child has found one beside her fork since she ate in a high chair. She stood there long enough that I thought she would take the plate around to the other side. Then she pulled the chair out and sat down in it, a foot from my arm, where I could not see her face without turning my whole head to stare. I kept my head where it was. Her wet hair smelled of lemons, and the damp of it reached my sleeve.

Poppy took the plate to the stove and brought it back full, with a square of cornbread on the rim.

"I used the last of your shampoo," Shelby said.

"That's dish soap. I put it in the nice bottle for company."

"It worked."

"It works on the skillet, too."

They had known each other thirteen hours. In that time my daughter had cried in front of that woman, eaten her waffle, slept under her roof and washed her hair in her bathroom, and they talked across my plate with the ease of two people who have shared a kitchen for years. I had been handed a ruling at the door on what I was allowed to look at.

"You sleep?" Poppy asked.

"Some."

"You decide?"

"Not yet."

I did not know what had been put to her to decide. It might have been whether to drive home, or whether to call her sister, or whether to say one word to me. On Thursday I would have had it out of one of them before the cornbread was buttered. I kept my mouth shut, and I was pleased with myself for about as long as it took her to pick up her fork.

She had dumplings and bread on that plate and nothing green.

"Put some greens on that," I said. "You haven't had a vegetable since Thursday."

"Jeri," Poppy said.

Shelby went on chewing. She swallowed, and she answered me without turning, in a voice she might have used on a customer.

"I've fed myself since I was fifteen, Mama. The year of your operation I cooked supper in that house for six weeks. Daddy walked around in his sock feet the whole time so you could sleep."

The heat went up my neck to my ears. I had forgotten the sock feet. I remembered a bedroom with the shades pulled and a girl bringing me a tray, and I had not thought in twelve years about what I listened to through that door. He had left his boots on the back steps every evening of those six weeks. He had gone up and down my hall as quietly as a man in a sickroom, which is what he took it for, and I had lain there with a pillow under my knees listening to him be careful of me.

"I know who she is," Shelby said. She tipped her fork toward the head of the table. "She told me before I'd finished the waffle. I told you that you smelled like a whore, Mama, and it was her on you. A woman who was fixing to give me her bed."

"I've been called worse by people who tipped," Poppy said.

Shelby did not smile, but her shoulders came down an inch. That had been settled between the two of them at three in the morning, then, and nobody had needed me for it.

* * *

"We'd got as far as Juliet Winters and her forty thousand," Poppy said, and she turned the laptop a few inches back toward herself.

Shelby's fork stopped over the plate.

"Juliet Winters. Why do I know that?" She looked across the table. "That's you. From last night."

"Yes," Juliet said.

"I've seen that name written down someplace. I can't think where."

She took her telephone out of her pocket and laid it beside her plate, and she went at it with one thumb while she ate with the other hand. Her father never allowed one at his table. I had enforced that rule for him for as long as those girls had telephones, and this was not my table.

"What is that page?" I asked. "Whose is it?"

"It's Reddit, Mama. It's a website. You say that one r slash Juliet Winters. Anybody can start a page about anything, and strangers come talk on it. There's one for the watermelon festival."

"Forty thousand people belong to a club about her?"

"Nobody belongs to anything. You push a button."

For twenty-seven years I had been the one to tell that girl how things worked, from a shoelace to a checking account. She told me this in the patient voice I use at my window on a man who cannot follow his own deductible. I had it coming, and I took it.

"Somebody has to be over it," I said. "Who started it?"

I asked Poppy. The answer came from across the table.

"I did," Juliet said.

Poppy looked up from the screen. Whatever she had read between four o'clock and daylight, that had not been in it.

"I was new in Los Angeles. I had a doctorate and no clients, and I thought that was how you got your name out."

I knew what that was. The first year we had the truck I put a card on the board at the feed store and another one at the Exxon, with our kitchen telephone on both, and I checked every week to see whether anybody had torn off a number.

"Did they come?"

"Forty-seven people. I wrote three questions to get in, and I read every answer myself."

"Riddles," Poppy said. "The old ones are still on here. One's about a wall with no door in it."

"I was young. I thought they were good."

"What did you want with riddles?" I asked. "I'd have taken anybody who could pay."

"She didn't want anybody," Poppy said. "She wanted the ones who'd sit up half the night over a wall with no door."

"Then about a hundred," Juliet said. "I knew every one of them by a made-up name."

"That's the vainest thing I ever heard," Poppy said. "A page about yourself."

"You thanked a strip club on your last page and waited for somebody to read it."

Poppy opened her mouth. For the second time at that table nothing came out of it, and she bent over the laptop and ran her finger down the pad.

"Here's where it got away from you," she said. "I'll read it as it's written. 'Friend of a friend works at the capitol. JW spent four months with our governor and the first lady, and they quit keeping separate bedrooms. Don't ask me which state.'"

"Which state?" Shelby asked.

"It doesn't say. That's why it traveled. Every soul who read it figured it was theirs."

"Is it so?" I asked.

"I'm not going to tell you whether that's true," Juliet said.

"You'd tell me if it wasn't."

She did not answer that, and she did not look away from me either. I have sat behind a counter long enough to know when a person has given all she means to give.

"Thousands of people asked to get in, inside a week," she said. "I tried to shut it down and found out you can't. They don't let you delete one."

"A person can't take down her own page?" I asked the girl beside me, with my eyes on my tea.

"No, ma'am," Shelby said. "You can quit one. You can't kill it."

"So I took my name off as the one running it, and I left," Juliet said. "It sat there with nobody. Then a stranger asked the company for it, and they gave it to him. He filled out a form."

"They gave a thing with your name on it to a man you never met," I said.

"He opened it up and took the questions off. Fifteen thousand."

"And you let it stand?"

"I'm aware of it. That's all I get to be."

She said it in the voice she had used on Friday to say what she charged.

"Then a boxer," Poppy said. "Alma Coronado. Sixteen seconds on a dance floor in a club in Las Vegas called the Labyrinth."

"I saw that," Shelby said. "Everybody saw that."

"I didn't," I said.

"It's two women dancing, Mama. One of them's a champion fighter in a black dress, and the other one's the woman she was signed to fight. Somebody held up a telephone." She kept her eyes on her plate. "It's not dancing you'd do at a wedding."

"She had that other woman's leg between hers and her head down on her shoulder," Poppy said, "and I've worked a pole better than thirty years. I know a dance from the other, and that was the other. Dale showed it to me on his telephone before I'd set my shoes down."

I had held a slip in my lap the night before while this woman did very nearly that in a chair with wooden arms. Poppy met my eye over the laptop and went back to her screen.

"Half this page says the woman who owns a piece of that club spent the summer in it," Poppy said, "and the boxer came out fighting different."

Juliet said nothing. She gave Poppy the same face she had given the governor. I had known for two days what that woman charged for an hour, and now I had a nightclub in Las Vegas to set beside the figure, and I could not make the two foot. I went after what I could follow. An hour before, with her water glass in front of her, she had told us she'd had a hard year.

"Is that the hard job?" I asked.

"I had a hard job last summer. I'm not going to say whose."

"Forty thousand," Poppy said. "And they've named your back house. The Winter Palace."

"It's a carriage house. It was built to keep a buggy in."

Shelby laughed. It was one short breath through her nose, and it was the first I had heard out of her in six weeks. She held her telephone out over the table.

"There's pictures of you."

Juliet leaned in over her folded arms to look, and she took longer over it than she had over the governor.

It showed a woman at an iron gate under big trees, taken from across a street. She had her back half turned, and brown hair down past her shoulders.

"That one's the woman who brings my mail," Juliet said.

Shelby ran her thumb up the screen, past a blonde head on a sidewalk that might have been anybody's and a figure behind a lectern no bigger than a match.

"Two of them are me."

She did not say which two, and Shelby took her telephone back.

"Forty thousand people," I said. "What do they know? I've sat across from her since Thursday and never had her last name."

"Nothing," Shelby said. She was scrolling again. "It's all people guessing. Half of them are fussing at the other half."

"The ones who've been in a room with her say thank you and not one thing else," Poppy said. "The ones with plenty to say never laid eyes on her." She looked down the table. "So everybody knows your name and nobody knows you."

Juliet's eyes went to the navy book lying shut by my plate, and she rubbed a cornbread crumb off her cuff with her thumb.

"That's about the size of it," she said.

"Why won't the first ones talk?" I asked.

"They signed a paper."

"I never signed one," I said.

"You're not a client."

That was so, and it was no comfort. I had told her my Tuesdays over three nights, and nothing held her but her word that I would not go in a book.

Poppy put both elbows on the pine. She had gone after this woman on the same subject Friday night, across a basket of shrimp.

"You're not a licensed therapist," she said. "I didn't know patient confidentiality was a thing."

"It isn't. That's why there's paper."

"Paper."

"A therapist's client has a board to go to. Mine has nobody. So I give them a paper a court would read."

"And what does it give you?"

"It binds me the same as it binds them, and it doesn't run out."

"A therapist has rules."

"So do I. Mine are stricter, and nobody enforces them but me."

"That's the part I can't get past." Poppy sat back. "The book I'd put in front of anybody. A woman who writes her own rules and grades her own paper, I'd want somebody checking."

I kept the books of a trucking company for twenty-two years, and in all that time nobody checked one column behind me. I was never off by a dollar. Nobody had to tell me what a woman can do with rules that only she reads, and I did not offer it.

"Your book's gone to selling, too," Poppy said. "I looked. I've sold four hundred and I know most of them."

"For years I could have named most of the people who bought mine."

"You don't know one of yours now."

"No."

* * *

"Gayla Aycock told my business at my own front counter," I said. "It's all over that parish, and I can't take one word of it down."

I said it to Juliet. I had not expected to find myself on the same side of anything as a woman with her name on a book, and it was my daughter who answered.

"It was on Facebook, Mama."

I turned my head and looked at her then. She had put her fork down.

"Union Parish Rants and Raves. Somebody put up 'Pray for the Aycock and Womack families' the night of the third. It had ninety comments by morning."

I am on Facebook for the church page and my cousin's grandbabies, and I had not opened it since the day my husband drove off. I had thought I was sparing myself the casserole pictures.

"Is it still there?"

"The lady who runs it took it down that Saturday. I've got pictures of every one."

"Why would you keep that?"

"So I'd know who I was talking to at the bank."

Half of Union Parish trades in Ruston. For six weeks she had counted twenties into the palms of people whose opinion of her mother she could have recited, and she had told every one of them to have a good day.

"I know what they said about me," I said. My mouth had gone dry, and I did not reach for my tea. "What did they say about you and your sister?"

She took her time. She had her father's way of looking at a question before she picked it up.

"Now you ask," she said. "Macy and me have been in that town's mouth for six weeks, Mama. You're asking on a Saturday in Mississippi because a stranger's got a damn web page."

"Yes."

"A girl I graduated with said those girls had to have known. She put praying hands on the end of it. A man said he'd seen Macy at the Sonic that Friday, laughing, so she must not be too tore up." Her voice held level, as it has to at her window. "Most of them weren't about us. Most of them were about Daddy. He'd pulled somebody's boy out of a ditch on the Marion highway. He'd hauled a widow's timber and wouldn't take his cut. There were thirty of those. I never knew half of it."

"Did Macy read them?"

"Every one. I sent her the pictures before I thought. That's what wakes her up at four."

I had asked that child on the telephone how she slept and been told she woke at four, and I had not asked what woke her. Thirty strangers had written down what Royce Womack had done for them, and I had not known half of it either, with twenty-two years of his mail going across my desk. None of that had ever come in the mail, and the mail was all of him I had kept up with.

I had counted the empty place in our pew for six Sundays, and the cars that slowed going past my mailbox. I had not counted what my daughters were reading on their telephones at night. Hers lay face up on the pine between her plate and mine. On any day before this one I would have had it out of her fingers. I put my own in my lap and laced them, which was all the amends I had on me and was not much.

