Delia thought of the river house, with its mildew and neglect. She had already scraped out a patch where she could put in a little garden once the weather turned. She planned tomatoes and squash and flowers chosen for their big, wide blossoms: sunflowers and dahlias and leafy zinnias. She had always loved to garden. What had happened to everything she had planted here? She lifted her head. Above the roofline she could just see the soft shadows of the pecan and walnut trees where she sheltered with her babies that last summer.

The door swung open. A tall gaunt man with ragged hair stood there gripping the jamb with both hands. He swayed a little, then steadied.

“My God.” Delia’s face was stern with shock. Dime-size spots of red showed on her suddenly ashy cheeks. Her head turned slowly from side to side, as if protesting what she was seeing, that body in the doorway, so familiar and so changed.

The two of them stood looking at each other, Delia motionless and Clint swaying slightly. His eyes were trained on her like searchlights on a moonless night. His mouth hung open, and his tongue, gray and thick, touched his lower lip.

“Delia,” he said. “I wondered if you would come.”

“Don’t you remember what you told me? If Clint dies while Grandma Windsor has my girls, I’ll never get them.”

M.T. couldn’t argue with that, but she was worried still. “Maybe he’ll get better,” she said. “We don’t know how bad he is.”

“I know how bad he is. I saw him. He might have a little more time than you thought, but not much. He’s no threat to anyone anymore.”

“Even a dying man can shoot you in the head.”

“Clint an’t going to shoot nobody.” Delia looked tired. “Way it is, it’s almost like he got religion or something. He’s different. He’s changed.”

“Well, I hope so,” M.T. said. “Son of a bitch was surely going to hell if he didn’t change. You think the cancer put the fear of God in him?”

“I don’t know and I don’t care. All I know is that we have an understanding. We made a bargain.” Delia shoved a handful of frayed dish towels into a plastic bag. “A hell of a bargain. He’s going to help me get Amanda Louise and Dede, and I’m going to take care of him till he dies.”

Cissy was sitting in the passenger seat of the Datsun staring at her mother. She couldn’t believe her ears when Delia told her they were moving in with Clint and insisted that Cissy come with her to meet him. Now she couldn’t believe her eyes. The yellow tract house did not look like anywhere Delia would ever have called home.

“This is where we lived when your sisters were born,” Delia said. “It was a sweet little house when we took it.”

“How long ago was that?”

Delia shifted uncomfortably. She pulled a tissue out of the box on the floor behind her seat and wiped her neck. “You were born just after Dede turned two. She’s a Taurus baby, May fourth. You’re August twenty-eighth, a Virgo.” She folded the tissue and blotted under her eyes. “Amanda was born March fifteenth, a Pisces. She’s four years older than you.”

Cissy could tell that Delia was trying to keep the shame out of her voice, to talk casually about what she never talked about at all. “How old was Dede when you left?” she asked, knowing the question would hurt Delia, wanting it to.

Delia looked at the house as if it were the only thing she could see. “Ten months. She was ten months.”

“That’s little,” Cissy said. “Awful little, a baby still.”

The moments stretched. Cissy could hear Delia’s teeth grinding. She was wondering if her mother would ever speak again when Clint came out on the porch and stood looking at the car. Cissy’s eyes flew to him. For a moment she was reminded of Granddaddy Byrd—the long, lean frame and the patient way the body hung motionless. But the dark eyes were shocking, soft and glowing and full of pain. And young, too young to be in that worn, pale face.

Clint Windsor did not look anything like what Cissy expected. M.T. had said he was a big old nasty boy grown into a big old nasty man. This man was not big, though maybe he had been at one time. He made her think of the first book Randall had read to her, a book about a stick cricket—a walking stick. This man was like that, long and odd, a walking stick that could no longer carry his own weight.

A roar went through Cissy then, echoes of all the stories she had ever heard about the man Randall called “that evil stubborn redneck son of a bitch.” Delia herself had cried his name like a curse, pounding the wall by the phone as she talked with Randall’s lawyers. “That son of a bitch! That goddamned son of a bitch!” So much rage and power. So many memories. All of it compressed into one stick-thin figure hanging in a doorway.

