The Right Thing

CHAPTER 15


“I still have the book of matches.”

“Really?”

“I’ve always kept it in the bottom of my jewelry box, like a kind of... keepsake, you know?”

The truck’s windows are fogged to opacity, and Troy Smoot is curled around my bare feet like a snoring fur space heater. He jumped over into the back seat a while ago and laid claim to that end of the blankets, although I didn’t notice him right away, being too caught up in my story about that summer spent down on Aunt Too-Tai’s farm. It’s warm here in the truck, wrapped in Ted’s arms, pressed skin-to-skin against his smooth chest, so different from Du’s heavy pelt of hair. I never knew horse blankets could be so comfortable, even though they still smell faintly of stable and laundry detergent.

Ted’s been propped on one elbow, listening to me. In the grainy half-light of the truck stop’s distant arc lamps, his face is thoughtful. I run my fingertip along his stubbled jaw, tracing the line of his generous mouth.

“Tell me about that matchbook, what it means to you,” he says.

I think for a long moment, and just like always, I’m right back under the sweet gum tree in Aunt Too-Tai’s yard. Like always, I can still smell the smoke, hear the hogs screaming. I can see George and my great-aunt stumbling away from the burning pasture. I still feel the terrible weight falling upon my eight-year-old shoulders, the near-adult knowing that like Cain, I was indeed cursed and now would always bear the mark even if I tried to be good for the rest of my life.

“It reminds me that the shit you do comes with consequences,” I say finally. “And that sometimes other people end up paying those consequences. So I try, God knows I try, to do the right thing, but sometimes—okay, a lot of the time—my best intentions amount to being irresponsible instead. Like driving Starr to New Orleans. Oh, no question about it, I knew up front it wasn’t the responsible thing to do. I mean, responsible would’ve wished her good luck, walked out of that tacky condo, and gone to my husband’s partners’ dinner, but I couldn’t abandon her because it wouldn’t have been right. She had no one, Ted. And I knew for sure that responsible would’ve left the Treebys’ dog in the elevator, but that shit was so wrong I had to do something about it.”

“And,” I say, looking up to meet the interest in Ted’s dark eyes, “responsible certainly wouldn’t have made love with a near-stranger. At a truck stop in the middle of the night. In the back seat of a pickup truck.”

Ted laughs, stroking my bare shoulder. “Not so strange anymore, but I’m definitely with you on the innocent bystander thing, baby.” His lips brush the side of my neck, a sweet wandering along my collarbone. He kisses the hollow at the base of my throat, murmuring, “You never want to hurt the innocent bystanders.”

“So much of the time, the responsible thing doesn’t feel like the right thing and I can’t always tell the difference. It’s like, oh, that talent some people have for finding water with a stick, whatever that’s called. If there’s ever a way, I’ll find me some trouble and jump right into it.”

Ted yawns. “Well, I don’t think this was trouble,” he says. “I’d call it damned incredible.” He gathers me to himself, holding me closer. “You cold?”

“No,” I say. “What time is it?” I lift my wrist to look at my watch but can’t make it out. It doesn’t matter: whatever o’clock it is, it’s late and I need to get home.

And I need time to understand what I’ve just done. Like so much of my experience, having made love with Ted feels right, but—based on my track record to date—this may turn out to be as destructive as what my grandmother used to call the War for Southern Independence. Still, no matter how I look at it, I can’t make myself believe that this wasn’t a good thing, so long as no one finds out. No, not even the rosebush voice can make me believe that.


Ted suddenly rolls over onto his back with me in his arms, and now I’m on top of him, looking down into those whiskey-brown eyes. “You still want to go to Jackson?” he asks, smiling his lovely smile up at me. “Can’t I convince you to turn around and head back to New Orleans with me?”

“Oh, Ted—awful as it is, Jackson’s my home,” I answer, trying to keep it light. “Like you said, it’s where they have to take you in.”