Ninety people had written under a prayer with my name in it. The name was Womack. I had taken it at twenty-four, and six years later I stood in the yard and watched the first truck that would wear it come up our drive.

* * *

He brought the first one home on a Saturday in the spring, twenty-two years ago. I was thirty years old and he was thirty-three. He had driven nine years for a man out of Marion, hauling another man's wood on another man's tires. He came up our drive that morning in a log truck that was ten years old and all his, and he laid on the air horn for the girls.

Shelby was five. She ran out ahead of me in her nightgown. I came behind with Macy on my hip, three years old and hollering at the noise, and he climbed down out of that cab grinning. In twenty-eight years I did not often see Royce Womack grin with his teeth.

I asked him everything. I asked how many gears it had and what a man did with all of them. I asked how the chains held, and what it weighed loaded, and why he had picked this one over the newer one he had looked at in El Dorado.

"That one had three drivers in four years, and not one of them owned it," he said. "This one's had one man. He greased it every Friday of its life, and he hated to hand me the key. I'd rather have an old truck that was looked after."

He walked me down one side and back up the other with his palm on the steel, telling me what each axle would bear. He said it would gross better than eighty thousand pounds with wood on it. He showed me how a man throws a chain over a load, and he took a binder down off the rack and cinched one for me.

"You put your weight on the bar and you keep your face out of the way of it," he said. "If it gets loose from you it'll break your jaw. Don't ever let me see one of these girls in front of it."

Then he lifted me into the cab by the waist and set both girls on the seat beside me. The cab smelled of diesel and another man's cigarettes, and the seat was split and patched with tape. He stood on the step and went through the dash one gauge at a time, and he held Shelby up to the cord and let her blow the horn until Macy quit crying and wanted her turn. He talked most of an hour. In later years I would not get that much out of him in a week of suppers.

"Are you scared?" I asked.

He took his time with it, as he did with everything.

"Some," he said. "I'd rather be scared of my own note than easy on another man's payroll."

It is the last question I can remember asking that man that was only about him.

He had the note figured in pencil on the back of a feed store receipt, with the payment and the fuel and the insurance in a column and what a load paid at the mill beside it. He had made one mistake in the adding. I found it after supper, at the kitchen table, when I copied his figures into a green ledger I had bought at Fred's for the purpose.

"I can keep up with this," I said.

"I was hoping you'd say that."

He meant it kindly, and I took it for a present.

I could not go to bed and leave that truck sitting out there by itself. I shut the ledger and went out the carport door barefoot, in my nightgown, and he came along behind me. It was the first warm night of that spring. The dew had come down already, and a whip-poor-will was going in the pines behind the well house. The truck stood in the yard with the moon on its hood, and it looked bigger in the dark than it had at noon.

He opened the driver's door and reached up inside to switch on the dome light.

"You'll run the battery down," I said.

"It's my battery."

He said it with so much satisfaction that I laughed out loud. He sat down in the open doorway, on the cab floor, with his boots on the step under him, a man of thirty-three with a note at the bank and a truck at his back. Sitting there he was no taller than I was standing, and I walked up between his knees in the wet grass.

"What do you want?"

"I've got it. I'm sitting in it."

"From me, Royce. Right now."

He looked over my head at the house, where his daughters were asleep behind two dark windows.

"You know what I want."

"I know what you'll settle for. I'm asking what you want. Say it."

He was not a man who said such things. In six years of marriage he had reached for me and I had come to him. Neither of us had ever put a word to any of it. The dome light showed me the color coming up out of his collar.

"I want your mouth on me."

"Where?"

"Lord, Jeri."

"You bought a truck today. You can say one word."

He laughed, and then he quit laughing.

"I want your mouth on my cock," he said. "Out here. In my own truck, with that light on, so I can watch you do it."

He got it out low, in one breath, and my knees went loose under me before he was through.

I unbuckled his belt myself, and he was hard before I had his zipper down. He lifted off the cab floor so I could drag his jeans out of my way, and then I had him in my fist, thick and hot, with the skin sliding under my palm. I had done this for him before, in our own bed, quickly, as a kindness. I had never done it standing in my own yard because he asked me to in words. I bent and put my tongue to him first and ran it from the root of him to the head, and he tasted of Lava soap and salt. Then I closed my mouth over him and took him in.

His hand came down on the top of my head, and he did not push with it. He laid it there open and heavy and kept it there, and he talked, which I had not known he would do.

"God Almighty. Look at you."

I looked up the buttons of his shirt and found him staring down at me with his mouth open.

"I thought about this in a deer stand," he said. "It was twenty degrees, and I had to quit thinking about it or freeze to death hard."

I laughed around him, and he groaned at what the laugh did.

"Don't quit. That's it. Take what you want of it." His thighs had begun to tremble against my shoulders. "Your mouth's so hot, Jeri. I can't hardly see straight."

I held the base of him in my fist and took him as deep as I could stand, with my eyes running and my jaw aching. I worked him with my tongue on the way back up. He was slick with me to the hair, and my own spit ran down over my knuckles.

"You've got the best head for figures in Union Parish," he said, "and Lord God, I am not talking about figures."

I was wet enough by then that the night air found it under my gown. I pressed my thighs together and took him deep again, and his heels knocked on the step.

"Quit," he said. "Quit, or it's over with, and I'm not through with you."

He stood up out of that doorway and had me under the arms before I had a word out. He swung me up past him onto the seat, as he had that morning, only facing him now, with my bare feet on the door sill. The split vinyl was cold under my thighs, and a strip of tape pulled at my skin. He stood on the step in front of me and pushed my gown up to my ribs.

"Open your knees," he said. "I want to see what I did."

I opened them under that light, and he looked his fill. He put two fingers to me and drew them up through the wet, the whole length of me, and he held them up shining between us.

"That's for me?"

"Who else is out here?"

He put those fingers in his mouth. I had never seen him do that in his life, and it went through me from my scalp to my heels.

Standing on the step put him at just the height of me. I hooked my heels behind his legs and took hold of him, and I brought him in myself. He was thicker than my fist had told me. He stretched me going in, an inch at a time, and the two of us said God at the same time.

He had one arm around my waist and his other palm braced on the roof of the cab. He went into me deep and steady, with the dome light burning behind his head and moths knocking against it. The truck rocked on its springs under us, and every stroke of him dragged the whole way out to the head and filled me again to the hilt. At the top of each one the bone of him ground against the place I needed it. The wet sound of us was louder than the whip-poor-will. I had his face in front of me the whole time, and I watched him look down between us at where he was going in.

"I can see all of it," he said. "I can see you take me. I'm going to be in you every night this truck makes a payment."

It was not enough for me, and I did not wait on him to find that out. I put my own fingers down between us, where we were joined, and rubbed myself in quick tight strokes while he watched.

"Do that," he said, and his voice cracked on it. "Lord, do that. Let me see you get it."

I reached up over my head with my free arm for anything to hold on to. My fingers closed on a cord, and I pulled.

The air horn went off across that yard loud enough to be heard in Marion, and I turned it loose too late. We stopped dead where we were, with him buried in me, both of us staring at the house. A dog started up somewhere down the parish road, and no light came on behind either window. Macy had hollered at that same horn at eight in the morning, and both of those girls slept through it at ten at night. I have always put that down to mercy.

Royce dropped his head beside mine and laughed until the seat shook under me. He was as hard in me as ever, and every heave of his chest moved him. I was laughing too, with my legs locked around him and my fingers still caught between us.

He quit first. He lifted his head and grinned at me from four inches off, with his teeth, and when he began again he did not go steady. He drove up into me hard and quick, with the seat springs squealing under me. My gown was wet through at the back, and the smell of us came up warm into the cab over the diesel and another man's cigarettes. I rubbed myself faster, and my legs shook around him.

"Come on," he said. "I've got you. Come on and let me see it."

It started behind my knees and climbed. My toes curled against the backs of his legs, and I clamped down around the thick of him so tight that he grunted. Then it broke. I came on him in long pulls that I could not have stopped for a house fire, crying out into his shirt front with my free arm around his neck, and he held still in me and took every one.

He had told me what he wanted, and he had not had all of it yet. I put my palm on his chest and pushed him back off the step, and I climbed down out of that cab on legs that would hardly hold me.

"Sit down where you were."

"Jeri, you don't have to..."

"You said what you wanted. Sit down."

He sat down in the doorway with his boots on the step, wet from me to the belly. I stood in the grass between his knees again and took him in my mouth, and I tasted myself on him. He lasted about as long as it takes to say so. His hand came down open on my head, his heels went to knocking on the step, and he said Lord God twice and let go on my tongue, hot and thick, in four or five hard pulses. I swallowed all of it and held him in my mouth until he had quit shaking.

He pulled me up by the arms afterward and stood me between his knees, both of us winded. He kissed me with his own taste still in my mouth, and he did not seem to mind it.

"Well," he said. "That's christened."

"You'll have every dog in the parish up."

"I don't care if I do." He pulled my gown down for me and smoothed it over my hips with both palms. "We can make that note, Jeri."

"We can make it by the tenth of every month, if you bring me your scale tickets on Fridays."

"Yes, ma'am."

It was the first order I ever gave that man about his own business, and he took it grinning. I have gone back over that night more often than I have gone back over my wedding. I do not count the question I asked him in that yard with the others, because of where I was standing when I asked it.

A man in Ruston lettered the doors that week, WOMACK TIMBER HAULING, and Royce had him add our kitchen telephone under it. The company Visa came in the mail with his name on it. When the first statement followed, he brought the envelope in from the box unopened and laid it beside my plate, and every one of them was laid there for twenty-two years.

After that Saturday my questions were what time, and which tract, and which truck. I asked them at the stove with my back to him and a pencil behind my ear, and he answered in as few words as the question needed. I cannot say he quit talking first. I had a ledger to keep and two little girls and a telephone that rang for him all day, and I found I liked being the one who knew where every dollar of that outfit was. He handed me the receipt, and I was glad to get it. We made a trucking company in that kitchen between us. We made it out of a marriage, and for a long time I did not miss what had gone into it.

* * *

The windows of that long room had gone gray while Poppy read to us, and nobody had gotten up to turn on a lamp. My feet had gone cold on her pine floor, and my tea had sweated a ring I had not wiped. The only light on Shelby came up off her telephone. She had not put it down since she failed to place a name.

"Mama."

She had said it to me that same way in the Tideline, low, with nothing behind it.

"It says her name used to be Buchanan."

Across the table Juliet did not move. She left her glass where it was, and her eyes stayed on my daughter. Poppy put two fingers on the lid of the laptop and closed it.

"It says she killed her husband."

I looked to the head of the table. Poppy was studying the lid of that computer with her mouth shut. She had known it before she ladled the first dumpling. She had known it when she sat there with a dish towel in her fist and told that woman she wrote like somebody who had buried people.

Chapter Ten

Nobody at that table moved to answer my daughter. Poppy kept her eyes on the lid of her computer, and Shelby's telephone went on lighting her chin from underneath. I had my fingers laced in my lap, where I had put them to keep them off her screen, and they had gone cold to the second knuckle.

For three nights I had been ashamed in front of that woman. I had told her about a chenille spread and a clock battery, and I had told her where each of us stood in my kitchen on the third of December. She had slid sugar packets across a table at me, and afterward I had cried through nine napkins in front of her. I had known she had trouble, since she told me in that booth she was not all right. I had taken it for the tidy trouble of a woman with a doctorate, and I had supposed she could look at my mess without blinking because hers had never been that size.

She had as good as told me, and I had let it go by. At three o'clock that morning I asked her why she sat facing the door, and she said it was to see who was coming. I asked who was coming. Nobody, she said, and not for a long time. I worked out on the spot that somebody had come through a door once, and I was proud of myself for catching it. I had not gone on to ask who walks into a woman's house without knocking.

I was raised on ten commandments, and I had spent six weeks with the seventh one sitting on my chest in a pew. The sixth had never been any concern of mine. I had ridden over a bridge that afternoon beside a woman who had stood trial for it, and I had asked her whether she was nervous about a dinner. I sat a little straighter than I had sat anywhere all week, God forgive me, and it lasted about as long as it took her to answer one question.

