“It’s my wife’s. She’s sick.” He extended the bag to Delia tentatively. “I was hoping you could do something with it.”

The bag contained Amy Tyler’s second-best wig. The best one had suffered what the home care nurse called “an unfortunate accident” because she would not admit that she had left Amy alone long enough for the woman to fall asleep with a cigarette askew in her mouth, blackening a big hunk of the side of the wig. Amy wasn’t supposed to be alone, and certainly not to smoke.

“Well, things happen,” the nurse had told Emmet.

“They do, they surely do,” he replied. His hands shook. He wanted to hit her, and he had never hit a woman in his life.

The second-best wig was now all Amy had, though she still spoke dreamily of the lost one, the one her friends from the insurance office had given her, a real-human-hair wig ordered from a specialty supply outfit in Florida. “Where is it?” she kept asking. She seemed to think Emmet had hidden it from her, or given it to some woman down at the courthouse.

Amy had a tendency to lose track of things these days. Between the haze the drugs spread over her brain and the slow eating away of her memory, a lot was slipping. Sometimes she remembered she had set the wig on fire, and should be grateful she had not burned herself too. Sometimes the wig and the cancer and even Emmet’s face retreated into a reality she could no longer comprehend. Was she truly a grown woman with two dead children and a husband who worked too many nights driving along back roads and sipping black coffee? Or was she still the girl who had not yet decided to marry that sweet-faced Tyler boy, the girl who was thinking about going up to Nashville for LPN training? How had she wound up typing insurance forms, miscarrying until she thought herself cursed by God, and then getting so sick so fast? Wasn’t this just a bad dream? Emmet could never be sure anymore which Amy he was talking to, only that his wife was frightened and confused and in pain.

“Dying is hard,” the Baptist minister told him. Emmet knew he meant to be comforting, but somehow the words rang harsh.

“It’s work,” Emmet said. “It’s more work than I ever knew.”

He had come into the Bonnet wanting the wig cleaned and styled, but with no real hope that they could fix it. It was only a cheap backup the clinic had given Amy to use before her good one came. The nurse had told him just to get a couple of terry-cloth wraps from the Kmart, said they would do fine, but Emmet knew that would make Amy cry. He wanted this wig to be transformed somehow, to look like her real hair had before the drugs and lying in bed so long turned it to fine, sparse straw. He didn’t want anything more to hurt Amy’s feelings, to interrupt the moments in which she imagined the bed a dream and herself a girl giggling when he flirted with her. He wanted her to stay in that dream all the way through what the doctor warned was going to be a long and terrible progress. But if she was going to be awake, he wanted her to be as well taken care of as he could manage. He wanted to be ready, just in case she should come fully awake again; he wanted her to be able to put on that wig and see her friends once more without shame or self-consciousness. He wanted Amy to die without having to show her almost bald head to anyone but him.

All of that grief and hope was in Emmet’s face as he held the bag out to Delia. When he stuttered his request, she heard an echo of the last months she had spent with Clint. She looked at him with the steely eye of a woman who was still not over burying two husbands. She understood immediately the exhausted love that motivated the man. Can’t do much, but can do this. She knew the feeling. When she looked at Emmet Tyler, Delia was looking at an earlier version of herself.

When you are helping someone to die, there comes a point when everything but the necessary falls away. Old angers and resentments sharpen, then dull. Passion recedes. It took everything Delia had to keep moving forward during Clint’s illness, and half the time she was moving forward to escape what she knew was inevitable—the shameful relief that would follow when the task was done, the body buried, and the real grieving begun. In the months since Clint died, she had finally begun to remember him as he was when she married him, and as she thought he was. Some days it seemed she was straining at the seams with realizations that before had been too painful to imagine.

“What is it?” Delia was sure that Emmet would know what she meant. It—cancer. It—emphysema. It—any of the dreadful ways there are to die slowly, draining those around you until they walk the way Emmet walked, look the way he did, the same way Delia had looked when Clint was dying. There is a place past exhaustion that is not numb but prescient, and Delia spoke to that place in Emmet.

“Liver cancer.”

His eyes drew her in. She took the wig from the bag and shook it out. Behind her M.T. coughed and announced she was going to go sweep up under the sinks.

“How soon you need it?” Delia’s tone was matter-of-fact. She kept her gaze on the wig, running her fingers through the tangled coils of dark auburn hair. She wondered if it had been chosen to match the hair Emmet’s wife once had, or if it was just whatever was available from the clinic support group. She had seen women come in wearing the most astonishingly inappropriate wigs, all of them with that curiously imperious, brittle manner. You never knew if they were ready to snarl or cry, and sometimes they did both. The worst were the ones who tried to pretend they were not sick.