His arms around my waist, Ted’s quiet for a moment, looking directly into my eyes with unsettling intensity. “So what was this?” He doesn’t sound angry, I think, just as though he wants this one thing to be really clear between us. If I could make it that way, I would, but to me, what happened tonight was as profound as a parable: self-evident and bound to be diminished by explanations. Besides, here in the back seat of this truck, questions can be dangerous things, and then Ted goes and asks another one.

“Was this a . . . fling, something you do when you decide you need a little excitement in your life?” He doesn’t sound happy.

“No!” I press my forehead on his chest, unable to look at him. “It was a very big deal. Lord, Ted—you’re only the second man I’ve been with in my whole life. Hell, I don’t even flirt. In fact, I’m always trying to cut way back on excitement.”

Ted appears to think on this. “Okay,” he says at last. “I guess I get that. Sort of.”

I’ve never been much for rationalizing. I believe actions stand or fall on their own merits—mine usually falling—but at this moment I badly want to tell Ted something he wants to hear. There are women in this world so good at smoothing things over that I’m in awe of them, but since I’ve always been really bad at smoothing, I can only keep my mouth shut and hope: please, don’t let me mess this up, too.

“You going to tell your husband?” Ted plays with a strand of my hair, slipping the heavy platinum strands through his fingers. He asks as though it’s a casual question, but underneath that I hear something more. I’m scared of something more. There’s only one answer I can give in any case.

“No.”

Reluctantly, I roll off him, sit up, and hunt for the black dress. It’s somehow ended up in the front seat and is covered in dog hair, Troy Smoot having used it for a bed when he was exiled from the back seat. With difficulty I struggle into it, remembering ruefully that it comes off a lot easier than it goes on. Where are the rest of my clothes? I can’t find my underwear to save my life.

Ted has pulled on his jeans and cowboy boots and is hunting underneath the seats and between the horse blankets for my panties. “I can’t find them,” he says after a pretty thorough search. It’s as though they’ve returned to the underwear mother ship with all the odd socks, but I’ve already got too much on my mind to obsess about panties. Offering Ted his T-shirt wordlessly, I clamber into the front seat. He pulls the white cotton over his head before he climbs into the front seat with me and gets behind the wheel.

“Why not?” he asks, slipping the key into the ignition, his voice neutral.

I know exactly what he’s talking about. Telling Du. I pull on my boots while I’m thinking about how to answer him. “Because I’m not going to leave him,” I say, deciding that brutal honesty is best. “Because this was between you and me, just us. Du and me, we’re . . . used to each other, and I couldn’t, really couldn’t, live in Jackson without being married to him.”

“You mean you’re afraid he’d leave you?”

I think this unsettling possibility over. “There’s that,” I say eventually. “For one thing, for years everyone’s been expecting Du to get fed up and walk out on me. My mother would literally die of shame. And I’m trying to be responsible here. Telling Du would do a lot of unnecessary damage, the kind that takes a lifetime to mend, if ever. He always forgives me, you see, and I, I . . . just can’t do it.”

I can’t set my marriage on fire and expect Du to get over that.

But have I already done damage here tonight, with Ted? Surely not. My own impulsive actions aside, I’m not about to try to fathom Ted’s reasons. And anyway, aren’t men supposed to want uncomplicated sex more than they want a bottomless beer keg and fifty-two weeks of football? Back at the Chi Omega house that was the gospel, all of us knew it by heart, and with the exception of my father none of the men of my admittedly limited experience have seemed to think anything different.

My explanation falls into silence. Ted doesn’t say anything more, but his jaw tightens. With a sigh I’m not even sure I heard, he turns the key in the ignition and the big diesel engine fires up immediately.

I guess there’s nothing left to explain.





It’s a long eighty-five miles from the truck stop to Jackson.

Except for directions, Ted and I exchange very little real conversation. The more time I put between me and the Fernwood Travel Plaza, the more I’m sure what happened there probably wasn’t one of my best ideas, and I don’t think I can blame it all on the dope. Even the dog seems subdued. He’s coiled beside me on the front seat, his nose on his paws, as though wishing his adventure could last longer.