Neither of the other two was going to put it to her, and my daughter had only read it off a screen. I asked her myself.

"Did you?"

Juliet took her eyes off Shelby and put them on me. She had her forearms on the pine with the white cuffs turned back, just as she had sat in the corner booth, and she left them where they were.

"Yes," she said.

I had braced for more words than that. I believe Shelby had too, because her thumb stopped on the screen.

"I was married two years. He died in our kitchen, and I was the one who did it."

She said kitchen, and I had not been able to stand in mine for six weeks without seeing the hook by the carport door and the chair I pulled out for my daughter. Hers had a dead man on the floor of it. I had nothing to say that was fit to follow that, and for once I knew it before I opened my mouth.

"There was a trial," she said. "Twelve people heard all of it, and they sent me home."

"What did he do to you?"

I asked it too fast. I had no use for the answer and only wanted to know, which had been getting to be a habit with me since the corner booth.

"I've told it to police and to lawyers. I don't tell it at a table."

She had refused me once before, in that booth, over what Poppy had said in her ear, and she used the same voice for this. I had learned by then that it was no judgment on me. She was keeping what was hers, and she had less of that left than I had known.

Poppy pushed her chair back. Her bare feet crossed the boards behind me, a chain rattled, and the light over the table came on yellow and brought all four of our faces up out of the dark at once. Juliet's had no more color in it than her shirt.

* * *

Shelby had gone on reading. I would have done the same at her age, and nobody at that table stopped her.

"It says he came home drunk and went for her." She was not asking anybody. "It says he thought she was running around on him."

"I wasn't," Juliet said.

Nobody spoke after that. The refrigerator hummed under the boot box, and out on Ruskin Avenue a car went by without stopping.

A man had gone for his wife over what she had not done. I had done it every Tuesday for six years, on a calendar, with my rings in a coffee cup on a windowsill.

My husband found out at ten o'clock on a Thursday morning, standing in the mud at a landing, from a woman in her church shoes. He had three trucks loaded and nobody else to send them, so he worked out the rest of his day. He drove home at ten past three and saw his daughter's car in the drive. He wiped his boots on my mat. He hung his keys on the hook by the door, a foot from Shelby's head, and he set his thermos on the counter with more care than a thermos needs. Then he told his girls to go on home, because it was between him and their mama and he did not want them in the middle of it. He never raised his voice in that kitchen, and he never took one step toward me. I could have stood her doing it, he said. He said it about me, to them, and he had spent five hours at that landing working out how he was going to.

I had wished that afternoon that he would curse me. I had stood by my own stove wanting a big man to holler, so that I would have his temper to point to afterward. Across from me sat a woman who could have told me what I was wishing for.

For six weeks I had believed the worst a husband could do was take his keys down and say nothing. I had known what he was the whole time. I knew it in a dentist's parking lot that same morning, when I worked out in under a minute that Royce Womack would not raise his voice in front of his girls, and I called them home on the strength of it. I took the best of that man and stood behind it.

Shelby had turned her head. She was looking straight at me, for the first time since she got up from a booth in the Tideline, and she had her father's eyes for it. She had been in that kitchen. She had watched him wipe his feet, and she had just added up what I added. Neither one of us said it. She held that look until I was the one who dropped mine, and then she went back to her screen.

"Why's it say Buchanan?" she asked. "Yours is Winters."

"Buchanan was his. I was tried under it, and I gave it back when it was over."

"This is new, though. The dates on these are all since Thanksgiving."

"Somebody matched the two in November. A picture from a courthouse and a picture from my gate."

"That's why nobody on this page had it before," Poppy said. She had sat back down with one foot under her. "They were hunting the wrong name."

"It says his people sued her," Shelby said.

"His family sued me for eight years."

"What for?" I asked. "You'd been let go."

"For saying it first," Poppy said. "She walked out of a courtroom with her version, and they've got money."

Whoever leaves gets to tell it first. I had read that aloud at this table that same afternoon, out of a navy book, with Poppy's pencil mark beside it, and I had thought I knew both ends of it. Gayla Aycock had one morning at my front counter to tell hers, and I had been living in it for six weeks. This family had hired lawyers to tell theirs for eight years.

"It says they paid her," Shelby said. "Nobody knows what. One of them says two million. One says fifty."

"It ended. I signed a paper, and I can't tell you what's on it."

Poppy's head came around.

"You signed one."

"Yes."

"Well." Poppy rubbed the back of her neck with her palm. "I gave you hell an hour ago for handing those out."

"You did."

"I'd take about half of it back."

* * *

I had been holding a question since the lid of that computer came down, and it was mine to ask. I turned in my chair to the head of the table.

"You knew."

"Since about five o'clock this morning," Poppy said. "It's not hard to find, once you quit reading about governors."

"And you called Denise and said bring her."

"I did."

"You said that about burying people right to her face. I was sitting here."

"I said it to see what her face would do. It didn't move. That's when I quit wondering if it was the same woman."

"You could have told me before I sat down. I rode over that bridge with her."

"It wasn't mine to tell first." She said it without any heat. "His people told it first for eight years, and now forty thousand strangers are at it. I wasn't going to be the next one. Not at my own table."

She pulled her other foot up, wrapped her arms around both knees, and looked down the length of fourteen chairs.

"I've had a preacher, two embezzlers and a man who shot his brother-in-law's dog at this table," she said. "She's the first one I ever had to look up."

Shelby's shoulders shook once beside me. I did not laugh with her. My back had been aching in that kitchen chair for an hour, my eyes stung from four hours of sleep, and I was through being talked around.

"You got up from my table Thursday," I said. "You said you were ten years old once and you couldn't do this one."

"I said that."

"You wouldn't sit across from me. You set a place for her."

Poppy did not answer me quickly. She looked up at the boot box on the refrigerator, and her mouth worked once before any word came out of it.

"Yes," she said. "I've been looking at that since daylight, and I don't like how it adds."

"How does it add?"

"A jury turned her loose. Nobody's turned you loose. That's part of it." She let go of her knees and put her feet on the floor. "The other part is I wanted her here before I knew it, and I wanted her here after. I'm fifty-five years old, and I didn't know I could still be that big a fool over a book."

She said it to the pine boards. Across from me Juliet had lifted her head, and she studied that barefoot woman with her lips a little apart, as she had studied a slip of paper with an address on it at half past six that morning.

"It's the first time anybody fed me before they asked," she said.

Poppy laughed once through her nose. I would not call what passed between them friendship, but it was the first easy breath anybody had drawn at that table in an hour.

Nobody had told me I was the lesser offender of the two, and Poppy had taken care not to. The one who would weigh me was somewhere on this coast, and I had three sentences for him. Poppy had also said her own sum would not come out, and I keep accounts for a living and know what it costs a person to say that in front of company.

* * *

Shelby laid her telephone face down beside her plate.

"I know where I saw it," she said. "It was on a check."

"What check?"

"Across my window. Pay to the order of Juliet Winters. I remember the name because it's not one from home, and I remember the amount."

"Whose check?"

"I can't tell you that, Mama. They'd fire me, and they ought to." Her voice went hard. "And don't work on me for it. I know what it sounds like now, and I'm not twenty-three."

She had that right down to the year. I know every family in Farmerville by what it owes Dr. Pruitt and how late it runs, and half of them bank in Ruston. I wanted that name as badly as I had wanted anything since Thursday. Somebody I had stood behind at the Brookshire's had driven five hours to New Orleans and written this woman a check, and not a soul at home knew it. I started down the pews at First Baptist in my head, couple by couple, sorting who had been short with each other at the fall supper and who had quit coming to Sunday school. I was four rows back before I caught what I was doing. It was the list. I had told Juliet about it at half past three that morning in the past tense, as a habit I had put down.

I had the question in my mouth, too, shaped to sound like no question at all. I shut my teeth on it.

Shelby was looking across the table with her chin up, braced to be asked from that side as well.

"You don't have to," Juliet said. "I know who wrote it."

Shelby's chin came down. She picked a crumb of cornbread off the rim of her plate and set it back.

"Did it help them?"

"I can't tell you that."

Two women at that table were keeping the same people's business, and neither one would say a name. My daughter had learned at a bank window what I learned at a dentist's, which is that what crosses your counter stays on your side of it. I had taught her that myself. I had not expected to be standing on the customer's side when she used it.

"They come in together now," Shelby said. She said it to her plate. "On Fridays. They didn't use to."

That was all she gave, and it was only what she had seen through an inch of glass. Juliet said nothing to it. She turned her face toward the black window over the sink and kept it there a while, and when she turned back she had her mouth set as it had been.

* * *

I had learned one useful habit in a corner booth, and I tried it again.

"What happened in November?" I asked. "After they matched it."

"A man with a microphone sat outside my gate three days in December."

"He's got a podcast," Shelby said. She had turned her telephone back over. "That's a radio show you get on your phone, Mama. There's two episodes about her. Both of them say she declined to comment."

I knew a little about being watched from the road. For six weeks cars had slowed going past my mailbox on the parish road, and I had quit walking out for the mail until after dark.

"Two magazines have written me," Juliet said. "I didn't answer."

"What do they want from you?" I asked.

"Same as that page wants," Poppy said. "They want her to say which half of it is so."

Ninety people had written under a prayer with my name in it, and by Easter most of them would be on to somebody else's trouble. Hers was not going to pass with the season. It had a dead man in it, a rich family and a club in Las Vegas, and I have lived in a small town long enough to know how long a story with those three in it will keep.

"You don't write back to anybody," Poppy said. "I heard that about you."

"Somebody's going to write it whether I talk or not."

"How are you handling it?" I asked.

"Badly. I left town."

It was the plainest answer I ever had from her, and it was my own. I had driven five hours down Highway 49 to get away from people who knew. She had driven ninety miles and sat down in a casino coffee shop at eleven at night with one cup, to watch a door for a woman out of a book.

"You left town for a casino," Poppy said. "That's the one building on this coast with a camera in every ceiling."

Juliet's mouth moved at one corner, and it was gone before it was a smile.

"I took a boat in October to get clear of last summer," she said. "This was on my gate a month after I got home."

Poppy had her elbows on her knees now, and there was no needle left in her voice.

"You've got no license, your name's on a nightclub, and now there's a dead husband printed next to it," she said. "All it takes is one unhappy customer and a lawyer who wants his picture made."

"I know what it takes."

"I've got a dean who signs my leave and a handbook I've read every page of," Poppy said. "At the club I've got Lyle. And you've got nobody over you to say you did right."

"No."

Dr. Pruitt answers to a state board, and I have typed his renewal every other year for twenty years and grumbled about the fee. If a patient ever said he had done wrong, there are people whose job it is to look and say whether he had. She had told Poppy an hour before that her client had nobody to go to, and I had not turned it around to see that she had nobody either.

"Are you safe at that gate?" I asked.

"Mostly."

I had asked that woman how she was twice since three o'clock that morning, once in a booth and once at this table. Both times she had told me the truth, and neither time was it yes.

* * *

Shelby pushed her chair back. She had cleaned her plate down to the glaze without putting one green on it, and I let that be.

She went around behind me to the front door and took Poppy's canvas coat down off its peg. She did not ask for it, and she put it on as a person does in a house where she has been told to help herself. The sleeves came down over her knuckles.

"Where are you going?"

I had asked her that in the Tideline at two o'clock that morning, and she had given me her father's answer.

"For a walk," she said.

I was half out of my chair. I had it all ready, that it was dark, and that she did not know this town, and did she have her telephone charged. My palms were on the pine and my weight was on them. Nobody said my name this time. I sat back down by myself, and the chair creaked under me.

"Flashlight's on the nail by the door," Poppy said. She had not moved from her chair. "It's dark down by the water."

"Yes, ma'am."

"You remember the turn?"

"I've got it."