Delia looked up at Emmet. He was staring at the wig, as stricken as any woman who had ever burst into tears under Delia’s cool fingers.

“You need it back quick?” she prompted gently.

With both hands he pushed his hair off his face. He spoke in a voice thick with the refusal to show how badly he was hurting. “Pretty quick. Yeah. If you could.” He pushed his hair back again, though not a strand was out of place. He did not seem to know what to do with his hands. He dropped them to his hips, then shoved them into his back pockets.

“I can pay whatever, you know. I just ... just want to get this to her as quick as I can.” Every muscle in his body was locked tight, the slight bob of his head marking the only loose cord in a skein of knots. Delia felt a wave of heat go through her, not lust but rage. God should be paying attention, she thought, then bit her lip. She didn’t want to start thinking like that again.

“Might be able to get it washed and set tonight. Then you could come get it tomorrow after I comb it out. You got any particular style in mind?”

“No. Just kind of wavy and loose. Amy never wore no curls or nothing. Hated permanents. Always said she didn’t understand women who would go through that for something that didn’t look any good anyway.” He smiled for the first time. Delia wondered if he knew he was already speaking of his wife in the past tense.

“He’s a strange one,” M.T. remarked after he left. “Little bit soft as a deputy, they say.”

“Deputy?”

“You didn’t see the shirt? Uniform. He an’t wearing his deputy jacket, but I know the shirt. Don’t know him, but I know the type. So upright he don’t know about sin, you know?”

Delia grimaced. A deputy, the law. She didn’t much like the law. But she had liked what she saw in Emmet’s face. Doing the best he could with an impossible situation. Upright maybe, but full of heart.

Delia stayed late that night to wash and set the wig. She treated it as if it were her own, shampooing it twice, conditioning the imitation fibers with a compound she had discovered in a beauty catalog, then setting it on big plastic rollers and putting it on a high shelf to air-dry overnight. The next morning she came in early, scented the wig lightly to cover the persistent sickroom smell, and styled it simply with soft waves. At lunchtime Emmet showed up looking as if he had not slept at all for fear the wig would be no different. Delia felt odd knowing she had done all this for a woman she would never see alive.

Awe broke on Emmet’s face. “It’s perfect,” he whispered. “Thank you.”

When Amy died the following week, Delia went to the Catholic funeral. She gave the deputy a nod and lit a candle before she left. Months later Emmet came into the Bonnet just as it was closing, moving unsteadily on his feet like a toddler or an old, old man. His hair was lank and hanging in his eyes, and the eyes themselves were red-rimmed and watery. Drunk, Delia thought, looking up at his sweaty face.

“Mrs. Delia.” He slurred the name.

Numb-drunk, she amended, noticing that he wore no socks.

“Ms. Delia.”

“Byrd, I’m Delia Byrd. What do you think you are doing?”

“I was thinking maybe you would like to go have a drink with me, or a bite to eat or something.” His air ran out. He swayed on his feet.

Delia shook her head. “You going to shame her in the ground?” she asked him.

Emmet looked into her face. For days he had been thinking of her in the church, the way she had leaned over that ·candle so that the light reflected on her neck. It was like the gentle way she had put Amy’s wig into his hands. He had imagined coming to her and leaning into her as she took him in her arms. She was alone, he had heard. She’d lost her husband the way he’d lost his wife. He had imagined that she would understand, that she would take him in and comfort him, that the touch of her mouth on his was what he needed. He had not imagined this, her face set against him and her arms crossed tight across her belly as if she knew what he wanted and hated him for it.

“Will you go out for a drink with me?” he asked.

“No,” she said. “I’ll have coffee with you, but not now. You come back in here sober, and I will try and remember what an upright man you used to be. Then I will go and have one cup of coffee with you.”

Ashamed, he lifted his hands and ran them through his hair. “All right,” he said. “I understand. All right.” He managed to turn and walk fairly directly out the door.

Two days later Emmet returned, shaved raw and hanging his head like a boy who needs a mama to slap him on the back and tell him to stand up straight. Delia watched him come in the door, the loose way his body shifted on those strong hips. Randall had walked like that, and Clint. It was something she always noticed, the way a man walked when he was hungry for a woman. Emmet hadn’t worn his deputy’s uniform. He had taken care. Trimmed hair, pressed shirt, pegged trousers, polished shoes.