Cissy pulled her legs up on the car seat and hugged her knees. She wondered if Clint was strong enough to hurt her mother. He might be, but he didn’t have to touch Delia to hurt her. He had been ripping her up for years. Cissy looked out the window to the roofline and the trees behind it. They had been living here when it all happened, when her sisters were born and he nearly killed Delia, when Delia ran off and Randall found her and everything started over in California. This was where the band started, where Cissy started, too, if she really thought about it. Delia was shaped here. Everything that happened afterward was because of what had happened in this house.

“Come on, Cissy.” Delia’s voice was loud in her ear.

Cissy swallowed and got out of the car. Together she and Delia walked to the porch.

“Cecilia,” Clint said in a husky voice. “I’ve wondered what you would look like.” His eyes lifted to Delia and then dropped back to Cissy. “You look like your mother.”

“You look like a grasshopper,” Cissy said.

Clint grinned. “Yeah,” he said, “’cept I can’t hop much.” His shadowed eyes found Delia again. “She’s your girl,” he said. “Your girl for sure.”

In California, when Delia said “your sisters,” Cissy imagined figures from an overexposed photograph, strangers who did not matter, family, but not really. They were unimportant, distant, the kind of family you never had to think about or confront. After all, they had remained in Georgia with Clint. Cissy didn’t know exactly what had happened between Delia and Clint, but she didn’t care. Her world was Delia and Randall. The world was the three of them, and the friends who came around to hug Delia’s girl and tell her how pretty she was, how much like her famous daddy, her beautiful mama. Maybe Delia was always drunk and Randall hardly ever there, but Cissy had never known anything different.

From the day crying season ended, Cissy’s world was remade. Everything was about “your sisters.” Everything was Dede and Amanda. The world was full of people who looked at Cissy like she was some dog who might bite, some girl who didn’t matter at all. Granddaddy Byrd, M.T., Pearl and Ruby, Stephanie and the women who came into the Bee’s Bonnet Beauty Salon—the world was suddenly full of people who did not love Cissy. From the first moments, Cayro, Georgia, had settled down on Cissy like a clamp on her heart, the weight and substance of two girls she had only known in dreams.

“Your daughters,” she said to Delia. “Your daughters, not my sisters.”

By the day of the move, Clint could no longer get out of bed without help. “There’s not enough of him left,” M.T. whispered to Cissy, “to make a woman do a damn thing. He’s gotten so small, and he used to be so big.”

Cissy wasn’t so sure. When she looked at Clint lying back against that stack of pillows, all she could think was that he had to be planning to shoot Delia in the head first chance he got, maybe with one of his precious hunting guns that hung on a polished pine rack over his bed.

There were three bedrooms in the little yellow house. The big one in back was Clint’s dying room. The smallest was for Delia. The one on the other side of Clint’s room was for the girls. From the first day, Delia started getting it ready for Dede and Amanda. She squeezed three narrow beds along one wall and put a dresser and a shelf on either side of the closet.

“You’ll have to share,” she told Cissy. “And it will be a little tight, but it will work out. We’ll make it nice so it does.”

Cissy said nothing. The room wasn’t large enough for three big girls, but she knew what Delia was thinking. Soon enough there would be another bedroom available. When Clint died, the house would open up like a puzzle box. Cissy crowded her stuff into a corner and let Delia enjoy herself making up the rest of the room for Amanda and Dede.

“Amanda will like these.” Delia had found small earthenware lamps with matching pale green shades. “And Dede needs a reading light. M.T. says she’s always getting books from that place downtown.”

Uh-huh. Yes ma’am.

Delia cooked soupy, unseasoned meals for Clint’s sore mouth and tender belly, mostly potatoes and rice reduced to a colorless puree. She scrubbed out ’the house, and swabbed down Clint’s sickroom. Sally refused to lend her crew, complaining that she had done more than enough for that family. M.T. didn’t press her. She was still unhappy about Delia’s decision to move out to Terrill Road.