There was a turn, then, and a place by the water that my daughter had been told how to find. There was a question she had not yet decided, and Poppy knew what it was. I had come that far by myself. I had seen the outriggers of shrimp boats that afternoon coming off the bridge, and I had taken my foot off the gas and put it back. I did not set those boats beside a flashlight and a turn, and I have gone back over that minute many times since.

What I did know was that if I followed that girl out the door I would be deciding it for her, whatever it was. I had done that to her once already, in four minutes by a stove clock, and she had lived in it for four years.

Shelby had the door open, and the cold came in around her and across my ankles. She stopped on the sill with the flashlight in her fist, and she did not turn all the way around.

"You asked me how I slept," she said. "On the phone."

"I did."

"Ask me tomorrow."

The screen door clapped behind her. Her feet went down the porch steps, and the light went bobbing off under the oaks toward the end of the street.

Her plate sat at my elbow, scraped clean, with the napkin I had folded wadded up on top of it. Three women were left at fourteen chairs. My child was out in the dark in another woman's coat, headed for a place I did not know the name of, and I had kept my seat.

Chapter Eleven

The screen door was still ticking on its spring when I reached for my daughter's plate. I could not go after her, and that plate was the nearest piece of her left in the room.

"Leave that one," Poppy said. "I'll get it."

She was up out of her chair already, with the iron pot in both hands. She took it down to the sink and turned on the hot water, and she talked to me over her shoulder while it ran.

"You can't sit and you can't follow her. Come dry."

That woman had refused me at her own front door that afternoon, and she had found me a job before I was through sitting down. This was the second one, and I went and took it. The dinner dishes had stood beside her sink since the middle of the afternoon, and the dumplings had set hard around the inside of the pot. She pulled a dish towel off the oven door and handed it to me. It did not match the one over her shoulder or the one folded under the rack, and I do not believe any two towels in that kitchen had come from the same store.

Juliet brought the glasses down from the table two at a time, and then the bowl the greens had been in. She set them on the counter at my elbow without a word and went back to her own chair, the one that faced the front door.

The window over the sink had gone black. It gave me the whole room back in the glass, with the bulb on its chain, the long pale table, and a white shirt sitting very straight on the far side of it. I dried a plate and kept my eyes on that shirt.

I had a check on my mind. Somebody from home had written that woman's name on one, and those two people walked into a bank together now on Fridays. She had told me herself, at four o'clock that morning across ten packets of sugar, that most of what people paid her for was one sentence with nothing asked in it, and that some of them took four months to get there. I could not make four months out of one sentence. I asked her with my back half turned, as I would ask a specialist's office what a procedure runs.

"What did you do for those people? The ones with the check."

"I can't tell you about them. I can tell you what I do."

"Then tell me. What does a person get for twenty-five hundred dollars?"

"Most of the time, talk. You've had three nights of that."

I'd had three nights of it, and nobody had sent me a bill. I reached for the next plate.

"Sometimes I take my clothes off and stand at a mirror next to a woman who can't look at herself."

Beside me Poppy's arms quit moving in the water.

"And sometimes I go to bed with them."

The plate stopped turning in my towel. In the black glass she sat as she had sat all afternoon, with her forearms on the pine and her cuffs turned back.

"With who?"

"A client. Both of them, if it's a couple. When it's what the work needs, and when everybody in the room has said yes."

"Married people."

"Usually."

* * *

I set the plate in the rack wet and turned around from the sink. The heat had started under my collar and gone to my ears, as it had on Thursday when Poppy left me at a table, and I had the towel twisted in both fists.

I had given that woman my marriage. I had told her about a chenille spread and what was done to me on it, and she had sat with her whiskey untouched and asked whether I liked it. That afternoon I had driven her over a bridge in my own car and troubled myself over whether she was nervous about a dinner. She went to bed with other women's husbands, with the wives looking on or lying down beside them, and she took a check for it. For all I knew, a couple from my end of Louisiana had been in that bed. I had most likely stood behind them in line at the Brookshire's.

I thought of the Sand Dollar. She had let go of the arms of that chair and drawn both palms up Poppy's bare back in one long stroke, and I had sat three feet off with a slip in my lap and judged that she had done a great deal of touching in her life and was very good at it. It had not entered my head to ask where a person gets that good.

There was a word for it. My daughter had put it on me at two o'clock that morning, over a plate of cold eggs, and I had let it stay on me because I believed I had it coming.

"There's a name for that where I come from."

"I know the name. You can say it."

"A whore."

"That one. It isn't so, and I quit minding a long time ago."

Her face did not change, and she did not take her arms off the table. I had said the ugliest word I own to a guest in another woman's house, and she went on in the same low voice she had used for everything else since Thursday.

"Nobody pays me for that. They pay me to find what's wrong, and some of the time that's where it is."

I had no answer ready, and she did not wait on one.

"It's the smallest part of what I do. It's the part people remember."

Poppy had not turned around. She had her arms in the dishwater to the elbow, and she spoke to the black window.

"I take my clothes off for twenty dollars a song, Jeri. Pick your words in my kitchen."

I had sat in that club the night before and watched her do it. I had held her slip in my lap for three songs with my knees pressed together, and I was in no position to look down on either one of them. I had done it anyway.

"I told her Friday I was cheaper than she was," Poppy said. "I didn't know by how much."

"You knew this?"

"Half that page says so and the other half says she's a fraud. I figured it was the first half." She shook the water off her hands and turned around at last, and she looked down the room at Juliet. "It's not the bed I'd argue with you about. It's what I said this afternoon. Nobody's standing over you while you do it."

"There's a word that stops it. Anybody in the room can say it."

"And you stop," I said.

"That's the rule."

It was three words, and not one of them was yes. I marked it, and I had too much else in front of me to pick it up. Poppy looked at her a little longer than the answer called for and went back to the pot.

* * *

I was still angry, and I was not through with her.

"So a wife writes you a check to lie down with her husband," I said.

"Some of them. Some of the husbands write it for the wives."

I had not thought of it running in that direction. I had been seeing every wife in that room of hers as Gayla Aycock, sitting at the end of a gravel drive with Christmas lights in her lap. It had not crossed my mind that a wife might be the one who asked for it.

"Is that where you were headed with me?" I asked. "Three nights of talk, and then what?"

"No."

"You'd tell me no either way."

"Nobody's in my bed who didn't ask to be. You never asked me for anything."

That was so, and I could count it. I had come close to asking her what I ought to do, in that booth before daylight, and I had shut my mouth on it. In three nights she had not put a finger on me, either. When I cried through nine napkins she had pushed the dispenser across the table and kept to her own side. I believed her, and it put me out to find that I did.

I still wanted her to have to explain herself. The bed I thought I understood, God help me, since I had driven to one every Tuesday. The mirror I could not make any sense of.

"What's it for?" I asked. "Standing at a mirror with your clothes off."

"A woman came to me after they took both her breasts. She hadn't let her husband see her in two years."

Poppy shut off the faucet.

"It took six sessions. For the first three she kept her robe on, and I didn't."

"Why would you?"

"She didn't need to be told she was still a woman. Everybody had told her. She needed somebody to stand there with her."

I have checked in women for twenty years who had been told every kind word there is by a husband, a surgeon, and a Sunday school class, and who still held a clipboard up against their chests in my waiting room. I knew those women by name. I had never thought there was anything to do for one but tell her she looked fine.

"Did it take?"

"She sent me a picture a year after. The two of them on a beach. She had on a two-piece."

That was all she said about it, and she gave no name and no town. She had answered the question I asked. She had heard my daughter say the word operation at that table, and no more than that. She could not have known what else she had just told me.

A woman had gone two years without letting her husband see her after a surgery, and somebody had thought that was worth six trips to mend. Mine had not seen me in twelve.

I had wrung that towel into a rope. I shook it out and laid it over the edge of the drainboard with the corners square, since I could not think what else to do with my hands.

"I need some air," I said.

"Porch light's on," Poppy said. "Don't go past the steps, I've got one out there already."

I crossed the length of that room in my stocking feet, past fourteen chairs and my daughter's plate. Juliet's eyes followed me to the door, since her chair faced it, and she did not say a word to stop me. Nobody came after me.

* * *

I had worked my shoes off under the table sometime during the afternoon, and the porch boards were cold enough through my stockings to ache. The bulb by the door lit the row of clay pots along the rail, every one of them leaning a little off true. Past the rail there were the two cars in the drive and the oaks over the street, and beyond those it was black. I looked down Ruskin Avenue for a flashlight and did not find one. I took hold of the rail with both hands and stood there.

My husband liked a lamp. He was a man who said little, and he looked at me as other men talk, at length and meaning every bit of it.

The night I go back to was in the summer when I was thirty-nine, the year before my operation. Nothing marked it. The girls were asleep down the hall, the window unit was running, and the lamp on his side of our bed was lit, as it was lit every time he reached for me in fifteen years.

He had scrubbed to the elbows at the kitchen sink with Lava soap, which never got all of the diesel off him or the pine tar that lived in the cracks of his knuckles, and he came to bed smelling of the three together. I was under the sheet already with nothing on. It was July, and I had quit bothering with a gown in the hot months.

He did not get in beside me. He left his clothes on the chair and sat down on his own side of the bed, and he took the hem of that sheet in his fist and drew it down. He did it by inches, off my breasts and off my belly. It dragged across the hair between my legs and on down my thighs, and he did not stop until it lay over the footboard. I did not reach for it, and I lay there with my arms down at my sides under that lamp and let him. I was not shy of that man.

He stretched out along my side, raised up on one elbow, and looked at me from my hair to my knees before he touched me anywhere. He was forty-two that summer, and he looked at a wife of fifteen years with his whole attention and missed nothing. My nipples had drawn up hard under his eyes before he laid one finger on me.

His hands went where his eyes had been. They were big and split across the pads from chain and cold weather, and they caught a little on my skin going over it. He took them along my collarbone, down over my breasts, and across my belly, which two babies had left soft, and his eyes went wherever his hand went. He lifted one breast in his palm and rubbed his thumb back and forth across the tip of it, watching it stiffen, and then he gave the other the same attention. He found the pale tracks my daughters had left low on my belly. He followed one of them with the rough edge of his thumb from my hip to my navel, and then he bent his head and followed it back with his mouth. His breath went down through the hair below it. He went no lower than that. He laid his cheek against the softest part of me and rested it there, and I put my fingers in his hair.

I looked back at him, too. That lamp was not kind to either one of us, and I would not have traded it. It showed me the white band across his forehead where his cap sat nine hours a day, and the brown of his neck and wrists against the rest of him, which never saw the sun. It showed me gray at his temples that I had not known was there. He was hard already, and heavy and hot against my hip.

He turned me by the hip toward the light, onto my side, so that he could see the length of my back. He set one palm on the small of it to keep me there. His mouth went to the two hollows above my backside, first one and then its twin. A day's beard rasped my skin, and his breath went down the cleft of me. I shivered all down my back and legs. He turned me again, onto my back, and I went where he put me.

He put his hand between my legs then, the whole breadth of it, and held it still. Under the soap he smelled of himself, of clean sweat and pine, and the smell of me came up warm off his palm between us. He did not go hunting. He pressed the heel of his palm where I needed it and let me find the rest for myself, and he watched my face while I did. I kept my eyes on his. I moved against that hard palm in small pushes, and I was slick on him inside of a minute and could hear it over the window unit. He did not glance down to see what his hand was doing. He watched my mouth come open. He watched the cords stand in my neck and the flush come up my chest, and when it took me he saw every bit of it cross my face, with the lamp full on me and no place to turn. I let that man watch it every time. In thirty-nine years no other soul had.

Then he came over me. He put his weight on me, all of it, which I liked. He was a big man, and it pressed the wind out of me and pinned my hips to the mattress. I opened my knees and took all of him on one long push, and neither of us shut our eyes. He held himself deep and still until I had quit shaking around him. Then he began to move, in no hurry, with his face a hand's breadth over mine and the lamp behind his ear. The black of his eyes had gone wide. The springs took up a creak under us. Sweat ran off his temple and fell on my cheek, and I tasted the salt of it at the corner of my mouth. I wrapped my legs around the backs of his and held on to his arms above the elbow, where the muscle stood rigid.