She sighed and saw Emmet’s face go still and stubborn.

We’ll see, she thought. Aloud she said, “All right, coffee.”

Dede waited until Delia was sound asleep, and carefully pushed the Datsun down the driveway until it was safe to turn on the ignition. From the first night, she was intoxicated. Night was the best time to drive, the very best. With the breeze swirling in the windows and the crickets booming, she opened her mouth and started to sing. She pretended she had run away from home, that somewhere ahead waited the man she loved, a man rich and strong and longing for her to lie down beside him and croon into his neck.

“Whoa, sinner man,” Dede sang. In her voice, the hymn Grandma Windsor had loved became rock and roll, the best kind of blasphemy, call and praise for the sinner who waited for Dede’s kiss. She had a select batch of tapes acquired secondhand or as gifts sent from Rosemary. Her favorites were the Patti Smith Group and Todd Rundgren, music she sang with raw passionate emphasis. “G-L-O-R-I-A!”

“They never play Patti Smith’s best stuff on the radio,” Dede complained to Delia. “Just that one she does with Bruce Springsteen, none of her kick-butt stuff. I think they’re scared of her.” Dede even tried telling Amanda that Patti Smith was a kind of gospel singer if you paid attention. “God is her subject. Listen to the words.”

She might have had more success with that argument if she had not been so fond of quoting the introduction to “Gloria” where the cadence drawled and Patti dragged out the phrase “Jesus died for somebody’s sins—but not mine!”

“You are demented,” Amanda told her. “Seriously demented.”

“Jesus died for somebody’s sins,” Dede sang at her. “Must have been yours.”

The night Cissy climbed into the Datsun, Dede had the tape of Wave primed and ready to play as soon as she got well down Terrill Road. They fought in raging whispers.

“I want to go.”

“I an’t gonna take your ass.”

“You take me or I’ll tell Delia.”

“You damn tattletale whiny bitch. You better tell nobody.”

In the end, Dede let Cissy come, but only after extracting a sacred promise. “You swear? You swear you will never betray me?”

“I swear.” Cissy put one hand on her belly and the other on her heart.

Dede laughed but accepted the oath. It was easier with Cissy helping her push the car down the drive, though having a passenger was not as satisfying as being alone, and it took a while for Dede to adjust. Cissy was quiet but obviously impressed with Dede’s driving. Every so often she would ask Dede to teach her.

“Not in this life,” Dede swore. “You’ll never be able to get a license. You couldn’t pass the vision test.”

“I could pass that test anytime.” Cissy’s mouth twisted in a devious grin. “I memorized the chart.”

Dede laughed. “Getting ready, huh? Well, you ever manage that, you let me know. I am not going to want to be driving anywhere in Bartow County the day you hit the road.”

Dede drove them all over Cayro, keeping an eye out for Deputy Tyler. She could fool Delia, but that old boy was nobody’s fool. Some nights they went out to the Bowle River and parked below the crest of the hill where the bridge supports were lit up by the railroad company. Dede smoked and Cissy sat and sometimes they talked. It amused Dede that Cissy did not want to learn to smoke. At Cissy’s age, Dede had been sneaking cigarettes out of Clint’s jacket and smoking them in the fields behind Grandma Windsor’s house.

“I don’t like the smell,” Cissy told Dede. “I bet you can’t even smell it no more. But Delia always stinks of cigarettes, and you do too. You think she don’t smell it on you?”

“She don’t say nothing to me about it.”

“She don’t ever say nothing to you, or Amanda either. She’s still trying to get you to love her.”

Dede shrugged. “Feels to me like she’s still trying to love us. She looks at us like we’re some kind of creatures she found in the back of the woods.”

“Yeah, well, she’s been looking for you all my life.” Cissy put her feet up on the dash.

“Oh, for God’s sake. Smoke one.” Dede tossed the pack at Cissy. “You’re starting to get on my nerves.”

“I don’t want it.”

“What is it? You scared of getting cancer?” Dede blew smoke at Cissy. “Or you scared of Delia?”

Cissy blushed. What she was actually worried about was that Dede would think she was trying to copy her. Cissy took a cigarette out of the pack, lit it, and inhaled. It burned her throat and tasted awful, but she wouldn’t embarrass herself by sputtering or coughing.

“Don’t taste like much to me,” she managed to say.