I haven’t thought about what to do with Troy either. Should I try to get him adopted into a good home, a good home far away from Jackson—somewhere out of state like, say, Manitoba? Should I threaten Jerome Treeby with a visit from the Ladies’ League SPCA volunteers? They’re always swooping in like World War II fighter pilots when it comes to animals in distress. Or should I just keep him myself?

Should I tell Du?

The enormity of the last fifteen hours is starting to sink in. I’m not the same Annie Sizemore who blew into Maison-Dit yesterday on the hunt for a cocktail dress. Hell, I’m not even the same woman who lied to her husband and drove to New Orleans in the middle of the night. Can I just slip inside my house tonight and pretend that none of this ever happened?

Should I tell Du?

Of course not, the rosebush voice says crossly. My watch says it’s 5:20. I know that soon the dark will be lifting, the dawn a pale, ice-white rind on the horizon. Soon, I’ll be sneaking into my own home, changing into my nightgown. Before Du wakes up, I’ll be lying in bed, trying to figure out how to explain my missing car—God knows where Starr left it—and my new acquaintance Troy Smoot. I can’t say a word to him about Ted and Starr, not if I don’t want to blow a gaping hole below my own waterline. No, if all goes according to plan, this night will soon become a memory, I remind myself, a memory that belongs to me alone.

But how, I wonder, will that memory fit into the tired narrative of Annie Sizemore, the spoiled, aging child with the irresponsible streak? And what about the change I can feel inside me like an underground river, its current carving deep into bedrock? How will I feel about this next year? What about five years from now when I’m forty, childless, perhaps still balanced on the high-tension wire between what I really am and who everyone thinks I ought to be?

All these thoughts run on a treadmill in my head, and then, too soon, just as dawn purples the east, we turn into the gates of the tall iron fence that protects my paranoid neighborhood from all the undesirables plotting to gain entrance. The massive, dusty pickup rolls alongside the parked Mercedes and minivans like a professional wrestler through a day spa, rumbling past the manicured, frost-leavened lawns and sprawling, too-big houses. Before we get to the corner, I ask Ted to stop and let me out.


“I need to walk home from here,” I say, knowing how it sounds but unable to think of a better way to say it. I may not have my keys, but I can sneak in anyway: there’s a door key taped inside the mailbox, and Du’s such a heavy sleeper. The truck idles on the street, diesel exhaust a dense white fog in the frozen air. I turn to Ted before I open the door.

“There’s no way I can thank you enough.” So, wanting to make this as right as I can, I say with a tentative smile, “Bette said it—you’re one of the good guys.”

He doesn’t reply and I want to slide across the truck’s bench seat to touch his face, to tell him I’ll never forget him, never. Instead, Ted reaches over and ruffles the fur behind Troy Smoot’s ears. “Be good,” he says to the dog. “Take care of her.” Stung, I shrug out of the blue jean jacket and try to hand it to him.

Ted looks at the jacket. He looks at me. “Keep it,” he says briefly. “I don’t want you to be cold.”

I bite my lip. “Thank you.” The dawn light is powder-pale and bitter cold, a snappish cold assaulting my bare legs and face as soon as I open the door to the truck. Now I really miss my underwear. “Come on, Troy,” I say to the dog. The little terrier springs out and onto the sidewalk with me, nose twitching and on the alert for matters needing his immediate attention.

I don’t want Ted and me to part like this. “Hey,” I say with my hand on the door, teeth already chattering. “Good luck this afternoon. At the races, I mean.”

“Thanks.” Without a glance in my direction, Ted’s eyes look straight ahead through the windshield. “Girl,” he says, “you burn like butane—clean, fast, and too bright to look at. You’ve messed up my head like high-octane coke. Go on home now.”

No one has ever said a thing like this to me before in my life.

Not trusting myself with another word, I shut the door. I know Ted’s watching me walk away from him, but I can’t look back, I can’t. Troy trots beside me on his leash made of hay rope, our breath icy egret plumes in the cold. We’re at the corner when behind me I hear the truck turning around in a neighbor’s driveway, then the quiet roar of its diesel engine drawing away.

Then it’s gone.





There’s a police car in front of my house.