It came up in me a second time, from further down, and he knew it by my face before I did. His jaw went tight, and he did not look away from me at the end. I watched it take him, with his eyes on mine, his mouth open, and not one sound coming out of it. He emptied into me in long hard pushes while I was still coming around him.

He put his face down in my neck afterward and said my name against it, and that was the whole of his speeches. I had been hearing him say it there since I was twenty-four, and I knew everything he meant by it. He did not turn that lamp off until I was asleep.

By that fall I was begging off more nights than not. I had been bleeding for the better part of two years, and I had handled it as I handle an account gone past due, by making arrangements and telling nobody what it came to. In the spring of the year I was forty a doctor in Monroe told me it was time and past time, and he gave me the word for what he meant to do. It was a hysterectomy. I have typed longer words than that on claim forms every working day of my life. At home I called it my operation, and at church it was female trouble, said low. I had not said the right name of it to one soul who was not holding my chart.

The doctor took it out by the road a baby travels, so that there is not a mark on me anywhere to show for it. Royce sat in the waiting room in Monroe for three hours with his cap on his knee. I did not ask him afterward what those three hours were, and I have not asked him since. I came home to six weeks in our bedroom with the shades down and a pillow under my knees. A girl of fifteen brought my supper on a tray, and a man went up and down my hall in his sock feet. Every evening of it he came and stood in the bedroom door and asked whether I needed anything. I told him no. He would stand there a while longer, filling up that door, before he went to see about the girls.

He was careful with me. For those six weeks he slept on the last few inches of his own side of the mattress, so that he would not jostle me when he turned over. When the doctor let me up, Royce did not reach for me, and he went on not reaching through May, June, and most of July. When he did reach, he asked.

"Is this all right?"

He asked it at my shoulder and again at my waist, and he asked it at every place he put his hands, every time, with that lamp burning beside us. He asked as a man asks before he lifts a dish that has been broken and glued. In all our years he had not asked my leave for anything he did in that bed. He had looked at me, and he had found his answer in my face.

I took careful to mean finished. In my mother's house a woman who'd had that operation was spoken of as through with all that. It was said at the stove with the voice dropped, about a cousin or a deacon's wife, with some pity in it and some relief. I heard my mother's kitchen in his question, and a man being polite to what was left of his wife. It did not come to me to wonder what the asking cost him, and I had three hours in a waiting room to go on if I had cared to count them.

I could have answered him. He put a plain question to me over and over in those few weeks, and every time I said it was fine, in the voice I use on the telephone. I wanted him to quit asking and look at me as he had the summer before. I did not say so. I had a payroll to get out and two girls to outfit for school, and I filed it with the rest of what I meant to see about.

It was a night in August. He turned to me in the dark and put his arm out behind him for the lamp on his side, as he always had.

"Leave it off," I said.

His arm stopped where it was.

"All right."

He brought his hand back, and he did not reach for that lamp again in twelve years. I did not tell him why, and he did not ask me. We went on as man and wife in the dark, as regular as the payroll, and I will say for both of us that there was no unkindness in it. I took to undressing in the bathroom with the door shut, and I came to bed in my gown.

Years after that August another man took my good blouse out of my hands in a fish camp, in broad daylight, and dropped it on a plank floor.

"Leave it," he said.

I had said those two words to my husband about a lamp. One of those men minded me.

My feet had gone numb on Poppy's boards, and I stayed where I was a little longer, because I was not through. At half past three that morning I had told Juliet that Lamar Aycock asked, and that he was the only one who ever did. My husband had asked at a bedroom door every evening for six weeks, and I had told him no.

I was fifty-two years old, and I had just counted up twelve years in the dark, every one of them on my own order. Behind me the porch light burned as it had been burning the whole time. Nobody had come to the door to see about me. I turned loose of the rail and went back in by myself.

* * *

Juliet's was the first face I met coming through that door, and it asked me nothing. The dishes were done and the rack was full. Poppy sat at the head of the table again with a damp towel across her knee. Shelby's plate was still at its place with the napkin wadded on it, though Poppy had said she would get it.

I sat down in my own chair and said it before either one of them could be kind to me about the porch.

"I had a hysterectomy when I was forty. He was careful with me afterward, and I took it wrong. I told him to leave the lamp off, and neither one of us said a word about it for twelve years."

It had taken me three sentences. There was no packet in any one of them, and I knew it as I said them. My mouth had gone dry over one word.

Poppy did not say she was sorry, and I was grateful to her for it. Juliet had her eyes on me and on nothing else in that room.

"Did he ever reach for it again?"

"No."

"Did you ever tell him he could?"

"No."

"Whose hand was it on that lamp?" Poppy asked.

"His. On my say."

"Then it was yours to turn back on. Any night you wanted, for twelve years. He'd have let you. He let you do everything else."

We had a pair of those lamps, one to a nightstand. Mine had a switch on it too.

I had the next sentence ready, and it was that he could have asked me why.

"He could have," I said.

I shut my mouth on the rest of it. Before daylight that morning Juliet had laid a pink packet on a table for a sentence built exactly like it, and she had told me what it asked him for. It asked him to take half.

She saw me stop, and she sat back in her chair.

"The list was true," she said. "It was also the one you could say in a coffee shop."

I had called that list the smallest reason a woman ever had. I had been proud of how small it was, and of how much it had cost me to say.

"Say the rest of it."

I did not want to. I had given them the surgery. I had said a word in front of company that I had left in a doctor's file for twelve years, and by my own figuring that ought to have been enough for one night. My feet were still cold from the porch, and I tucked one on top of the other under my chair. I knew which part I had kept back. I had known it at the bar on Friday with a bourbon in front of me, and again in the booth that morning while I told her about payroll and postcards.

"He looked at me," I said. "Lamar. It was the middle of the afternoon with no curtains, and he took his time about it. I was forty-six years old the first time."

"Was he the first?" Poppy asked.

"The first and the only one. Twenty-two years I never looked at another man. I didn't look at that one. He asked me how I was."

"And you liked it."

"I liked being wanted. I liked that he didn't ask was it all right." My face was hot again, and I kept it turned to the two of them. "I told you about the list because a list sounds like work."

That was true, and there was worse under it. I had brought the worse part in off that porch, and I made myself say it to them.

"My husband looked at me with a lamp on from the night I married him. I'm the one who told him to quit. Six years after I told him, I drove out to a lake to get it from a man I didn't love."

Poppy let her breath out through her nose. Juliet had gone still, as she had that afternoon over a boot box, and she had no question ready.

For the first ten minutes of every Tuesday I had wanted a sheet to pull up, and for the rest of four hours I had not wanted one at all. A man had stood me in the daylight and looked at what a surgeon, two babies, and forty-six years had left, and he had not asked first.

"Six years is a long time to go back," Poppy said.

"After the first time I put it on the calendar. I have never missed an appointment in my life." It sounded as cold aloud as it was, and I went on with it. "And after Shelby knew, I was already the woman who'd done it. There wasn't any use quitting."

"That's three reasons," Juliet said. "Not one of them is a reason he should have had to live with."

"I know that."

She had told me as much in the corner booth, and it did not get easier to hear a second time.

Not half an hour before, she had told me what went on in her room. I set it beside my Tuesdays then, as I would set two statements side by side. In hers every person knew what was going to happen before it happened, and every one of them had said yes to it aloud. She had her rules, a paper a court would read, and a word that any of them could say to stop it. A couple from home had sat in that room and agreed to whatever was done there, the two of them together, and they walked into a bank side by side now. I'd had a ring in a coffee cup, a pew, and a calendar. Lamar and I had not said one plain word about what we were doing in six years of doing it. Of all the people that camp was going to cost, the only two who had agreed to it were the two in the bed.

"I put a name on you at that sink," I said to Juliet. "I had the wrong woman."

She nodded once and said nothing to it.

Poppy had been turning the dish towel over on her knee. She laid it on the table.

"I do it in the open, for money," she said. "She does it behind a gate, with everybody's say-so. You did it in secret, for nothing. There's three of us at this table, Jeri, and you're the only one who had to lie to do it."

I did not answer her. It was the hardest true sentence anybody had handed me since she told me over a waffle that she had been ten years old once, and it had come from the same mouth.

* * *

I could not sit under that sentence with nothing to do, and I will not claim that what I did next was all kindness. She had said she did hers in the open, for money. I turned in my chair to the head of the table and asked her about it.

"How long are you going to keep on with it?" I asked. "Dancing."

"Till Mr. Seymour quits coming or my knees do." She had one foot up on the seat of her chair again. "I've told Lyle to tell me when it's time. He won't."

"Will you know it yourself?"

"The girl ahead of me last night was twenty-two, and the men who sit up for me are mostly past seventy." She pulled at a thread on the hem of her khakis. "I know what I'm looking at."

She had not put a joke on the end of it. I had sat in that club and seen every old man on the rail lay his telephone face down for her. It had not occurred to me that she counted them too.

"And then what?"

"Then I've got a table and eighty-one people to write."

"Who feeds you?"

"Denise. Waffle and two sausage, six nights a week."

"I mean who cooks for you."

She opened her mouth with the joke already in it. I had watched her find one for a security guard, a resort fee and a Baptist from Laurel, and I waited on this one. It did not come. She looked down the length of fourteen chairs and back at me.

"Nobody's asked me that in this house," she said.

I counted up what I knew of her. She had twenty-two boxes on that wall and a bed kept made in the back for strangers. She had put a waffle in my daughter and dumplings in me, and she had ladled a second helping onto Juliet's plate without waiting for a yes. That afternoon she had peeled a satsuma for herself in the middle of a quarrel with me over her mother, and she had laid it back in its skin and never eaten it.

Juliet reached across to the blue dish. She took out a satsuma with the leaf still on the stem and worked her thumbnail under the skin at the top. She brought the peel off in one long piece, taking care that it did not tear, and she set the fruit on the pine in front of Poppy with the peel beside it.

"What's that for?" Poppy asked.

"You haven't eaten since two o'clock."

Poppy studied that satsuma a good while. Her eyes came up once to the white shirt across the corner of the table and went back down. Then she pulled the sections apart and ate them one at a time, with her elbow on the table and her eyes on the boot box up on the refrigerator. Neither of them said another word about it.

She wiped her thumb on the dish towel when she was through. She had been done a kindness in front of company, and she did not let it lie there long.

"I've got a door with my name on it, a dean, and a handbook," she said. "You've got a doctorate the same as mine, and you work out of a buggy shed. One of us is still in the building."

"They put me out of it."

"I figured you hadn't walked." Poppy tipped her head at the peel lying on the pine. "And there's that. I feed a person before I know one fact about her, and I judge her afterward. You sat three nights with this one and never bought her a cracker."

"I never told her what I thought of her, either."

"No. You leave that to me."

"You're good at it."

Poppy laughed out loud, and she sounded surprised to be doing it.

"And I can't shut up," she said, "and you can't be made to start."

"I started. You were talking."

They had laid out every difference between them inside of a minute, and neither one had given an inch of her own ground. I had been told the truth about myself by both of them, more than once. On what I had done they agreed. On what I ought to do about it they had not agreed yet, and I had quit waiting for one of them to win.

* * *

Poppy looked past me to the clock on the stove.

"She's been gone forty minutes," she said. "It's twenty there."

"Twenty where?"

"To the water."

I had it worked before she finished saying it. Twenty there and twenty back came to a girl who ought to have been on that porch by now, and she was not on it. So she had stopped at the end of her twenty minutes, and she was standing somewhere in the dark by the water with a flashlight and a decision. I could have asked what water, and what was beside it. Poppy had just answered me straight, and I believe she would have done it again.

I let it go by. It was my daughter's to tell me or not, and it cost me to keep still.

"Is that porch light staying on?" I asked.

"It's been on since I bought this house. I don't turn it off."

