I laughed. “It sneaks up on you. Abby and I were watching vh1 the other night. They had some nostalgia show on, and what it was nostalgic for was the eighties.”

“I’m not ready for nostalgia,” Kim said. “I’m not old enough. Not nearly.”

“Tell us about your son,” Abby said.

“Oh, Justin, he’s a sweetheart. Well, to be fair, he’s at that sweetheart age. He just turned six. He wants to be a cowboy, and he thinks his sister is just wonderful. As far as he’s concerned, she can do no wrong.”

“I suppose it’s the difference in their ages. You’ve escaped sibling rivalry.”

“To some extent,” she agreed. “The harmony won’t last forever, though. Tory’s father—that’s Tony, my second husband—takes a real interest in her. He’s never missed a birthday or a school performance. He’s great, and we’ve remained friends. Justin’s father, total opposite. He can’t be bothered. Birthday parties, soccer games—Justin calls to invite him, and he never shows up.”

“That’s a shame,” I said.

Kim said lightly, “Oh, I think it’s all for the best. Chris was a real bastard.”

Abby polished off her last French fry and wiped her fingers on her napkin. “That’s not what you really think, Kim. That’s not what you think at all.”

Kim sighed. “You’re right. Sometimes I see Justin’s face, I see how disappointed he is, and I’d like to shoot his fucking father.”

“It must be awful.”

“You can’t imagine,” she said. “When someone hurts your child—it’s far worse than anything they could ever do to you.”

The week passed slowly. It rained three times and, despite Kim’s tutoring, I failed a Calculus quiz. On Wednesday, Susan called, but she didn’t talk long. Dave told me he’d made reservations for April 30 at the French restaurant. Eight o’clock. He asked if I’d ever eaten snails. I said no.

On Saturday, the sun was shining, not a cloud in the sky. By ten o’clock in the morning, it was eighty degrees. It was my great-grandmother’s eighty-fifth birthday, and the entire Bartholomew clan was set to turn out in force. Hunter’s brothers and sisters and their children were coming from all over the country to mark the occasion. Not because they loved her, and certainly not because she loved them. They were coming because my great-aunt Lucy had decided that they ought to do something to mark the passage of time. My grandmother’s family, the Abernathys, had family reunions every year. They liked one another. The Bartholomews got together only for weddings, funerals, and birthdays they hoped would soon be leading to a funeral.

Lucy was the second oldest child after my grandfather. She lived in Florida with her bejeweled husband Oscar. They both sold real estate. She’d called several times over the past few years to say that Miss Agnes ought to move into a nursing home.

“She can’t live out there by herself forever,” Lucy said. “Anything could happen to her.”

“A nice nigger lady comes five days a week to clean and cook and do for her,” Hunter answered.

“If only I lived closer,” Lucy opined, “she could come live with me.”

“My ass,” Hunter said after he’d hung up the phone. “She moved out at sixteen, and we didn’t see her for dust.”

Abby’s aunt, Pearl Johnson, looked after my great-grandmother. Pearl had a stable of old ladies she checked on, taking them food, making sure they hadn’t fallen and broken a hip, making sure they had heat and electricity. My grandfather and his siblings paid her a pittance every month, about two hundred dollars. She spent at least two hours a day with my great-grandmother, which meant she was only averaging five dollars an hour.

“You ought to pay Pearl a living wage,” I said. “And it doesn’t soften the blow of‘nigger lady’ if you add the word ‘nice.’”

“If I want any shit out of you,” Hunter replied, “I’ll knock it out.”

At noon, we stopped by Fred’s boarding house and blew the horn. Hunter was driving my grandmother’s car, which was of a slightly more recent vintage than his van. None of us wanted to sit next to Fred, so Nana, my mother, and I were squished together in the back seat. We waited while Fred came stumbling down the front steps. He’d gotten himself a new pair of shoes, black wingtips. Still no socks.

Mrs. Jones appeared in the doorway behind him, leaning on a cane and waving jauntily. Hunter rolled down the window and called out, “How you doing, Ms. Jones?”

“I’m just fine,” she hollered back. “How about yourself, Mr. Bartholomew? Isn’t this a beautiful day?”

Hunter grinned. “It feels so good out, Ms. Jones, I think I’ll leave it out!”

“Hunter!” my grandmother hissed, but I could see that Mrs. Jones was laughing. Fred climbed into the front seat, and we headed east on Highway 64, stopping at the bait store so Fred could run in for a pack of cigarettes. He came out with a bag of beer.

Nana lit up a Virginia Slim and stared out the window. My mother cracked open a Harlequin Romance. A sultry redhead in a low-cut blouse lounged provocatively on the cover, her pouty pink lips promising a-hundred-and-fifty pages of formulaic titillation.

My great-grandmother’s house was across the road from the First Baptist Church of Knightdale. It sat on a hard patch of red clay with its kitchen window looking across to the cemetery where her husband and two infant children were buried. Past the house a rutted dirt track led through the tobacco fields to the pond. Two barns and a derelict sharecropper’s house, all covered in green tarpaper, sat at right angles to one another on the far side of the first tobacco field.

No one had lived in the sharecropper’s house since the 1940s. The roof over the porch had caved in, and there was a dry well lost somewhere in the tall weeds. In the early days of my weekend jaunts to the pond with Hunter, I could never resist climbing through a window and wandering around the sharecropper’s house. I found old bottles, cigarette papers, and a black button shoe, which I took home and polished. Abby said it probably belonged to one of her ancestors.