Dede grinned. “Well, it’s probably like beer and whiskey—an acquired taste, as the Petrie boys used to tell me.” She took another drag and thought about Craig. He was fun when he wasn’t being so pushy. She would like to have him asleep or drunk. Helpless. It would be nice to have him helpless. She would like to touch that boy any way she wanted, to stroke him and get him as disturbed as the brothers had managed to get her. She wondered if it would ever be possible to have sex with a boy, not get pregnant, and not have him tell everybody and their cousin you had done it.

Maybe if he was unconscious? Could you have sex with an unconscious boy? She giggled.

“What are you laughing about?” Cissy asked.

“Driving,” Dede said. “The sheer power of the machine.”

Most nights Dede took them twice around the overpass. The first time they went up and over, the old Datsun peaked out at just under 60. Dede checked the gas gauge. She’d have to get more before going home or Delia would notice. Twice already Dede had siphoned a little gas from Mr. Reitower’s car up the street. She was going to have to find someone else to borrow from this time, or maybe she could get Cissy to buy two dollars’ worth on the way back. Cissy seemed to have money now and then. She stroked the steering wheel. It was a good car, sweet. It should be able to go faster. She turned to Cissy.

“I bet if we went back over the grade and came down from the train crossing we could get it up faster.”

“You think?” Cissy seemed eager.

“I think,” said Dede.

The Datsun topped seventy-five on the downhill side of the overpass, the body shimmying but the engine roaring along fine. When the speedometer needle crossed the line, Dede whooped, “Damn!” and Cissy crowed with her. She did not see the needle, but she felt the car lift slightly as they passed the crest and gained momentum. She put both hands straight up in the air, her palms flat on the rooftop, and blew a whistle of happy surprise. The surprise was in the exhilaration, the marvelous rush of air pouring in the windows, the lights along the bridge approach flashing past. She had never gone so fast in her life, never been so afraid and unafraid at the same time. Dede’s hair was whipping in the wind. The damp off the river was cool and sweet in Cissy’s mouth.

“Damn! Damn!” Cissy yelled, beaming at Dede in full impassioned glory. Her stomach felt a little funny. The cigarette, she told herself, swallowing acid. Then the right front tire popped and the car made a terrible shrieking sound. The front spun, poles and trees sweeping past. Dede roared curses along the car’s rooftop as she fought the pull of the steering wheel. They deadheaded a mile marker, then another, slowing with each post that went down. Dede was aiming at the little posts deliberately, Cissy realized, trying to stop the car.

“God, God, God!” Cissy screamed in a rush of adrenaline.

“God, yes!” Dede screamed back at her as the car slammed into a dogwood sapling and came to a sudden wrenching halt in the mud and weeds of a shallow ditch.

“My God,” Cissy breathed.

“All right, little sister, all right.” Dede was shaking, hands tight on the wheel. “You okay?”

“I’m fine,” Cissy said.

“Oh Lord!” Dede put her head on the steering wheel. “Shit! No way Delia an’t gonna find out about this now.”

Cissy felt her stomach roll. “Damn,” she whimpered, and threw up out the window. “I have always hated this car,” she said, and threw up again.

Miraculously, the Datsun survived. All the damage was to the body.

For all Delia’s shouts and accusations, Cissy never admitted how fast they were going. “I asked Dede to drive me,” she said. “It was just an accident and Dede saved our lives.” Cissy stared hopefully at Delia’s stern face.

“You could have killed your sister,” Delia said to Dede.

Dede looked over at Cissy, her face suddenly pale and frightened. “I know,” she said, “I know,” and began to sob like a child for the first time in her life.

Delia watched her and remembered all the times she had said the same thing to Randall. You could have killed her.

“But you didn’t,” she said to Dede, and took her daughter into her arms.

“Let me help you,” Michael called to Amanda, rushing over and bumping his forehead solidly into hers. His mother laughed and went outside for more flowers. Amanda saw stars and the bright sheen of embarrassment that flooded Michael’s already rosy features. He’s gorgeous, she thought, and said yes almost before the question was out of his mouth.

“God led me to you,” Michael told Amanda repeatedly, and meant it with all his heart. His daddy approved. His mama beamed. That Amanda was a good Christian girl, a little serious and unsure of herself now and then, but a fine young woman. People talked about her mother, but Amanda wasn’t wild. She was a faithful member of the congregation. She’d make a fine preacher’s wife.