I looked up at the bulb over her table and at the chain hanging down from it. Poppy had crossed six feet of floor in her bare feet to pull that one. For twelve years I'd had a lamp within reach of my own arm.

Chapter Twelve

I had one question left, and I had been walking around it since Thursday night. In the corner booth before daylight I had opened my mouth to ask it and shut it again, because by then I knew what a request sounded like coming out of me. Juliet had said, while I stood at the sink, that I never asked her for anything. She was right about that, and I was about to spoil it.

"I'm going to ask you both for help, and I know I'm asking," I said. "What do I do?"

Poppy had the satsuma peel in her fingers, and she was fitting it back together into the shape of the fruit.

"About him or about you?"

"Is there a difference?"

"About five hours of highway."

"She'll tell you one way and I'll tell you another," Juliet said.

"I've noticed."

Poppy set the hollow peel down on the pine with its round side up, and she pushed her chair back from the table.

"Come here," she said. "Bring nothing."

I had put my palm on the navy book without knowing I meant to take it along. I took it off again and got up.

* * *

She walked me down the length of that room in my stocking feet, past all her empty chairs, to the wall of shelves at the far end. I had counted those boxes from my seat at two o'clock and looked along their tops for dust. Standing in front of them was different. They went from the floor to higher than I could reach, twenty-two of them, each with its year on the end in black marker, and the oldest years had faded brown.

Poppy did not open one. She hooked a finger over the lip of the first box, down by her knee, and slid it an inch off the shelf with no more effort than that. Then she laid her whole palm against the newest one, up at the height of her shoulder, and pushed, and it did not give a hair.

"Don't go to him," she said.

She had turned around to face me with her back against her own Christmas mail, and there was no joke anywhere in her face.

"Go home. Set your table. Tell your girls the truth one time, all of it, and ask them for nothing after. Then wait."

"Wait on what?"

"On him. He knows the road. He drove it."

"He's had six weeks."

"You had six years. Don't hand me six weeks."

"How long, then?"

"I told you Friday. About ten."

"Ten years. And if he never comes?"

"Then you'll have fed your girls for ten years without lying to them, and you haven't done that yet."

I shut my mouth. She reached behind her without looking and put her knuckles against a box about halfway up.

"That woman in Lafayette is in here nine times," she said. "Her husband went to Houston. She didn't drive to Houston. She stayed where her people could find her, and it took her till about the fourth letter to quit setting his place."

"Did he come back?"

"No. That's not what the boxes are for."

"What are they for?"

"So somebody knows whether she's eating." She let her arm drop. "I've watched better than forty people go chasing after the one who left. I never saw one of them go to give anything. Every one went to be told she wasn't as bad as all that. You came down here with a speech. I heard the front end of it Thursday, and I know what the rest was for."

She did know. I had counted that speech out myself in sugar, seven requests in six sentences, and Denise had told the tale of it over the telephone before I had slept. I had three plain sentences now in its place, and Poppy had not asked to hear them.

I stood in front of that wall and looked at what she was sending me home to. I have a table with six chairs and a lazy Susan, and it would be laid for one. His thermos would be on my counter with dust on the lid. The company mail quit coming to my box in the second week of December, when he had it sent to the shop, and only one envelope still came to the house, which was the one I had followed to Mississippi. Payroll had gone out six Thursdays without me, to three drivers, one of them with a garnishment that has to come out first. I did not know whose hand had signed the checks. Dewayne Tubbs dispatched those trucks and told me yes ma'am and no ma'am. January is the wet season in the woods, when a truck may sit three days out of five, and a man can run an outfit that size on a telephone if he has to. I kept those books for twenty-two years. Our kitchen telephone is still lettered on a truck door, and since December it had hardly rung.

On Monday the eighteenth I would go in the back door at Dr. Pruitt's and sit down at the billing desk, and his niece would raise the blind at my window. The Sunday after that there would be a pew with a clear foot of oak on either side of me. Poppy was telling me to go and live in all of that on purpose, for as many Decembers as it took.

She had said to tell my girls the truth one time, and I believed I had done it.

"I told them it was mine," I said. "Both of them."

"You told them whose it was. You never told them why. That one in my coat asked you to your face, and you sent her off with nothing."

"I didn't have it then."

"You've got it now. I sat right there and watched you get it."

She came off the shelves and stood close enough that I could smell the cocoa butter on her.

"And then you let them go to their daddy without you in the middle of it," she said. "That's the part that'll kill you."

She had that right, and I knew it in my stomach before I knew it anywhere else. Every word that passed between that man and his daughters for twenty-seven years had come through me first, as his mail did. I told him what they needed, and I told them what he said. I had believed I was sparing all three of them the trouble.

* * *

Juliet had not moved from her chair in all that time. She had her forearms on the pine, with the satsuma peel in front of her where Poppy had left it, and she waited until I had sat down again before she spoke.

"Go to him once. Say the three sentences and stop. Hear what he says back, all of it. Then leave him alone."

"And drive home."

"And drive home."

"What if he doesn't say anything back?"

"Then that's what he said. You don't get to wait there till he makes it easier."

I had watched that man's back go out my carport door without a word to me, and I had lived on that one silence for six weeks. She was telling me to drive five hours and stand still for another.

"Why alone?" I asked. "If I've said it true, why can't I go back and hear whether it took?"

"Because the second time you go, it's for you."

She said it without any heat, as a fact she had come by herself, and I let it alone.

Poppy had not sat down. She stood behind her own chair with both arms folded on the back of it.

"He drove five hours to get shut of her voice," she said. "She's told it first in that house for six years. Let the man have the quiet he picked."

"He got it from another man's wife, standing in the mud. He's never heard it from her."

"She walks up on him uninvited, that's her deciding one more time what he's ready for."

"Staying home decides it too. It only looks better from the road."

"You'd have her drop that on him and leave him by himself with it."

"He's by himself with it now. All he's got is what Gayla Aycock told him."

That was her own sentence out of her own book, turned to face my husband. He had been living in another woman's telling for six weeks, and before that he had lived six years in mine.

Neither of them was looking at me by then. I had sat between those two at a round table on Friday night while they argued over what I was, and I had kept quiet and let them. I had more to lose by keeping quiet this time.

"Listen at the two of you," I said.

They both stopped.

"He wants quiet. He's by himself with it. He's ready, he's not ready." I had both palms down on the pine. "Neither one of you has ever laid eyes on that man. I lived with him twenty-eight years, and I was wrong about what he could stand every day of the last six. You taught me that, the both of you. Now you're doing it right across me."

Poppy looked at Juliet, and Juliet looked at Poppy.

"Well," Poppy said. "She's got us there."

Juliet let it stand, which from her was as good as a yes. I had not won anything by it. I still had two answers and one husband, and I went at each of them in turn.

"You want me to set a table for a man who moved half the money out to the penny," I said to Poppy. "He left me the odd cent. That is not a man who's coming to supper."

"Now who's saying what he'll do?"

She had me before I had my mouth shut. I had scolded the two of them for it not a minute earlier.

"I didn't say he was coming," she said.

"Then who am I setting it for?"

"For the two who might."

She meant my girls. I had not thought of that table as a place they would ever sit down at again, and she had laid two plates on it in five words.

"And you." I turned to the other side of the table. "You want me to tell him to his face that I liked it, and then get in my car."

"Yes."

"You said yourself he might hear it and never come home."

She did not take it back, and she did not add to it. Each of them had sounded right to me while she was talking, and I have balanced enough ledgers to distrust any two figures that both look right and will not agree.

"Go to him where?" I asked. "I don't know where he is."

Juliet did not answer me. She turned her head and looked up the table at Poppy, as she had looked at her over the dumplings when a harbor went by without a word. Poppy had kept her eyes on the cornbread that time. She met the look now and held it, and then she turned it on me.

"That's not mine to answer," she said.

She had not told me she couldn't. I have known for twenty years the difference between a person who cannot give me a date of birth and one who will not. That woman knew where my husband's truck was, or she knew near enough. I thought I knew whose it was to answer, too. Only one person in that house had been asked whether she remembered a turn.

If I asked her and she told me, I would have my husband's whereabouts out of a woman I had known three days, over my daughter's head. Shelby had found that place on her own two feet. I had taken one decision out of that girl's mouth in four minutes by a stove clock, and I was not going to take this one out from under her.

I had let it go by me once already that night. I let it go again, and the second time was harder than the first.

* * *

Juliet's eyes lifted over my shoulder, as they had three times in the corner booth before daylight. Each of those times she had come back to me with nothing, and she did not come back now.

The spring on the screen door stretched, and the cold crossed the back of my neck while I was still turning around in my chair.

Shelby stood on the mat inside the door with Poppy's canvas coat hanging off her shoulders and the flashlight in her fist, still burning. Her nose was red, and so were the rims of her eyes. She was not crying, and she had not been for some while. Her shoes were dark with wet to the laces.

"Well?" Poppy asked.

"I looked. That's all I did."

"That's allowed."

I did not ask what she had looked at. I will take credit for that much and no more, because of what came out of me in its place.

"You're frozen through," I said. "Hang that up and come sit, there's tea. You're not driving to Ruston tonight, I've got two beds at that hotel. And call your sister, she's been trying you since morning."

I heard it while I was still saying it. I had given her a coat, a chair, a bed and a telephone call in one breath, and not one of the four had a question in it. It was the list, out loud, and I had described it to Juliet that morning in the past tense. Nobody said my name to stop me. Poppy had pulled me up twice at that table with one word, and she kept her mouth shut and let me run to the end. My daughter stood on the mat and took every bit of it, as she had been taking it since she was old enough to stand.

"You done?" she asked.

"Yes."

"I'm staying here. I'll call Macy when I've got it straight what to tell her." She thumbed the flashlight off. "I'm going to wash my face."

She hung the coat on its peg herself and put the flashlight back on its nail. She stepped out of her wet shoes on the mat and set them side by side against the wall, heels out, as her father set his boots. Then she went past the three of us and down the hall in her socks, and the latch clicked.

A quarter of an hour earlier I had been proud of myself over one question about a porch light.

Neither of them said a word to me about it. I would rather have had Poppy say my name.

* * *

It was Juliet who spoke, and she did not speak to me. She had been studying the boot box on top of the refrigerator again.

"You told her to go home and wait on somebody who isn't answering."

"I did," Poppy said.

"You're the one who doesn't answer. You know what that wait is from the other end, and you didn't tell her."

Poppy's arms came off the back of the chair.

"My mother left a child on a hill. He's a grown man who got done wrong."

"You don't owe her a letter. You do know how he's reading his mail."

I had gone at that woman about her mother that afternoon, over a satsuma, and I had done it standing up for the mother. Juliet had not taken anybody's side. She had only pointed out which chair Poppy sat in. Poppy's eyes went to the boot box and came down to the peel on the table, and I watched her decide to pay it.

"I read every one the day it comes," she said to me. "I told you that. In thirty-six years I've never missed one, and I've never answered but the first. Both of those are so at the same time."

"What do you want from her when you read them?"

"Nothing she's sent yet." She pulled her chair out at last and sat down in it. "That girl texts him the weather every morning. Did you know that? What it's doing in Ruston. I'd bet this house he reads it standing up."

I had known about the weather, since Shelby told me in the Tideline with her thumb through her key ring. For six weeks I had pictured that man's telephone shut in a glove box with the sound off. I had not pictured him reading it, and I had no right to the comfort I took from the idea, since Poppy had not said he would answer.

"And you," she said, and her chin came around to the other side of the table. "Go once, say it, get in the car. That's every job you ever took. They write you and you don't write back."

"No."

"You've never stood in anybody's kitchen the Wednesday after."

"I told her that myself, at four o'clock this morning."

"Telling it isn't the same as fixing it."

"No. It isn't."

She said it without lowering her eyes, and Poppy did not press her further. Before daylight that morning she had told me she could get me to a door and had never been much good on the other side of one. I had taken it for modesty, and it had been a plain report.