“M.T. thinks cancer is catching,” Steph said. “She thinks it’s like herpes or VD or something.”

“I do not!” M.T. slammed the cash drawer shut. “I just don’t like being around sick people. I never have.”

“You were over at Billy Trencher’s place every day for a week after he broke his leg,” Steph said pointedly. “You were doing his laundry and cooking for him almost every night.”

“Billy’s an old friend, and he wasn’t sick. He was injured. There’s a difference.” M.T. glared at Steph. “And I don’t hear you offering to help.”

“I never could stand Clint Windsor, not even when he was healthy. Wouldn’t bother me if he drowned in his own piss.”

“You don’t have to do anything.” Delia was embarrassed. “The house is fine. All that’s left is the garden, and I’ll do that myself.”

From the back window Clint watched Delia’s every move as she spaded and sowed. He had promised his help. She was doing her part. She would have her girls. If it took a lawyer, a judge, and a court ruling, she would have that too. Clint had promised, and Clint was the way through.

Cissy thought she knew the story. Delia had been foolish in her head and Clint evil in his heart. She figured Clint was like Granddaddy Byrd. Every time he looked at her, he would see Randall in the bones of her face. He would be reminded that Delia didn’t love him, that he had broken Delia’s love and driven her away. It was only a little less complicated than one of the plots in Ruby and Pearl’s romances, but a lot meaner. Either way, Cissy figured Clint had to hate Delia. He had to.

For a week Cissy stayed away from Clint, but one late Sunday afternoon when Delia was hanging out sheets in the backyard, Cissy heard him making low strangling noises in his room. She stood in the hall and listened, then tiptoed to the door to see him bent over the side of the bed, spitting painfully into a basin on the floor. He pulled himself up, fell back onto his piled pillows, and saw her, Cissy’s big eyes catching his narrow squint, her pale face reflecting back his red one. Cissy remembered the photos M.T. had shown her, Delia and Clint at their wedding, their strong bodies and broad smiles. He had been a big man, not tall but thick and sturdy-looking. Now Cissy took inventory of the jut of his bones and the stretch of his scaly neck. There was no hate in his face, just an impassive gaze, old and tired.

“I could get you some water,” Cissy whispered the words.

“All right.” Clint barely nodded.

Cissy had to hold the glass for him. She looked down at his tangled hair, flattened against the sheet, and felt heat flame on her face. She had heard so many stories, dreamed so many bad dreams. He had been so big in those stories and dreams, wild and drunk and dangerous, breaking Delia’s bones and cursing her soul. Chasing her out of Cayro and into the arms of another man, using her girls against her and never setting her free.

“You need anything else?” Cissy asked.

Clint wiped his mouth and shook his head. “No, no.”

The next afternoon when Cissy came home from school, Delia was still at the Bonnet. The whole house was quiet and she went back to look in on Clint. He was sleeping restlessly, breathing hard in the stuffy room. Cissy opened the window and turned, leaning back against the sill. She saw Clint’s eyes open and his mouth relax as he looked her up and down, and up and down again.

He said, “That’s good.”

Cissy didn’t know if he meant the little sweep of the breeze that played through his hair, but she could see the pleasure in his face, the easing of pain. She could see in the glance he gave her that Clint prayed for something to pull him out of himself, even if only for a moment. It stopped her where she stood. In that instant she saw Clint Windsor as a needy, fragile man, someone she could comfort just by being present. Clint was a man starving for company, even Cissy’s company. She was an unknown, another man’s child, but she was also some piece of Delia. And more, she saw him as someone who could comfort her, just by looking at her with hunger and patient acceptance. Every time Cissy stepped into that room, his eyes ate her up, not hatefully but with something like love—something like Jesus’ love earned through suffering and long patience. She remembered again all she had heard about Clint, and she knew that whatever he had been with Delia was gone. He was somebody Cissy did not know anything about, truly, except for one thing. She could make him happy by standing there in front of him, not hating him and not running away.