At first the only question for Amanda was whether she deserved Michael, whether she was godly enough to be his wife. Her doubts on the subject made Dede stay out of her way, and sent Delia out to her garden and Cissy off on a long contemplation of the more obscure holdings of the county library. But once Amanda convinced herself that she could somehow make herself into the wife Michael needed, she became equally insecure about all the things she imagined would go wrong before the wedding. For weeks Amanda squalled through the house, certain that Michael would drop dead or the sky fall before she could be married. She became fanatical on the subject of church attendance, but neither Dede nor Cissy responded well to harassment. A few times Delia gave in and went with Amanda to Cayro Baptist Tabernacle, where she hadn’t set foot since crying season. There she shifted uncomfortably in the pew next to Michael’s uncle, a carefully benign expression on her face. That expression vanished after the service, when Delia stood outside the church talking and laughing with M.T.

“Lord God!” Delia exclaimed loudly at one point, ruining the good impression her numb endurance of two weeks’ sermons had won her.

“You embarrassed me!” Amanda wailed once they got home.

“Why can’t she just marry that boy and leave me out of it?” Delia said to Cissy when Amanda ran back to her room.

Amanda’s hopes for Delia’s salvation were sudden and constant. She seemed determined to bring Delia to God—specifically to Baptist Tabernacle, Michael’s family church—as proof of her own worth, her destiny as a preacher’s wife. Cissy doubted that even a penitent Delia would solve Amanda’s problem. Amanda was never going to believe herself safely a part of the God-fearing, respectable family that had produced her Michael.

“You’d probably have to renounce me,” Cissy told Delia with a smirk. “After you joined the church and all.” Delia gave her a long calculated look, but said nothing.

Amanda got married on the second Sunday in March, a week after her eighteenth birthday. That morning she shut everyone out of the bathroom with the makeup mirror, and Dede kept going out back to smoke. Craig Petrie had reappeared at Thanksgiving with a determined smile and a little baggie of Panama Red. When he left, the smile was wider, and the bag and a packet of papers were safely hidden in Dede’s boxes of secondhand books in the garage.

“Don’t believe what people tell you about this stuff,” Dede told Cissy when she offered her a toke. “It’s like a bottle of beer but you don’t get bloated or nothing. Makes you a little hungry, though, you got to watch that.” She found another boy to sell her a bag at a good discount. She wasn’t going to let herself become dependent on a Petrie for anything she liked so much.

Cissy and Dede were giggling at the awful dresses they were required to wear as bridesmaids when there was yet another crisis of faith.

“Wouldn’t be too bad,” Dede drawled, “if we shortened the skirt, dropped the neckline, changed the color, and pulled off this rickrack crap.”

Cissy doubled over with laughter and noticed for the first time that Dede had already cut off the hem of her dress. “I think the best thing we could do is march naked behind Amanda, wiggle our butts, and remind everyone what a marriage is really about,” she said.

Amanda came out of the bedroom with a towel around her neck and her makeup half done. “I heard you. I heard you.” The big wire curlers all over her head rattled menacingly. Limp wisps were already falling around her temples. Those curls were never going to hold up for the ceremony, Cissy thought.

“This marriage,” Amanda sputtered, “is about joining our souls before God, committing ourselves to the Lord’s service.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Amanda.” Cissy knew she should say nothing, but she couldn’t help herself. “You’re getting married, not taking a vow of celibacy. God isn’t keeping count of every minute of your life. I’m pretty damn sure he’s got other stuff going on.”

“You don’t know anything about God,” Amanda shouted. “God is the judge of our lives. Wait and see what you know when you’re burning in hell, when the flames of God’s judgment are licking at your crusty soul.”

“What is going on?” Delia came out from the back.

“We were just joking about the dresses,” Cissy said.

“She was telling me about God!” Amanda’s mascara had started to run.

“Well, what did she say?” Delia’s face was almost as pink as the tea roses pinned to the veil she was holding in her left hand. It was Amanda’s veil, and Delia had been pressing it out when the shouting erupted.

Cissy stopped in the act of reaching for Kleenex. “I didn’t say shit, but I’ll tell you, she better start asking God to sweeten her soul. She has got to stop trying to run everybody else’s life.”

“If I was running your life, I’d run you right out of this house. I’d run you out of Cayro. I’d run you clear out of the state of Georgia. Don’t you know you are going straight to hell?”

Cissy looked from Amanda’s wrathful countenance to Dede’s frank enjoyment of the fight. Then she looked down at the orchid and yellow bell-shaped skirt Amanda had insisted she wear. It was only one dress size smaller than Dede’s, but Amanda did not seem to notice how much Dede had shortened hers. Now that Dede was standing up, Cissy could see that Dede had put in enough darts to make the dress cling suggestively at her hips and bust. Catching the direction of Cissy’s glance, Dede produced a glassy smile. That is not the grin of a sober woman, Cissy thought. Can’t Amanda see?