One of them was sending me home to wait on an answer, and for thirty-five years she had been the one who did not answer. The other was sending me to stand and hear every word a man said back to me, and by her own account she did not answer what came back to her.

"So I'm to pick between two women who can't take their own advice," I said.

"Welcome to church," Poppy said.

* * *

She had her bare feet hooked around the legs of her chair, as she'd had them when she asked whether Juliet owned her book.

"Do you love him?"

Nobody had asked me that. Since the third of December I had been asked how long, and with who, and whether the girls knew. My pastor had asked whether I would see a counselor. I had a speech and a list and three plain sentences, and that word was not in one of them.

I did not have an answer ready. I looked down at the navy book where it lay shut on the pine, and I went hunting for one out loud.

"I ordered his eggs Thursday night," I said. "Over medium. I didn't know I'd done it till she set them down."

Neither of them helped me along, and I was left to keep going or quit.

"I left him the door side of a bed in a hotel he's not in. I've done it in every room I ever slept in." My throat had gotten small. "I know one blessing, and I only know it in his voice."

I could have gone on in that line for an hour. He never got up from a meal I cooked without telling me it was good, and somewhere around the second truck I quit hearing him say it. He had carried Macy to bed off the couch until she was eleven and too long to carry. I had those by the dozen, and every one of them was a way of not answering.

"That's not what I asked you," Poppy said.

"Yes. I love him."

It came out louder than anything else I had said at that table. I had not known for certain that it was so until I heard it, and then I could not see how I had gotten through six weeks without saying it once.

"At home we say it at the end of a telephone call," I said. "I couldn't tell you the last time I said it to his face."

It did not make what I had done one ounce lighter. It made it heavier, and I saw how before either of them could show me.

"They were boys together," I said. "Him and Lamar. They split a deer lease fifteen years. Royce asked that man to say the blessing at our table, and he said it, and I passed him the gravy."

My daughter had put that in front of me four years ago, in my own kitchen door, in nearly those words. I had talked her around it in four minutes.

"I didn't only take a man. I took his friend from him, and I let him go on sitting in a deer stand forty yards off for six years."

Royce did not have many friends, though he had men who drove for him and men he bought parts from, and he had one he had known since they were both in short pants. Every Saturday of the season he got up at four and went to the woods with that one, and he came home at dark and told me what Lamar had said while I fried the venison.

"He never asked me how I was," I said. "Not in..."

I stopped, because there was a bedroom door in the way of that sentence, with a man standing in it every evening for six weeks.

"No. He asked. I told him no till he quit."

"Then he quit," Poppy said. "That's his, and it's about the size of a dime."

It was the second time in a day that somebody had handed that man his own small share and kept me from climbing under it. I tried once more, and I am not proud of what I reached for.

"He hasn't answered those girls in six weeks. Whatever I did, they didn't."

"That's between him and them," Juliet said. "You're the one who put them in the kitchen."

"I know where I put them."

She let me have a minute with that. Then she turned her chair a few inches, so that she faced me square, and she asked me a question I had not known there was.

"Do you want him back, or do you want to be forgiven?"

"Both."

"They're not the same, and he'll know which one walked up to him."

I tried to pull the two apart, as I would two receipts stuck together in a drawer. If I wanted him back, I wanted the man himself. I wanted the dip he put in a mattress and two boots set together under the edge of the bed, and the thirty kindnesses strangers had written down that I never knew about. If I wanted to be forgiven, I wanted my pew back, my window, and the right to stand in line at the Brookshire's with my head up. I had driven five hours on Thursday night and could not have sworn which of those two had her foot on the gas. I had liked to think it was the first. The speech I rode down with asked him for seven things, and every one of the seven was for me.

"I don't know," I said.

"Find out before you're standing in front of him."

* * *

I looked up, and Shelby was standing in the hall door. Her face was scrubbed pink, her hair was pushed back behind her ears, and she had her arms crossed over the front of that green sweatshirt. She was in her sock feet. Her father walked my hall in his for six weeks, and through a shut door I had heard every careful step. I had not heard her come ten feet over bare pine.

Four years before, in my own kitchen, I had not asked that girl what time of the afternoon the boat was on the cove. I had kept from asking for four years after that, because I did not want to be told. I had done it again in the Tideline the night before, with the question sitting right in front of me.

"How long have you been standing there?"

"Long enough."

"What did you hear?"

"That you love him." Her voice gave me no more than it gives a customer. "And Mr. Lamar saying grace."

So she had been there for all of it that counted. I did not look to either of the others, and they did not offer.

"I asked you why last night," Shelby said. "You said you didn't have anything fit to hand me."

"I've got it now. It's not any bigger than it was."

"I didn't ask for big."

I put both palms on my knees under the table, where I had put them at four that morning to keep them from reaching for a packet. She was twenty-seven years old, and she was my daughter. I sorted out what part of it was hers to be told.

"After my operation I told your daddy to leave the light off, and I never told him he could turn it back on. Six years later a man looked at me, and I liked it. And for four hours a week he kept the time, so I didn't have to keep anything. That's all it ever was."

She took it in standing up, with her arms still crossed. Her face changed at the word operation, since she had been fifteen and carried the trays, and she counted from that year to the cove while I watched.

"That's all," she said.

"That's all."

"Twelve years, and you never told him."

"No."

"And he just left it off. Twelve years, and he never turned it on."

She had held that door open for me, and she did not know she had done it. It was the same one I had started through an hour before, and I had gotten three words into it.

"Don't put that on your daddy," I said. "I told him to leave it off. He did what I said."

She looked at me a good while, and I do not believe she had heard me turn down an out before in her life.

"I had better ones for you."

"I know you did."

She had made me six or seven over four years, so that she could stand to sit at my table, and the true one was smaller and meaner than the least of them. I did not tell her I was sorry, though I had it in my mouth. I had learned in a corner booth what my sorry drags along behind it, and she had been asked for enough.

She did not say it was all right, and she did not go back down the hall. She came up the room in her socks to the table and picked up her own plate, with the napkin still wadded on it. She took it to the sink and washed it under the hot tap, and she stood it in the rack with ours. Poppy watched her do it and never said one word about whose job that plate had been.

* * *

I worked my feet back into my shoes under the table. Juliet stood and took her coat off the back of her chair. She picked the small gray book up off the pine, where it had lain beside the navy one all afternoon, and she had it halfway to her coat pocket when Poppy spoke.

"Leave me that fifty-cent copy," Poppy said. "I'll write in it."

"It's a library book."

"It's withdrawn. Nobody's coming for it. Leave it."

Juliet stood holding it a little longer, and then she laid The Long Table down on the pine beside the navy one, with the two spines touching, and took her hand away. She had owned that book since graduate school, and she walked out of the house without it.

"You'll get it back," Poppy said.

Juliet did not ask her when.

Poppy came out on the porch behind us in her bare feet and pulled the screen door to. Juliet went on down the steps to my car. That left the two of us under the bulb, with the clay pots in their crooked row along the rail.

"You'll get a letter at Christmas," Poppy said. "You ate at my table, and that's the rule. It doesn't make us friends."

"Do I answer it?"

"That's up to you. Most do."

"You still wouldn't have sat across from me."

"No. I'd have fed you standing up."

She said it kindly, which did not change what it was. I had come over a bridge that afternoon half hoping she had thought better of Thursday night. She had fed me, put me to work, and told me the truth each time I asked for it. She had not taken back one word of Thursday.

"I owe you for a short stack," I said.

"You do. Keep owing it." She tipped her head toward the car, where Juliet stood with her coat over her arm. "Which one are you fixing to do? Hers or mine?"

"I don't know. I'd have to find him to do hers, and I'd have to quit hunting him to do yours."

"That's about the size of it."

She did not tell me which she would pick in my place, and I did not ask her.

I looked back through the screen, and down at the far end of that long room my daughter stood at the sink with her back to the door and a dish towel in her fist, drying that one plate longer than a plate takes. I did not call good night to her down the length of that room. I did not ask her how she slept, either, since she had told me when I could ask.

"Go on," Poppy said. "I've got a girl to feed."

She went in, and the screen door clapped shut between us.

Chapter Thirteen

I drove us back toward the bay with the heater turned up high and neither one of us talking. Where the road started up to the bridge, the outriggers of the shrimp boats I had slowed for that afternoon stood off to my left over the dark roofs, with one yard light burning among them. I looked, as I had looked at every lot on that coast, and saw no more than poles and wire. My daughter had come in out of the dark that evening with her shoes wet to the laces and told Poppy she had looked. I had not asked her at what, and I did not ask myself.

The bridge was lit from end to end, and the water on both sides of it was black. Juliet rode with her coat folded over her knees. Near the top of the span she put her fingers into the right pocket of that coat, where a small gray book had ridden over that afternoon, and found the pocket empty. She took them out again and laid them in her lap.

"You left your book," I said.

"I know where it is."

"She called it a fifty-cent copy."

"It was fifty cents. I didn't need it read into the record."

She sounded put out, which I had not expected of her over fifty cents. I kept my eyes on the taillights ahead of me and did not smile where she could see it. She had kept that book since graduate school, and a barefoot woman had talked her out of it between the table and the door.

My telephone lit up in my purse as I pulled into the parking deck, and I read it with the engine running. It was Macy. "Shelby still won't pick up," she had written. "Is she ok?"

I had told Macy that morning that her sister was safe and fed and would call when she wanted to. That was ten hours old, and the child had been dialing ever since. I typed that Shelby was all right, that she had eaten her supper and had a bed for the night, and that she said she would call herself. Then I typed, "Be patient with her," and looked at it. Every word that passed between my girls and their father for twenty-seven years had come through me first, and a good many that passed between the two of them had as well. I rubbed out that last line and sent the rest. It ought not to cost a woman that much to say less.

Keandra had the desk, with her green nails going on a keyboard. Mr. Ladner sat at the keno board in his Saints jacket with his chin on his chest. The corner booth in the Tideline stood empty behind its plastic ferns, and Denise was at the counter marrying ketchup bottles with her glasses down on their chain. Across the lobby Linh looked up from behind her brass rail, took a bottle of bourbon by the neck, and lifted it an inch off the shelf to ask me. I shook my head, and she set it back.

"Go to bed," Juliet said.

"There's two beds up there, and I can't lie down in either one."

"You ought to have gone Thursday."

I had slept four hours since Thursday night, and I was not going to sleep in that room. One bed had my suitcase open on it, and the other had its door side turned down for a man who had never laid eyes on the room. From the roof of the parking deck, my first night in that town, I had looked out at an island and a long pier with one light burning at the end of it. I had thought then that a person could walk out there and be as far from Louisiana as dry boards would take her.

"I'm going to walk out on that pier," I said.

She did not ask me which pier, or tell me it was forty degrees. She put her arms into her coat and buttoned it to the neck, and she came along without being asked.

* * *

We went out the back of the hotel past the pool, which was drained and roped off until March, and down a set of concrete steps to the sand. The wind was coming straight in off the water. The pier started a few hundred yards down the beach and ran a long way out on its pilings, and the one light stood at the end of it on a pole.

The boards were old, and they had gaps between them wide enough to lose a quarter through. We were about halfway out when the heel of Juliet's shoe went down into one of those gaps and stayed there.

"Fuck," she said.

She stood on one leg and worked at it with both fists around her own ankle. Then she put her palm on my shoulder to keep from going over, and she pulled until the heel came loose. In three nights that woman had not put a finger on me, and when she did it was to get her shoe back. I held still for it, as I would have for anybody.

"She'd have walked it barefoot," I said.

"She'd have walked it barefoot in January and told me what my shoes cost."

She went the rest of the way on the balls of her feet. Under the light her ears were red, and so was the end of her nose. She had her shoulders up around her neck and her fists pushed down in her pockets. That same day her own court record had been read out at a supper table, and her forearms never left the pine. It did me good to learn that the cold could get at her the same as it got at me.

An old man was fishing off the end with a white bucket and a thermos beside him. He did not turn around when we came up. A bench was bolted to the boards with its back to the wind. We sat down on it and looked at the black water and the blacker line of the island beyond it.