There was a moment at Grandma Windsor’s when Cissy felt almost sorry for her. Delia was dragging a big black sack of clothes, and M.T. was huffing under the weight of a box with one wet corner. Neither of them looked to the left or right. Neither was going to acknowledge Amanda’s sobs or Dede’s muttering. Cissy had stayed at the truck, so she was the only one who saw Grandma Windsor come out on the side porch, drop down on the steps, and let her head fall to her knees. After a moment she looked up, and her hands moved as if she were going to slap her own face. Her mouth pulled back and down in a howl, but she made no sound. She just rocked, grinding her fists into sunken eye sockets, the perfect image of grief.

Clint was the way through, but Clint did not matter at all. This was a war of women. No quarter. No mercy. The last box thudded into the back of the truck.

“Cissy!” Delia’s voice was sharp, but she was looking past Cissy to the side porch. “Come on, girl.”

Grandma Windsor stood up and looked back at Delia. Cissy turned away. She did not want to see what would come next, the awful damage the two women had done and were doing to each other. The screen door banged when Grandma Windsor went inside. The truck door groaned when Delia pulled it open.

“Get on, girl. You go in M.T.’s car. I’ll take Amanda and Dede with me.”

Bang. Bang. Doors slammed. A curtain fluttered. Dust lifted off that porch.

“Lord, I’d rather eat ground glass than cross your mama.” M.T. wiped her face and started her Buick.

“You’d have a better chance of getting over it,” Cissy said, watching as the kitchen curtains were pulled roughly together.

Neither Amanda nor Dede said a word the whole way to Clint’s house. When they got there, Delia had to prod them into the bedroom where he lay limp and almost speechless. Cissy followed, breathing in Dede’s slightly flowery perfume and Amanda’s odor of starchy insistence. The girls stood and stared at their father. When Amanda bent over to kiss his stubbly cheek, Dede made a vague, impatient gesture.

“Girls. Good to see you here,” the man whispered with clumsy grace, but his eyes wandered to Delia and Cissy, plainly more interested in them than in the daughters he had kept as his own for so long.

Dede stalked out, but Amanda stood by her father’s bed until he finally met her gaze. “Daddy, you don’t look well,” she said then, in a tone darker than a curse. Clint flinched and blinked up at Amanda with her own piercing gray eyes.

That evening Delia sat them all down at the dinner table. Her face was stern and open, the girls’ shuttered and blank. The air between them was electric with suspicion.

“You have to know I never wanted to be apart from you,” Delia said.

Her words were stones dropping from a great height. Amanda laced her fingers on the table. Dede wiped the corners of her mouth with a forefinger. Cissy picked at her cuticles.

“I wanted you with me, every moment. I lost myself in California because I could not abide what had separated us. And I did not know how to get you back.” Delia turned from Amanda to Dede and finally to Cissy. Her lips seemed to have thinned under the pressure of speaking precisely.

Delia took a breath and looked at Amanda. “Your daddy and I have reconciled. We’re going to take care of each other, all of us.” She paused. “You know your daddy is dying. He’s going to take all my attention for a while. I expect to need your help. You’ll all have to help, I think. And you’ll regret it badly later if you don’t spend some time with him now.” She stopped again, her glance darting between Amanda and Dede.

“I know you don’t want to be here. When you’re of age, you can leave. Eighteen, and you can go where you will. That’s not so long, Amanda. A couple of years is nothing. And the time will come when you will see how much I love you.”

Amanda kept her eyes trained on Delia’s. “I don’t love you,” she said. “I don’t care nothing about you.” Dede nodded almost imperceptibly. “You’re nothing to me.”

Delia flushed, but her gaze never wavered. “And you’re everything to me. Everything. The two of you.” She looked at Cissy. “The three of you. The three of you are all I want in the world. If you don’t love me, I’m not surprised. If you hate me, I can take that too. But you’re mine, all of you. You’re everything I am. And whatever else happens, I am going to take care of you.”

Cissy shifted in her seat. Dede’s mouth was open and her color high as she twisted a strand of hair. Amanda clasped her hands more tightly in front of her, as if in prayer.