“Oh yeah, Cissy is damned if anyone is,” Dede drawled. “No question.”

Dede was no devotee of Christian dogma. She had even been known to declare herself a Buddhist when pressed, but she took her faith by spells, a fierce believer when she was in the spirit, even if she usually slept through Sunday services and sneaked beer with the boys at Sunday afternoon ball games. Christmas and Easter, Dede worshiped with utmost seriousness. Most of the summer she did not. Last Christmas, right after Amanda got engaged, Cissy found her stoned and supine under the tree weeping out loud at the fate of the baby Jesus. The Cross, Dede explained, was like the tree. It had cradled the Son of God. Dede’s hands were deep in the fir branches and covered with scratches, and Cissy did not doubt either her sincerity or her grief. They might have been chemically induced, but Dede’s doctrine was heartfelt, no matter that she picked absently at the almost invisible scrapes and shrugged off Amanda’s invitation to a revival meeting two weeks later.

“I got faith,” Dede protested in answer to Amanda’s accusation that she did not. “I just don’t always make a big stink about it.”

At heart, Delia’s first two girls were believers. Amanda worried about her own worth, but not about the possibility that there might not be a Nazarene to judge her. Dede’s faith was seasonal but there was no blasphemy in her, while Cissy picked at the idea of God like a prickly abrasion on her soul. It was Cissy, they all agreed, who was the heathen.

“My Lord. Couldn’t we just leave it alone for one day?” Delia shook the veil impatiently.

In a sudden rage Cissy stripped off the ridiculous matron’s dress and threw it at Delia. She stalked down the hall in her slip and nylons and slammed the bedroom door.

“Cissy. For God’s sake, Cissy. Please.” It was Delia.

Cissy pulled on jeans and a blouse, ignoring them all. Dede started to giggle just as Amanda started to cry. Delia came to the door twice to plead with Cissy, but she refused to answer. When the house was finally quiet, Cissy came out to find Nolan sitting on the couch.

“You want a lift?” he asked. He had his black suit on but was clearly ready to do whatever Cissy decided.

“You look terrible,” Cissy told him.

Nolan regarded his hastily polished shoes and his too-short, too-tight pants. “Yeah,” he agreed. “You want to go over?”

“All right,” Cissy said. She would go late to Amanda’s wedding, but she would go. Amanda would whine about it for the rest of her life if she did not. When she and Nolan slipped into the back of the church, she saw that one of Michael’s cousins had been drafted to take her place in the ugly dress. The girl looked as miserable as a female ever looked in this life, but past her shoulder was Amanda, and Amanda looked pretty good. Pancake makeup masked her tantrum’s effects, and at moments she appeared almost pretty, almost happy. At her side, Dede appeared absurd but cheerful. In the short trip from the house to the church, she had gone beyond her earlier sins, ripping off the rickrack and acquiring yet another layer of chemical insulation. She looked like a Magdalene in a deflated inverted tulip, and appeared to have forgotten that she was supposed to be mad. She beamed out across the church and waved Cissy forward.

“Come on,” Dede whisper-yelled. “Come on up here and say good-bye. After today you get your own bedroom.”

As Cissy shook her head, she took in Delia’s stricken face and Amanda’s bowed form. Dede waved one more time and Cissy gave it up, moving forward until she was beside them. The heat at the front of the church was extraordinary. Cissy was overwhelmed by perfume, the smell of Amanda’s bouquet, Michael’s astringent after-shave, Dede’s tobacco aura, Delia’s hair conditioner. She found herself going weak with the desire to get this thing over with and get out of there. Amanda’s makeup was streaked with tears. Dede was tugging at the few remaining strands of yellow material on her skirt, and then Michael looked up and gave Cissy a broad smile of welcome.

Family, his smile said. God’s love, his eyes promised. That’s why Amanda loves him, Cissy thought.

Amanda turned to her, tears gushing freely at Reverend Myles’s pronouncement of her new status. “Oh, Cissy,” she wailed. “What am I going to do with you?”

Once Amanda moved out, Dede kept after Delia to redo the Terrill Road house. It was not enough that she now had Amanda’s bedroom, the one in which Clint died—something none of them ever mentioned. She wanted Delia to widen the back porch and screen it in, put in flower boxes off the kitchen windows, and have all the floors sanded down and refinished. What she really wanted was a new house, a home made over now that Amanda was gone.