My mother’s Lincoln—a fastidiously maintained relic the color of dyed ranch mink she’s driven for the past twenty years—is parked halfway on the lawn, as though the car hadn’t stopped moving before she jumped out of it. The cold burns my lungs when I gasp at the sight, my boots planted to the brick walk. There’s going to be no sneaking into the house now. Impulsively, I turn and look back over my shoulder, but Ted’s truck is, of course, nowhere to be seen. A lone crow wings high overhead in the pitiless light of early, early morning, cawing this way to the rest of the flock. With the sincere dedication of a housebound dog who’s not used to being outdoors, Troy pulls on his rope, barking at the bird.

“Hush up, Troy.”

No running, Annie. This time’s going to be bad, very bad. Maybe the worst yet, but where else do I have to go? Possibilities flood my mind—Memphis? Atlanta? Angkor Wat?

I’ll have to pray that they take me in. So even though I’m shaking with the cold and the knowledge that I’m in serious trouble, I square my shoulders in Ted’s jacket and tighten my grip on Troy’s hay rope. Climbing the sweeping front steps to the columned porch, I discover the front door with its heavy brass knob isn’t shut all the way. I slip inside, feeling as though I’m wearing an old-fashioned diving suit—lead-footed, cut off from the world above with all its air and light. At least it’s warm inside the house. Troy’s nails click briskly on the travertine floor as we tiptoe through the foyer.

Raised voices are coming from the living room, Du’s heavy baritone drawl louder than them all.

“Cut the effin’ crap. What’s this forty-eight hours shit? You can’t tell me my wife isn’t a missing person!” he bellows. I wince. My mother murmurs something I can’t make out before he responds angrily, “She’s s’posed to be in bed, but she’s not. She’s gone. That makes her a got-damn missing person!”

Like a coward, I peek into the living room first. Two cops in blue uniforms—one short and ferret-faced and the other the size of a small asteroid—are parked in front of the fieldstone fireplace, my most recent portrait simpering above their heads. Like the cops have heard this same story one too many times, their body language radiates a skeptical professionalism, while my mother is slumped on the Danish linen sofa Du picked out last year, a handkerchief to her eyes. Wearing his bathrobe and slippers, my husband paces around the grand piano neither one of us knows how to play, looking like he just fell out of bed, with the back of his hair standing up in disordered spikes. Du’s face is as red as I’ve ever seen it: he always gets mad when he’s scared. Gulping past the trepidation I feel in my chest like a hot rock, I force myself to walk in the big double doorway to the living room. I clear my throat.

“Hey, y’all,” I manage, my voice faint. “I’m home.”

I have never wished for a pair of underwear more in my life.

“Annie!” Du’s jaw drops, a look of bafflement crossing his crimson face, as though I’m an inappropriately dressed ghost of myself. I don’t think he even sees the dog at my feet.

My mother’s face is the pure white of paper, of snowshoe hares, of freshly laundered sheets. “Annie!” she exclaims in a low voice, getting up from the sofa.

“Where the hail you been?” Du crosses the football-field-sized Tabriz rug in about two furious strides, his bathrobe flapping. “Do you know how got-damn crazy I’ve been? You stop to think about that, huh?” he says. His mouth twisted, he grabs my shoulders in Ted’s jacket and shakes me like Troy would shake a rat. “But you don’t ever stop to think, do you?”

Christ, I’ve never seen him this mad before. What have I done?

“Du!” I squeak. For the first time in our years together, I’m scared of what he might do to me. At my feet, Troy Smoot’s hackles lift like a little hedgehog’s, a miniature growl thrumming in his barrel chest.

My poor mother’s mouth is a shocked O. “Duane . . .” she begins, but the ferret-faced cop cuts her off.

“Mr. Sizemore, I know you want to get a handle on your temper.” His tone is calm, but this pair of Jackson’s finest is on the alert now, ready to run my husband in for getting physical with his wayward wife—even though Du would cut off his own arm before he’d ever hit me. I think. Du drops his hands from my shoulders, clenching them at his sides, and, freed, I find my voice at last.