“God watches over all of us,” she said. “You think He doesn’t know what you are doing? You think we don’t? A couple of years is nothing in the sight of the Lord.”

Never sparing Cissy a glance, Amanda got up and turned on the television set, rotating the dial until she located the news. Then she retreated to the spot she had staked out and shifted down so that she was sitting on the floor between the couch and the coffee table. She looked almost relaxed.

Cissy joined her, sitting down on the far side of the couch. She didn’t know what she expected, not real conversation surely, but maybe a few remarks about the news, the weather, the local sports.

“This guy,” she said, gesturing at the announcer, “is about the scariest-looking guy on television. Once, I saw his wig slide sideways, and he did the rest of the show like that. Somebody in the studio was giggling and snorting, but he never seemed to notice. Just kept talking with his wig hanging off.”

Amanda ignored her. With enormous care she opened the backpack she had brought with her, pulled out a giant-sized box of vanilla wafers and an equally large jar of Jiff, and slowly began to spread the wafers with the peanut butter. Her attention was completely focused on the cookies and the television. When every wafer had been painstakingly covered with its layer of Jiff and they were all lying in a great open design on the table surface, she began to pair them, each pressed on top of the other, the edges precisely aligned. With one extended finger Amanda skimmed off the extra peanut butter that oozed from the circumference of each sandwich, and popped it into her small tight mouth. Cissy watched the whole process, unable to look away, until the coffee table was littered with a mass of joined cookies and the whole room smelled of vanilla and peanut oil.

Amanda gave Cissy one expressionless glance and turned back to her project. From the interior of her backpack she produced a large plastic bag and began to parcel the cookies inside. When the table was empty except for one lone cookie sandwich and a scattering of pale crumbs, she carefully sealed her plastic bag and tucked it in the depths of her pack.

Cissy discovered that her mouth was open. With a shake of her head she closed it and turned to watch the announcer. When she looked back, Amanda was munching on that cookie, her eyes fixed on Cissy’s face.

“I despise you,” Amanda hissed, her breath smelling strongly of peanut butter. “And her!” She pointed toward the kitchen. Her mouth barely moved when she spoke.

“Even if I have to go to hell for it,” Amanda said, zipping up her backpack grimly. “God will understand.” She hugged the pack to her breasts. “You’ll be there, you know. You’re going to hell for sure.”

“I’m going to bed,” Cissy said. When she went into the room, Dede had turned down all the lights and pulled a sheet up over her shoulders. Nervously Cissy put on her sleeping shirt and climbed into her own bed. Dede’s body was close enough to touch.

“What’s wrong with your eye?” Dede propped her head on one hand and peered at Cissy.

“Nothing.”

“You crying?”

“No. I just get watery eyes sometimes.”

“Only the one.”

“So?”

Dede shrugged and lay back, falling silent when Amanda came in and knelt to say her prayers.

“You are going to hell,” she told Cissy every morning, and “To hell,” she said again, when they passed in the bathroom. Cissy said nothing in reply. What she felt was certainly not to be admitted. It was Amanda’s expression, Cissy thought, her bright, determined eyes. Her voice was so sincere, her words, the smell of her—a girl who would not compromise. Against her will, Cissy was enthralled. Amanda was magnificent, and they were of the same blood. Amanda was Delia’s girl, Cissy’s half sister, someone to be proud of even if Cissy wished she had never been born.

Amanda and Dede were as different as Cissy could imagine, especially for children of the same daddy. It was just that the differences between them were not immediately visible. Seen side by side, asleep, they were almost identical, equally slender and lithe. It was also true that both of them had the same white-blond hair, without a hint of Delia’s red. But Amanda kept her hair cut off above the shoulders, and Dede’s was a long brush down her back. It was not even that Dede was beautiful while Amanda was not. Amanda should have been beautiful. Everything was there to make a beauty. Grandma Windsor had called the girls her Roses of Sharon, but it was Dede who was the bloom and Amanda the briar.