Behind us the hotel stood lit to its roof, with a third of its windows dark for the winter. I found the sixth floor and could not have said which window was mine. The casino made no sound at all from out there. I had the water working at the pilings, the old man's reel, and a woman in a good wool coat beside me breathing through her teeth. The cold came through the seat of my slacks before I had been sitting a minute. My eyes burned, and the light on its pole had a ring around it.

I ran through the hours she had given me. There was Thursday night in the corner booth, Friday night at the bar, the hours before daylight that morning with a row of sugar packets between us, and a whole Saturday at another woman's table.

"At what you get," I said, "I've had ten thousand dollars off you."

"Twelve-five. You're leaving out the strip club."

"You weren't working at the strip club."

"I have never worked harder in my life."

I laughed out loud, and it went down the pier ahead of the wind. The old man looked around at last, studied the two of us, and went back to his line.

"I'm still not getting a bill."

"You're not a client. I don't know what the hell you are. You're not getting a bill."

* * *

The old man reeled in and cast again, and neither of us spoke while he did it.

Every February for twenty years, when the woods were too wet to cut, Royce brought up his week of redfish on the coast. One winter he had a rod picked out in a catalog with the page turned down. Every spring there was a truck note to meet or a driver out, and I was the one who said so. The old man's thermos was green steel with a dented cup. My husband set one of the same make on my counter every evening for twenty-eight years, and I could not keep my eyes off it.

When Juliet spoke, she said it to the water.

"What do you think is going to happen?"

For six weeks people had asked me what happened, and how long, and who knew. Poppy had asked me on her porch which answer I meant to take. Nobody had yet asked me what I expected.

"When?"

"Tomorrow. March. Ten years from now. Pick one."

I took tomorrow, since it was nearest. On the road down I pictured finding him a hundred times, and a hundred more in that hotel. He would be standing with his back to me in a parking lot or at a gas pump. My own voice said his name, and he turned around. It stopped there every time. The second minute never came, and I had one day left to get that far. On Monday morning at eight I was due at a billing desk in the back of Dr. Pruitt's office, five hours north of that bench, and somebody else would be sitting at my window.

I wiped my nose on the back of my wrist, which my mother would have slapped. "I've got him turning around," I said. "I never got any further than that. I had a speech to put there, and you took it away from me."

"What about Lamar?"

"He told his wife I ran him down and wouldn't turn him loose. She said so across my counter. He hasn't called me since. His mailbox was full that morning, and I never tried it again."

"Where is he?"

"I don't know. Gayla's been by herself in their pew since about New Year's. Wendell Albritton passes the plate on that aisle now. That was Lamar's aisle for twenty years." I pulled my coat closer. "I haven't asked a soul where he went."

I had not wondered, either, and I found that out while I was saying it. Three hundred times I had driven to that man. I could have taken his gravel with my lights off, and I had learned which board of his porch gave. For six weeks I had not spent five minutes on where he was sleeping. My husband's bed I had hunted across two states, walking the parking lots of a strange town in the dark and looking for a crease in a tailgate. I set those two facts next to each other, and what they came to was no credit to me. It did tell me the truth about six years of Tuesdays, which was that the man had never been the point of them.

Gayla Aycock ate paste to make me laugh when we were six years old. She sat by herself now on Sunday mornings with her hair set, in plain view of my own pew, and I was the one who had cleared the seat beside her.

"What did your husband do about him?"

"I don't know that either."

What I had was one piece of mail. The week before Christmas a cancellation notice had come to the house on our homeowner's policy, and behind it in the same week came a new declarations page from an agency in Ruston, with both our names typed on it as they had always been. He had moved the house away from Lamar Aycock and kept my name on the paper, and that was the whole of what I had. I had driven to work the long way since December so that I would not have to pass that agency's front window. I could not have told her whether the man had a black eye or a new truck.

Four years before, in my own kitchen, I had asked my daughter what she thought the truth would do to her daddy, sitting in a deer stand forty yards from Lamar with a rifle across his knees. I had built that picture to keep a girl quiet. Royce Womack never raised his hand to a living soul in all our years, and I used it on her all the same. On that bench in the cold the picture came back to me, and I could not make it go away. The man I was married to for twenty-eight years wiped his feet. I did not know the one who had walked out my carport door on the third of December.

"I'm not afraid for Lamar," I said. "I'm afraid of what it cost Royce, whatever he did. And I'm the one who sent him to do it."

She did not tell me that he was a grown man and had sent himself. She had spoken for him once that day, and I had caught her at it.

"Do they have children?"

"One. Brady. He's thirty. He sells insurance in Shreveport, and he was going to come home and have his daddy's agency."

I had known that boy since the Sunday they brought him into church in a blue blanket. He was three years ahead of Shelby at school. He had eaten at my table beside his mother a great many Sundays, and he had said yes ma'am to me every one of them. Every Tuesday for six years I had counted my own two girls on the road out to that camp and again on the road home. I had worked out what it would do to each of them, and I had gone anyway.

"I never counted him," I said. "He never came into my head. That's three children in this, and I've been saying two."

Juliet did not answer that. She had drawn her feet up under the bench and crossed her arms tight over her coat, and she was shivering and making no remark on it. The wind took a little spray up over the end of the pier, and the old man moved his thermos back from the edge with his foot.

Three children put me in mind of a courthouse, and I went there before she could send me.

"He hasn't filed," I said. "I'd have been served. Nobody's come."

I had never let myself picture a lawyer's office, and I did not picture one then. I told her about the checking account instead. On the fourth of December he had taken out half of what was in it, to the dollar, and had left the odd cent with me. I had read that both ways for six weeks. A man who means to come home does not split an account down to the penny. A fair man does, whether he is coming home or not, and Royce was a fair man before he was anything else.

Then I told her about the girls without being asked. It would come down to which house. There would be a Christmas next December and one after that, and somebody would have to decide who got them first and who got them for what was left of the day. Macy would marry sometime, and an usher would have to be told which pew to put her mother in. One day one of them would hand me a baby at my own front door and stand on the step while I held it, with her car still running in the drive. I would be the grandmother they got around to second.

"What does it look like if he comes home?"

"A man at my table who knows. Every Tuesday for the rest of his life he'll know what day it is."

"And if he doesn't?"

"I'm fifty-two. A rented house in town. A desk in the back where nobody has to look at me. My pew."

I had said both of those in one voice, and neither had made it shake. The second I had been living in since December, and I could have listed its furniture. It had a back door at Dr. Pruitt's and a clear foot of oak on either side of me on Sunday, and it had one plate in the drainer. The first I could not see past the supper table. I could get him as far as his chair, with his boots off at the door and his cap on the hook. I could not get him to lift his eyes from his plate, and I could not get either one of us down the hall to that bedroom.

"What will you take?"

"Whatever he says."

"That's not a term. Name one."

So I laid them out for her as I would lay out a payment plan for a patient, one line at a time, in the order they came due. If he said sign, I would sign where the lawyer put the flag. If he said the house was his, I would pack. If he wanted the books, the ledger was his for the asking, with twenty-two years in it in my handwriting. If he wanted every Tuesday of the three hundred, with the dates, I would sit across from him and give them to him until he told me to quit. If he said come home and I'll never touch you again, I would take that too, and I would cook his breakfast.

Not one of those was a term I would refuse. A list with no refusal in it only tells a man how much his wife thinks she owes.

"Is there one you won't take?"

I started to say there was not. I had my mouth open for it, and then I found one.

"I won't have him tell those girls any of it was his. If he tries to take half in front of them, I'll say no to his face."

"That's the first one you've named that isn't for you."

* * *

The old man reeled in for the last time and snapped the lid on his bucket. He came up the boards past us with his rod over his shoulder and nodded to me, and then he went on toward the beach. We had the end of that pier to ourselves.

Twice that evening she had told me less than she knew. The first time was at Poppy's sink, and I had turned it over there with a dish towel in my fist. The second came across a pine table, when she told me my husband would know which woman had walked up to him. She had not said how she came to know such a fact about a man she had never met.

"You told me he'd know which one walked up to him," I said. "How do you know that?"

She kept her face to the water. I had learned from her how long a person can be let alone with a question, and I let her alone with that one. The wind got in under my collar. I did not help her, and I did not take it back.

"At Poppy's sink I said, 'And you stop.' You said, 'That's the rule.'"

"I did."

"That's not a yes. I've given that answer across a counter for twenty years."

"No. It's not a yes."

She took her fists out of her coat pockets and put them back, and the wind pushed her short hair over to one side. I thought she might sit there until I gave up and went in. Then she straightened her back against the bench, and she told it in the fewest words she could find.

"A woman said the word to me, and I didn't stop."

"You didn't hear her."

"I heard her. She said it seven times."

I had begun to shake, and I pressed my knees together to stop it. Seven is a long way past a mistake. A person has to hear a word and go on, and hear it and go on again, six times over. I had been asked only once. My daughter stood in my carport door four years ago and asked whether I was going to quit, and I drove out to that camp two hundred times after she asked.

"And the eighth?"

"I stopped."

"Who was she?"

"Somebody I loved. She trusted me more than anybody had, and that's what I used."

I did not ask Juliet what she had done to that woman in that room. I know what it looks like when a person has left the worst line off a statement, and I had not earned the seeing of it. Earlier that evening I had believed the rules were the difference between her room and my camp. She'd had every one of those rules in place, and she had gone on anyway, with a woman saying the word to her face.

"I went and found her afterward," Juliet said. "I stood at a door and told her I was sorry."

"What did she say?"

"She asked me what for."

Her voice had gone rough at the edge. She stopped, and I waited. A gull came down on the rail near the light, looked the two of us over, and left again.

"I said all of it. She told me that wasn't an answer, and it wasn't. I'd driven there to get it off me. I wanted her to take it and hand me back somebody I could stand to be."

I had made that speech. I had ridden five hours with my own, and at four o'clock that morning I had counted it out in sugar in the Tideline. Mine came to seven requests in six sentences. Hers had been two words long, and it had been a request all the same.

"She knew what I'd come for before I had my mouth open," she said. "That's how I know he'll know."

"Did you ever say it right?"

"I said what I did, a piece at a time, with her looking at me. Then I left, and I haven't gone back."

"Did she forgive you?"

"I don't know. I don't get to ask."

She had told me over supper to go to my husband once and then leave him alone, and I had taken it for hard advice from a woman with nothing to lose by giving it. She had been telling me what she did herself.

"Poppy said you were working on yourself and using me to do it."

"She was right. You sat down in that cafe with a speech. I knew it when I heard it. I'd made one."

I was not angry. She had been working on herself across a table from me for three nights, and I'd had the use of every hour of it.

I had two kind sentences ready, and they were both true. She had stopped, and there are people who would not have stopped at eight or at twenty. She had gone back, besides, and said the ugly part aloud to the one person she owed it to, which was more than I had done in six weeks. Both of them were excuses, and by then I could tell an excuse by the feel of it in my mouth. Two women had spent three days refusing to hand me a single one.

"I'm not going to tell you it's all right," I said.

"Good. I'd think less of you."

Her teeth had been shut against the cold the whole time she talked. She bent over now and blew into her cupped palms, and the breath came out between her fingers white under the light.

* * *

We sat a while with nothing said, and I went back over what I had told Poppy on her porch. She had asked which of the two I was fixing to do, hers or Juliet's. I had said I would have to find him to do one and quit hunting him to do the other, and I had gone down her steps believing I had to choose.

Juliet's took an hour. I was to say my three plain sentences, hear him out, and get in my car. Poppy's took ten years. I was to go home, set my table, and stay where my people could find me. The woman beside me had done the first of those at a door. If anybody ever told her the second, she had not said so.

Neither one of them had offered me a way to get him back. I had asked them both what to do, and I had been listening the whole time for how to win. One had told me how to say a true word to a man and the other how to live after I had said it, and Royce Womack coming up my drive was in neither.