“Too much money,” Delia would tell her. “We can’t afford that.”

Dede was undeterred. She enlisted Cissy and Nolan to help her pull up the carpets and rented a floor sander from the B & B Hardware for the minimal twenty-four-hour fee. Together the three of them sanded and swept and mopped and sanded again. They kept the stereo on loud, playing Patti Smith and Kate Bush. Delia stayed out of the house, partly to avoid the stereo. She thought Dede’s taste in music eerily ironic, her girl was a hard-core rock and roller, oblivious to the Top 40 and uninterested in dance music—she called Madonna a joke, though she told Cissy that Cyndi Lauper wasn’t too bad. Cissy liked Prince and the Revolution. She played his tapes at night under the covers.

“Sounds like Mud Dog,” she told Delia.

“No,” Delia said. “It doesn’t.”

Nolan worked like a madman, but Dede never paid him a minute’s notice, not even when he got down on his hands and knees to smooth the sealant over the floors with a cotton towel. It turned out that he also knew how to pop off the sanding disks and use the old polishing ring M.T.’s sister Sally still had from a job she had done. For the last few hours on the rental, Nolan and Dede took turns with the polisher, making those floors shine like something out of the decorating magazines M.T. collected.

“My Lord!” Delia exclaimed when they finally let her back in the house. “It’s beautiful.” She hugged Dede and beamed at Nolan and Cissy. “You guys could hire out, make yourselves some real money.”

“Hell, no,” Dede said. “I an’t going to work this hard for nobody else.”

Cissy and Nolan laughed but Delia nodded. “Tell you what,” she told Dede, “you pick out the fabric and I’ll make up new curtains, maybe even do a new cover for the couch.”

“All right! Then all we’ll need is some real furniture and a new television set.”

“What’s wrong with this furniture?”

“Delia!” Dede gave one of the battered wooden spool tables a kick. “This stuff is older than I am.”

“Makes it antique, don’t make it bad.” But Delia looked again at what they had. The couch did sag, and the coffee table was another wooden spool that Clint had gotten from a friend who worked for the phone company. Delia had sanded it down and painted it when she was pregnant with Amanda. Maybe she could find something better. She had liked taking things apart and putting them back together when she was a girl. She could buy some old furniture and fix it up. “I’ll think about it,” she said.

“Well, while you’re at it, think about getting some new sheets. It’s embarrassing when you hang those sheets of yours on the line.”

“Don’t start about my sheets.”

“What sheets?” Nolan whispered to Cissy as they went out.

“Kermit the Frog, Snoopy and Linus, Miss Piggy, rocket ships and trains. Delia got them on sale in the children’s department at Sears, and Dede is always bugging her about them.”

“Yeah?” Nolan looked back at Delia and Dede standing on the floor he had worked on so hard. “Cool.”

Delia bought new end tables at a yard sale and a great wingback chair at the Saint Vincent de Paul. She hauled the old spool tables out to the garden and used them as potting stands. Under pressure from Dede she put up new curtains and yielded on the television set, but she continued to cling to her sheets. It did not bother her that they were designed for a child’s bed. When she did not fall asleep on the living room couch, Delia went to her single bed in the smallest bedroom, narrow, hard, and solitary. If it had not been for the sheets and the cartoon-patterned quilt thrown over them, that cot would have suited a nun.

“I like bright colors,” Delia said when Dede showed her an ad for pinstripes on sale. “Just because I’m a woman grown don’t mean I have to sleep on plaid or stripes.”

“But it looks so silly.”

“Who sees it but me? And an’t I the one that matters? I like colors, bright and loud and full of energy. Don’t have to wash them as often, and they don’t go that sad gray. Besides, they look cheerful out on the line.”

It was true. Cissy did the laundry, but never Delia’s sheets. She did not even go into Delia’s room. Delia liked to do her sheets and hang them out on the lines strung from the back of the house to the ramshackle garage, where she kept her garden supplies. She got up late on Sunday morning and put a quick load in cold water while she drank her coffee. She did a little weeding in the small garden off the back steps through the spin cycle. Then she hung those sheets out in the sun and sat on the steps to watch the cartoon figures billow and flap. With her knees pulled up and one hand trailing through her loose hair, she hummed softly to herself while Dede and Cissy banged around in the kitchen. She could have been a young mother with small children, not forty years old and still mourning what she had lost.

Delia’s bed was a joke awaiting comment.

“My bed suits me,” she would say, “and it an’t like I’m inviting company.”