“Honey, I’m so sorry.” Gripping Troy’s leash as though it were a lifeline in that midnight fire at sea I’m always saying I’d rather be in, I drop my eyes in shame, looking down at the pattern of the rug.

“And your mother!” Du’s tone is like a stranger’s, heavy with contempt. “I called her at four this morning when I went to look in on you, saw you weren’t in bed—just a pile of f*cking pillows. You could have given her a heart attack.”

My mother speaks up at that. “There’s nothing wrong with my heart, Duane Sizemore,” she says. “We all need to calm down, now that we know Annie’s safe.” Her eyes are a red-rimmed, steely green, her backbone ramrod straight. Silence fills the big, overdecorated room. Du turns away from me to the officers in his house.


“Well,” he says, stiff as a length of stove wood, “y’all can see she’s home now. Sorry to have called you out for a false alarm.”

The asteroid-sized cop closes his notebook. “Happens more often than you think, Mr. Sizemore,” he says cheerfully. “We’ll be on our way now. Y’all have a happy Thanksgiving.”

That’s guaranteed not to happen in this house, but I say anyway, “And the same to you, officers. I’m sorry again about the mix-up.”

Du walks the cops to the front door, doing his best to look like he’s got this situation under control. There’s a low-voiced exchange outside on the porch I can’t quite hear, but from the cops’ guffaws I gather his good-ole-boy instincts are coming through in the clutch.

My mother crosses the room and folds me into her thin arms. Dropping Troy’s hay rope so I can hug her back, I’m aware of her ribs beneath my hands, frail as swallowtail butterfly wings under her woolen dress.

“I’m so sorry,” I whisper into her shoulder. “I shouldn’t have worried you.”

“Oh, Annie,” she sighs. “What have you gone and done now?”

My throat closes around any words I might have spoken when Du stalks back into the living room, his footsteps loud as the banging of my heart. I move away from my mother’s side, wondering if my marriage, the life I left behind yesterday, will survive this Thanksgiving Day.

“I’m gonna ask you one more time,” Du says, his voice cold and distant as the surface of the moon. “Where you been? And where the hail did that dog come from?” Troy’s tail is erect and quivering, his expression wary, but he holds his ground.

Taking courage from the dog, I walk across the acre of carpet toward my husband, and with every step I feel the rosebush voice howling inside me. I choose the easy question first.

“He’s a rescue,” I tell him, my voice shaking. “I, I found him in an elevator.”

Du snorts in disgust. “I mean it. Where. You. Been.” I peek at him. He folds his arms, eyes narrowed to coin slots. I look down at his fleece slippers, away from the mask of rage on Du’s normally amiable face.

Here I am again.

It’s time to grovel. I’m literally being called on the carpet, an all too familiar experience. For more times than I can count, Du’s spoken to me as though I were a disobedient child, but this is the first time in thirteen years of marriage he’s been so angry he doesn’t sound like he wants to forgive me. Like always, I can’t speak up because I don’t know what to say, how to justify the unjustifiable.

And then, with a jolt of self-awareness like a thrown breaker, I’m amazed to discover I’m mortally tired of this. I’m sick to my soul of the carpet and my usual place on it. I’ll be damned if I can stand living like this anymore, always wrong, always apologizing. For better or for worse, this is me.

I lift my chin, tilt my head back, and look my husband in the eye, defiant. “I was helping a friend.”

“Which friend?” Du demands. “Where were you all night, dressed like a damned slut?”

I’m not turning back from this. If I’m going to be damned, let me be damned for the truth—at least, the parts of the truth I can tell him.

“Starr Dukes is my oldest friend, my best friend since I was seven years old. She needed a ride to New Orleans, and I drove her.” With every word, I know I’m not wrong. Not this time, not about this. “Before you ask, I didn’t tell you because I knew you’d say I couldn’t do it since she’s Bobby Shapley’s pregnant girlfriend, the one everybody’s been talking about. Starr didn’t have another soul in the world to help her. It was the right thing to do, and I did it.”

