like?”
“Does she have tattoos?” asked Will and Amy’s youngest.
“Didn’t see any,” I said, answering the easiest question first. “She looks like anybody else. Very nice, but very sad right now.”
“Does she look like Ruth or A.K.?” asked Zach’s Emma, who was filling napkin holders from an enormous package.
“Yes,” I said, looking around for Andrew.
Out at the grave site, Duck’s people had set up rows of folding chairs under the tent. The closed casket was already in place with a blanket of red roses covering the polished wood. Duck and several of my brothers, somber in dark suits and white shirts, were down there with more of the children. But no Andrew.
“Which?” said Emma.
“Which what, honey?”
“Which one does she look like?”
“Both of them. Same eyes, only black hair.”
I slipped past before they could bombard me with more questions. Inside the kitchen, Maidie was sugaring a huge vat of hot tea since everybody knows you might as well not bother with sugar at all if you try to add it after the tea is iced. Never tastes the same.
“Stevie? You and Reese can go ahead and set them ice chests out on the porch, too,” she said.
I turned, and there was my nephew back from Chapel Hill in a gray tweed jacket, blue shirt, and tie. As my glance fell on him, he immediately grabbed the ice chest and retreated, which let me know I wasn’t the only one hoping to avoid awkward questions.
Amy and Doris were making coffee in the two big party urns Mother had bought thirty years ago when one of the boys got married here at the homeplace, and Haywood and Isabel arrived with Jane Ann and a box full of plastic cups, plates, forks, and spoons.
Since Haywood immediately demanded more information, I tried to tell them as concisely as I could.
“She’s not Olivia anymore, I guess y’all heard that?”
“Tallahassee,” said Robert’s wife Doris, disapprovingly. “Now you got to say that’s a real peculiar name to call yourself. Like me changing my name to Raleigh or Fuquay-Varina ”
“Actually, wasn’t Varina a woman’s name?” asked Isabel, going off on her own tangent. “Somebody from Civil War days?”
“If you have a problem with that, Doris,” I said, “just call her Tally. That’s what everybody else does.”
“I didn’t say I had a problem with it,” Doris said huffily. “I just said it seemed peculiar. I can say that, can’t I?”
“Doris, honey, you can say anything you want,” said Minnie, who’d stepped inside the kitchen, “but let’s let Deborah tell us what we need to know before they get here, all right?”
Doris thought about flouncing off (Doris does that a lot), but she was too curious, so she subsided and listened as I explained that our niece Tally had been married almost twenty years to someone named Arnold Ames, that they lived in Florida, that they were part owners of the carnival playing the harvest festival, that she owned the old Hatcher place over near Widdington, that she had a second son named Valdosta (Doris frowned at that name), who was about sixteen (the girl cousins perked up their ears), and that they’d probably be accompanied by a lot of their carnival friends.
“I hope you’ll all remember that Sunday’s a workday for them when they’re on the road and they live in trailers too crowded for a lot of clothes they wouldn’t normally need, so some of them might not be dressed up. But Braz was their friend and I’m sure they’ll be mourning for him just as sincerely as if they were in suits and ties and Sunday dresses.”
Several started to scold me for even suggesting that they’d judge a person’s worth by their clothes, but I knew it would undercut the ones like Doris and also help the kids keep an open mind.
Another car arrived with A.K. driving April and Ruth. No Andrew.
“He just flat refuses to come,” April said despairingly. “And there’s nothing I can say that Seth and Mr. Kezzie haven’t already said. We’ll just have to make the best of it.”
Duck Aldcroft had sent a funeral car for Tally and her family, but they weren’t due for another half hour.
I slipped out of the house while the others were exclaiming and tsk-tsking, and a few minutes later I was easing my car’s low-slung chassis across a couple of erosion barriers in the lanes between the homeplace and Andrew’s house.
As I expected, he was out back at the pens with some of his rabbit dogs.
“Don’t you start on me!” he said as soon as he saw me. “I’m not going and that’s that. You can just turn around and march yourself right back over to Daddy’s. You hear?”
“I hear,” I said, and kept coming till I reached the step of the little viewing house he and the boys had built in front of the quarter-acre training pen so that they could watch the dogs in comfort when the weather was rainy or cold.
I didn’t say anything, just sat on the step and waited while he raked the dog dirt out of the gravel yard of each pen, filled their pans with fresh water, and checked their ears for mites and ticks. His hands were gentle with them, if a bit unsteady, and his face still had a pasty look from all the liquor he’d drunk this weekend.
“You had no call to tell April,” he said angrily.
“I didn’t go looking for her, Andrew. She came to me. To find out why you’d crawled in a bottle to hide.”