“You an’t dead yet.” M.T. did not approve.

“And I an’t crazy. I like my bed and I like it alone.”

After Clint’s death, men looked longingly at Delia, but few had the nerve to approach her. Delia barely noticed. As far as she was concerned, that was over. Oh, she went out with Emmet, but there was nothing to that. She’d had enough trouble in her life, she told M.T., and when Rosemary called they joked about how many men a woman could go crazy over in this lifetime. One, maybe two, never three. “Well, I’ve had my two,” Delia swore. “I’ve had all I can stand.”

The secret was that Delia’s sheets saw little use. Her insomnia had gotten so bad, she used her bedroom as little more than a storage place for her clothes. Her naps were brief and restless. Mostly she needed to move around. She strung Christmas tree lights along the back of the house and the side of the garage, and took to gardening at night by the dim light of the parti-colored bulbs. When there was nothing left to do in the garden, she started refinishing furniture. She sanded and sealed some lawn chairs Steph had given her, then worked her way through the tables and chairs in the house. She picked up a few pieces of furniture at the Goodwill, fixed them up, and gave them away—a dining room table for M.T., a rocker for Amanda, and a splendid cherry side table for Emmet, with little drawers set on two sides.

“You built me a table?” Emmet smiled at her when she brought it over.

“You don’t have to take it,” she told him. “I just liked the way the finish came out and I remembered you had that cherry armoire. Thought it would look nice with it.”

It would, Emmet agreed. He said “It would” with his head down. His fingers stroked the finish. He had asked her to marry him when Amanda married Michael. He had thought she would stop seeing him from the way she had looked at him, but so long as he pretended the question had been a joke, pretended she had not been spooked. They went out almost every other week, eating greasy food at Goober’s and seeing movies at the drive-in near Marietta.

“Wasn’t nothing,” Delia said. “You’d be amazed at the beautiful stuff people throw away sometimes. This treasure was just sitting by the road.”

“Thank you,” he said. He lifted his head.

“Oh, you’re welcome.” Delia was already looking back at her car. “Why don’t you come over next Sunday and I’ll show you what I’m working on for Stephanie’s birthday.”

“I’ll do that,” Emmet said, his fingers gripping the edge of the little table.

“Well, Lord damn!” Steph said when Emmet and Delia delivered her birthday present, an antique vanity. “Girl, you should go into business.”

“I got a business,” Delia said. “Anyway, sanding is like doing hair. Feels like something I know with my muscles more than my brain. It makes me feel good to do it, and I like the way the wood looks when you sand it down real fine.”

“Just as long as you don’t start building flats and compost bins like that crazy woman on television. This is the kind of thing you can take too far.” Steph winked at Emmet.

Delia had a few moments when she thought about giving up the Bonnet and restoring furniture for money. She would never have to smile at a woman with her head in a towel again, and that might be nice. But the truth was she was just restless. Her hips hurt no matter what she did, and no matter where she slept, bed or couch or a mat out on the grass, things seemed to press on her.

One of M.T.’s new boyfriends, George, put a big antenna up on the back porch so Delia could tune her radio to stations as far away as Phoenix. After 2:00 A.M. there were several stations that came in from the Southwest and they all seemed to carry phone-in talk shows hosted by deep-voiced religious commentators. These were the very shows that Delia had never been able to stand before, but suddenly they were her passion. She set up a workstation for herself out back with the colored lights and the radio. Sanding, she would hum along to country rock, switching stations to find music that matched her pace. She tried to time her work so that she was smoothing stain or sealant by the time the talk shows started and got her all excited.

“I get so mad,” she told Cissy. “Mad or disgusted. You can see it in the wood. Sometimes I come close to grinding the grain right down to nothing or gouging whole strips off.”

“Then why do you listen?”

Delia looked at her daughter as if what she was saying was perfectly obvious. “ ’Cause sometimes mad is what I need. A good mad or a good cry. Cussing out loud or kicking a bucket across the porch, just something. Something strong. Sometimes a woman just needs to get mad as sin.”

What Delia could not have guessed was how closely the rhythms of her body were matched by those in Amanda. She could not have known that when she was sweating under her Christmas tree lights, grunting and cursing at some far-off preacher, Amanda was moving with her all the way across Cayro, ironing T-shirts and chanting her prayers. For every “Fool!” of Delia’s, Amanda would whisper an “Amen!” Now and then, as if in harmony, they would stop together, hearts pounding in counterpoint, to lift their heads at the same moment and breathe “Lord!”