In this room, among the carefully curated furniture and artwork, the outward and visible manifestations of Du’s success, my explanation falls like a dead bomb: nobody wants to pick it up because it might go off.

Du’s blank-faced, his eyes dull. He slumps, and his big, meaty shoulders collapse inward as though he’s taken a body blow from the heavyweight champion of the world. When he finally speaks, he says heavily, “You thoughtless bitch. Bobby’s pregnant girlfriend. You helped that little whore, and now I’m going to have to deal with the shit that’s gonna come down. Goddamn you, Annie. The Judge will see me tossed out of the firm and doing wills for niggers when he hears about this.” Blindly, Du turns and stumbles away from me, his hands in his hair. I can only watch him leaving the living room, crossing the foyer, taking the stairs to the second floor.

“It’s too much. I can’t take this shit anymore. I’m gonna pack me a bag, go somewheres else and think things over.” Du’s voice dwindles with his footsteps, and then I hear a door quietly shutting upstairs. My mother’s tired face is oblique, unreadable, but she says nothing.

I should go after him.

But I don’t.





My mother and I are outside down by the rose garden, letting Troy Smoot run around in the backyard. Off the hay rope, the dog’s hurling himself across the frosted brown grass like a manic Frisbee, peeing on the lawn furniture and chasing imaginary rabbits through the bushes.

The BMW turns out to be parked in the garage, the keys in the ignition. On the front seat I found my purse and parka, its pocket still stuffed with hundred-dollar bills. It’s something of a relief that now I don’t have to remember Starr as a thief but as an inconsiderate, lying, ex-best friend instead. I can imagine Du thought the worst after he discovered the car, after he’d found I wasn’t in the house. Actually, I can’t imagine what he thought and I’m not sure I want to try.

My mother’s bundled up in her old mink, sitting on the cement bench beside the denuded rosebushes and smoking a cigarette. She offers me one from her pack.

As I light it, she surprises me by asking, “Where’d you get the dress? It’s not your usual style.”

So grateful for being able to smoke again, without thinking I say, “Maison-Dit.”

She takes a ladylike drag on her Parliament. “Somehow I can’t see Dolly selling it to you. And I doubt the jacket came from there.” The dog sniffs inquisitively at one of the rosebushes, the Peace hybrid tea, scoping out his new surroundings. My mother smiles. “I like him,” she says.

“He’s a sweetheart of a dog,” I say absently, wondering how I’m going to explain that I stole Troy Smoot from that perverted cheapskate Jerome Treeby. “I guess he’s mine now.”

“Not the dog,” my mother says. “I meant the man who loaned that jacket to you—he must have been worried you’d be cold.” My mouth falls open at this. She stands up and smoothes my hair behind my ear. “It’s been the most dismal fall,” she says, “far too chilly for Thanksgiving.”

“I love you,” I say, my voice breaking. “I’m sorry I did this to you, to Du.”

“Mercy Anne,” she says, “Duane’s a grown man. He can take care of himself. And if you wanted to help Starr, I’m glad you did—although it would’ve been better to have told him what your plans were. He really was beside himself when he called me.”

“But I knew Du wouldn’t let me even have coffee with her. I couldn’t exactly tell him I was driving Starr to New Orleans to get money for a lawyer so she could take on the Shapleys. Besides, the whole damned thing was a terrible idea, a waste of time, not worth what I may have lost here today.” I bite my lip and look away. “She just . . . left me.”


My mother mashes her cigarette out on the cement bench and asks casually, “How did it go so wrong between you and Starr?”

So I tell her about Starr’s predicament, about her trouble with the Judge, her inexplicable decision to get back together with Bobby, how she stranded me in New Orleans. I give her an abbreviated version of how I got home, too, leaving out the truck stop part. Even now, the memories of Starr’s betrayal, of Ted’s face as I left him, tear through my heart like a dull knife cutting a ripe tomato.

“And so it was all for nothing,” I say when I’ve finished. I stub my cigarette out on the sole of my boot. “I should have known Starr would act like that. It was a, a . . . trashy thing to do, just like what everyone used to say about her.” I gulp, remembering my husband’s reaction. “And Du’s so angry.”