It was after you spent a little time with them that the differences between the girls became pronounced. People who knew them forgot the similarities. Though they had inherited the same frame, it seemed their bones were sorted out differently, Dede’s finely carved and willowy, Amanda’s awkward and heavy. She was within a pound of Dede’s weight, but stood out like some thorny desert plant, all bristly angles and serrated edges. Amanda had those astonishing gray eyes, sharp as the ice on meat put by too long, while Dede’s eyes were blue and deceptively placid, and though her smile was crooked, it was almost gentle. Amanda’s smile, severe and fierce, rocked people. Amanda’s smile made people look down to see what was unfastened, what was inside out.

“Skinny,” people said of Amanda. “She’s skinny as a rail.” But turn them to Dede and a gleam would come into their eyes. “Look at that girl,” they would say. “You see that pretty little thing?”

As she got older, Amanda’s features became more austere. Her face lengthened until it was as flat as the backside of a shovel. Her nose jutted out and down in a line with the corners of her mouth. It was a face as sad as the grave, always downcast, so that she looked up from under her eyebrows. Dede’s face was forthright, chin, nose, cheekbones, and brows protruding fearlessly, but the impact was cheerful. “Why, she’s prettier than her mama,” men said. Dede seemed always to be looking straight on, hopefully and curiously, and though she often pressed her lips tight together, she had none of the aura of repression that was Amanda’s essence. In Dede the sadness was more subdued, not so awful. In Dede it was almost attractive.

That sadness, maybe, was what they got from Clint. That sadness, that suspicion, that fearfulness of spirit and deep sense of the fatefulness of life. They both expected trouble, Amanda head down and stubborn, Dede looking it in the eye and throwing her head back as if to say, What now?

Their silences were different too, not like Delia’s, which were not quiet at all but full of humming, brief snatches of lyric, and muted music. Dede’s moments of stillness vibrated as loudly as Delia’s voice on the old records. And Amanda Louise could say more with a silent glance than most people could say in a string of curses. In her, quiet was a pool of great contempt across which only occasionally flashed a curse or a prayer. Cissy wondered sometimes about herself. She thought of herself as quiet, as a watcher, but she was not sure that was how other people saw her. Angry, resentful, and stubborn, M.T. had called her, and M.T. was rarely wrong. But Cissy had an object for her anger. Delia was the prism through which all her outrage focused. Delia was the fulcrum.

“Your sisters are too strange for this world,” M.T. told Cissy after discovering that Dede had painted the ceiling of their room black and silver‘and pasted fragments of broken mirror all over it. “Every time I see ’em, I think how lucky I am to have my Pearl and my Ruby.”

There was a part of Cissy that agreed with M.T. Dede and Amanda were difficult. Delia might be overjoyed to have her girls back, but she was paying for her triumph with every nerve in her body. The sisters did not so much settle into the house as take it over and remake it completely, but there was still no doubt in Cissy’s mind that on the whole she preferred them to M.T.’s butter-mouthed, vicious daughters.

Dede not only painted the bedroom but hid cigarettes in Cissy’s underwear drawer and communicated with stern eyes that she would be very displeased if Cissy told Delia. Amanda, who was a junior at Cayro High but seemed oblivious to the opinions of the other girls there, promptly organized a prayer circle whose sole purpose seemed to be directing God’s special attention to her own heathen family. Cissy spent a lot of time in Clint’s room, reading or hiding out.

When the sisters she had seen only at a distance or in photographs walked through the front door of Clint’s house still smelling of the wild clover that grew all around Grandma Windsor’s front yard, it struck Cissy that behind the facade of contempt and resentment she had already pieced out, there was still more that she knew nothing about. There was a world of justified rage in Dede’s pale cheekbones, a simple iron strength in Amanda’s tightly compressed lips. Dede was only two years older than Cissy, Amanda not quite five, both of them close enough to be recognizably family to Cissy, but they were nothing like her, and nothing like Delia. A little shiver went down her back when she looked at her long-lost sisters. All her life she had hated them. But from the moment they walked through Clint’s door, Cissy lost her certainty. Delia had always said the lost sisters were a part of her, and for the first time Cissy began to see how that might be so.