The party was under a large green tent set up by the pond. There were too many people—and Miss Agnes would have objected—to have it in the house. Lucy had flown up from Florida to do the organizing. The tent was her idea. She’d rented it from the Mile End Funeral Home. I had hoped it would have the funeral home’s logo on it, but in this I was disappointed.

We parked on the edge of the dirt track behind a long line of cars. Of great-grandma’s nine children, seven had made it to adulthood, and six were at this birthday party: Hunter, Lucy, Alice, Allard, Dot, and Fred. Many of Miss Agnes’ grandchildren, great-grandchildren, and nieces and nephews were also in attendance. Great-grandma owned two hundred acres of prime farm land, and no one knew if she’d made a will or not. Whenever anyone asked her, she always said, “Wait and see.”

I could count the number of people I recognized on one hand. Lucy and her husband, Oscar, stood next to my great-grandmother’s chair, looking Florida-tanned and prosperous. Oscar liked chunky gold jewelry, and he wore a lot of it. He had fat rings on both hands, a thick bracelet, a gold watch, and two heavy chains nestled in his curly gray chest hair. My grandfather wore his Masonic ring. He said he’d found it behind the toilet.

“Our toilet?” I asked.

“Yes, our toilet,” he replied testily. “Does it matter?”

“Not at all,” I said. “But I thought you said God stole it from you. If God’s going to use our toilet, I’m going to start locking the bathroom door.”

I spotted my mother’s nemesis, Linda, standing next to an enormous bowl of potato salad. Linda was Lucy and Oscar’s daughter, and, like my mother, she was an only child. Linda was a tiny, driedup raisin of a woman, though I’m sure she thought of herself as petite and tan. She was two years younger than my mother and had been a bridesmaid in my parents’ wedding. She herself had married a doctor, as she and Aunt Lucy never tired of reminding everyone. They had a Mercedes and houses in Palm Beach and Charlotte. They also had two exceptionally hideous children, Jake and Nancy. It didn’t take me long to spot Jake. He was standing at the edge of the pond holding something under the water with a stick, probably Nancy.

I took my mother’s arm and whispered in her ear, “Don’t look now, it’s Linda the Cinder and the awful Jake.”

My mother grimaced. “I see her. Where’s Dr. Crippen?”

Linda’s husband’s name was actually Brown, but my mother always called him Crippen or Mengele. I scanned the crowd. “Don’t see him. I spy Nancy. She’s over there in a black dress and sunglasses.”

“Do you think she’s anorexic? She looks like Karen Carpenter, only breathing.”

Linda waved and tottered over on her spindly legs.

“Hello, Barbara Jo,” she said. She turned and smiled up at me. “This must be Mary Frances. My goodness, what a big girl you are!”

“Five foot ten,” my mother replied equably. “But I think she’s done growing.”

“And so muscular,” Linda went on, feeling my arm with her hard brown fingers. “Is she one of those lady weightlifters, Barbara Jo?”

“No, she’s a trapeze artist,” my mother said. “We’re sending her off to Ringling Brothers after graduation. How’s Jake? Is he enjoying military school?”

My cue to skedaddle. While it might have been fun to watch my mother fence with Linda, I didn’t care to be a foil. At twelve, Jake was already an evil delinquent, and word had blown through the family grapevine that Nancy had been busted for marijuana possession. I was sure that my musculature would not bring undue shame upon our branch of the family. I weighed 155 pounds, and at my height, I thought that was pretty reasonable. It meant that I would never look wispy in crepe and tulle, but I was fit and trim in my 501s, and Linda “I shit fruit salad” Brown could put that in Nancy’s hash pipe and smoke it.

For lack of anything better to do, I wandered over to the pond to see what Jake was drowning. A small calico kitten, as it turned out. I snatched the stick from his hand and cuffed him on the back of the head.

“Hey,” he said, his beady eyes watering from the smart.

“Hey, yourself,” I replied. “I suppose you’d like my foot up your ass?”

Jake didn’t have any fight in him. He turned tail and ran, leaving me free to pull the kitten out of the slimy water. She was a homely thing, half-starved and misbegotten, like all of the cats that hung around Miss Agnes’ place. My great-grandmother didn’t believe spaying or neutering her cats, relying instead on the road traffic and malnutrition to keep the population in check. I grabbed a handful of napkins off the buffet table and wiped the algae off the kitten as best I could. Then I fed her a piece of fried chicken. She bit me for my pains, a sharp pinch between my thumb and index finger.

“It’ll turn septic,” said an old voice behind me. I turned around to see Miss Agnes leaning on her walker. She was chewing a piece of bubble gum—or mashing it, rather. She refused to wear her false teeth. Pearl puréed meals for her in the blender.

“I’ll pour some peroxide on it. Happy birthday, grandma.”

She pushed the gum to the front of her mouth and poked at it with her tongue. Hunter said she’d been a redhead in her youth. Her hair was white now, and she wore it in two thin braids coiled on top of her head. Her face was as wrinkled and brown as a dried apple doll, but the watery blue eyes behind the gold-framed glasses were sharp and alert.

“You want to put that kitten down and help me with my plate? Use some of them wet wipes to clean your hands.”