My mother’s mouth tightens. “That’s ridiculous. I can only imagine what it’s been like for you,” she says. “Duane Sizemore has always meant to keep you on a pretty short leash. I could have told him that taking such a heavy-handed approach would end up, well, much the way it has.” She points at Troy Smoot, who’s digging in the rose bed, scattering the pine-straw mulch with furious energy. “Isn’t that the Treebys’ dog?”

“Yes,” I confess.

“Good for you. Someone should have taken that poor thing away from Jerome a long time ago. I almost stole him myself once.”

At this astounding information, I have to sit down on the cold cement bench next to her, remembering right away I really ought to go inside and put on some underwear. That’s why I don’t notice that the dog has unearthed a small pile of dusty EPT tests and has dropped them beside my boots like he’s sharing a kill. My mother and I seem to see them at the same time.

“What’s this?” she asks. She reaches down, picking up one of the wands.

Of course. Let the unraveling of my lies continue. Why ever not?

“Oh, Annie.” Shaking her head, my mother’s voice is sorrowful. “Why have you buried”—she gestures at the pregnancy tests on the ground with an air of despair—“all this? Why didn’t you tell me? I’d assumed that you and Duane had decided you didn’t want children after all.”

Too tired to cry, I shake my head and look away, hopelessly sliding the rough length of Troy’s hay rope through my fingers. “I buried them so no one, especially not you, would know I was still trying to have a baby,” I say with a short laugh, arid as the dirt of the rose bed. “I gave that up for good yesterday morning. After nearly thirteen years, I’ve finally had enough. I’m a failure at getting pregnant,just like I’m a failure at everything else.”

“Darling,” my mother says. “You’re not a failure, not really.”

“No?” I drop the EPT test on the ground. “Look, you don’t have to be kind to me. I know it’s true. All those goody two-shoes over at the Ladies’ League act like I’m the last person on earth they want on that stupid committee, and I can’t really blame them because I’m positive rocking those babies just gives them gas. Oh, and at the firm? The other partners’ wives always stop talking when I come in the room and give me these looks, like I just ripped open a big bag of ripe garbage and dumped it on the carpet. And . . . and it seems like Du’s done with me, so I guess it’s sort of a blessing, me not being pregnant. A baby would only make this situation even more complicated.”

I still can’t believe it: after thirteen years of a maybe-not-so-bad marriage, Du’s gone and perhaps not ever coming back. He left without knowing the worst of it. The hell of it is, he left because of Starr. Coiling the hay rope and putting it in the jean jacket’s pocket, I consider the EPT tests piled like grimy finger bones on the dead grass. There’re fifteen of them so far, and Troy’s still digging.

“I swear to God,” I mutter hopelessly. “It’s always been like there was some big-ass, super-important rule book that got passed around, only I was out of town the day everybody else read it.” I put my face in my hands, rubbing my eyes, gritty from lack of sleep. “And don’t try to tell me I haven’t been this crashing disappointment to you all my life. I already know.” My joints protesting, I get up off the cement bench, wrapping Ted’s jacket closer around me. It smells like him. The heady scents of night and leather and the faintest trace of cologne bring me almost, unaccountably, to tears.

My mother takes my hand. “Come on,” she says. “Come with me to the house. I’m sure that dog needs to eat, even if you won’t. I’m so cold I feel like a freezer-burned catfish.”

“Okay,” I say. She’s right: her hand is like ice in mine. “I’ll make coffee, and we can have some pumpkin pie, at least. Oh, and I should call Aunt Too-Tai to tell her Thanksgiving’s off.”

“Besides, there’re some things I need to tell you.”

Curious now, I whistle to the dog. We really should go back inside before we all catch pneumonia. The three of us walk across the lawn to the flagstone terrace together, silent, my mother and I thinking our own thoughts. Reaching the back steps, I open the screen door to go into the kitchen.

“I didn’t love your father, you know,” my mother says, looking back over her shoulder at the rose garden, shivering. “Not at first.”