Nolan’s mama went a little bit more than a minute and a half without breathing. The paramedics put her on oxygen in the ambulance, and she came to with her mouth open and her tongue out.

“Like a baby bird,” Nolan told Cissy. “Like a happy baby bird.”

A hungry baby bird.

It was a life change for a woman who had never consumed a full thousand calories in a day for thirty years. Her husband and her boys were fat, but Nadine made a religion out of being thin. Rail-thin, starved skinny, a clear-soup-and-celery-stick life. She was painfully proud of the way her hips and collarbone protruded, smugly contemptuous of her wide, soft men even as she fed them all the food she would never eat. Nolan’s mama believed men should be big and women small, and she was sharp-tongued about it. She was sharp-tongued by nature anyway, given to cutting remarks and sudden cruelty, though she believed herself kindly. It was just that she knew how things should be and the world so rarely matched her convictions. Nadine Reitower made gravy but never ate it, baked cakes, pinched the crusts of pies and steamed puddings. She fed her men like a sacrament and starved herself matter-of-factly, until her bones went lacy and fine and fractured in thin, spidery lines.

“Should have put her on calcium and had her walking more for the last decade,” Dr. Campbell grumbled. “Should have seen what she was coming to.” He was chagrined because he had believed Nadine to be supremely healthy, anticipating her visits every time her name appeared on his charts—that fine-boned, ethereal creature he had almost adored. She was a devoted mother, a happy wife, maybe a little bossy and difficult now and then, from what people told him, but no more than should be expected. Her husband’s death changed all that, and Dr. Campbell finally met the Nadine Reitower everyone else knew. From the doctor’s perspective, the woman he admired had been supplanted by one he could barely stand to examine, an indignant, contemptuous woman grown suddenly old and fragile, one who told him he was a fool right to his face. When that creature altered again, he stopped talking with any certainty. What they had was what they had. What might come next was completely past his ability to predict.

“Nolan,” Nadine said, waking up after that last ambulance trip. “Nolan, I’m hungry.” And so she was. Nadine’s disposition changed with that minute and a half of stillness, with the acquisition of the wheelchair, the ramps, and the visiting nurse. Her baby-bird mouth smiled often, and she waved at people from the porch, calling out their names.

Cissy. Dede. Amanda. Anyone who passed. Even Delia. Nadine liked everybody now, and the plumper she got, the more she said so. In a minute and a half, Nolan’s life was remade.

Nadine Reitower was a new woman and everyone knew it. What was not so quickly apparent was the change in Nolan. Only Cissy seemed to see it, perhaps because she saw him so regularly. As Nadine widened in her chair, Nolan seemed to relax and brighten. His late growth spurt intensified. He started doing an exercise routine with a set of weights his daddy had kept in the garage. He swore it had nothing to do with his last run-in with Dede, when she told him she would never go out with a boy who looked like a biscuit on legs.

“I just feel like it,” Nolan insisted to Cissy.

“Naaa, come on. You’re working at this. Damn, Nolan, you’re coming close to having a real physique!” Cissy teased him so relentlessly she was surprised he did not take offense.

“It’s practical, that’s all,” he said. “I have to lift a woman who is just about a dead weight, and heavier all the time. Getting her from bed to bath to chair has been just about breaking my back. Her doc told me I had to get a whole lot stronger or I’d wind up with a hernia. Only other choice is to hire a nurse full-time, and the visiting nurse is all we can manage.”

“Uh-huh.”

“Besides, I need to do it efficiently and quickly. Moving Mama is not something you want to do slow. You want to get it done fast.” Nolan’s face was very pink.

“Yeah?” Cissy was curious. She had never seen him look so uncomfortable.

“She giggles.”

“Giggles?”

“God, yes.” The pink of Nolan’s face went a deeper shade, almost rose red at the cheekbones. He closed his eyes. “Me and the nurse go to pick her up, put her in the bath, and she puts her hands up over her eyes and starts to giggle. She says, ‘Don’t look, son, don’t look,’ and she just giggles all the way through. Naked and all, and I never seen her naked before in my life. She would have died before she let me see her like that. Now she’s teasing me and laughing. God, if she was as embarrassed as I am, it would be awful. I suppose if she wasn’t so cheerful, I wouldn’t be able to stand it at all. But even so.” He stopped, and Cissy could not think of a thing to say.

Nolan kept his eyes shut tight. There was more, a lot more, that he could not say to Cissy. While he was working out to get stronger, he was also trying to persuade Nadine to diet—a project that was awful for both of them. The new Nadine hated diets, hated anything but food fat-rich and tasty. And Nolan loved this new version of his mama, this extraordinary woman licking her fingers and laughing out loud, wheeling her chair around the kitchen, humming along to his music, telling him how handsome he was, how proud he made her, and repeating that to anyone who happened to stop by.

But the doctor kept telling Nolan that bone mass did not replenish. It would not come back, and another break could kill Nadine. “She gets much bigger, those bones will cave in all the quicker,” the doctor said firmly. “Son, you got to be the man.”

Nolan could see what he meant. Nadine’s body was not designed to carry the weight she was adding, no matter the gentle open mouth that only wanted to chew and smile. The bigger Nadine got, the greater the risk. If Nolan did not take care, he would lose his mama, this new creature he loved almost more than his music or his dreams.

Nolan took care and steadily pumped his muscles stronger. He invented games to help Nadine exercise safely, made adjustments in the kitchen while she was at physical therapy with the nurse. Sugar substitute, no-sodium salt, fresh vegetables, low-fat soups. He refused to bring home biscuits no matter how Nadine cried, and finally used her mother love against her. “Mama,” he pleaded, “you have to help me. How will I ever find a wife if you don’t help me shape up^?”

Slowly, steadily, Nolan lengthened and thinned while Nadine endured, mourning the loss of butterfat, ice cream, and chocolate pies, but admiring the alteration in her big, soft boy. She watched as Nolan’s shoulders became broad and muscled, his hips and legs slim and powerful. He looked like a football player, a quarterback, strong and handsome, maneuvering his mama’s fragile body as carefully and intently as he played his clarinet.

“Such a handsome boy I’ve got,” Nadine told people when they came to visit. They nodded offhandedly, and then they looked over and realized that she was right. Big, strange, shy Nolan was not the boy he had been. Big, strong Nolan was a man lifting his mama out of that chair, feeding her orange sections and apple slices, dropping his glance when women looked at him, playing his music so sweetly that half of Cayro knew he could go anywhere in the world.

The one who did not look was Dede Windsor. The one Nolan would do anything for, go anywhere to please, never glanced up at the porch where he waited.

“Oh, baby,” Nadine sighed when she saw him looking down the road. Her face was tender, her eyes wise. “Oh, baby,” she said, in that voice that could break his heart. Nolan pulled her up and held her to his chest. He thought, If my mama could become this, then anything can happen. Someday what I want might be.

“Someday,” he said out loud, and Nadine pressed her mouth to his salt-sweet skin. Her boy tasted like apple pie, like a sugar dumpling made to bless her tongue.

“They act like they’re not afraid of God or anything,” Amanda complained every time she came into the store.

“They’re not.” Dede was the only person allowed to smoke in the store itself, but she only seemed to actually do it when someone she did not like came in. As soon as Amanda put her hand on the metal bar that held the Camel Red Pack sign, Dede would pull out her pack and start rolling a cigarette between her fingers. “Except for me. All of them are just a little scared of me, and I work that. I work it for all I’m worth.”

“They should learn a little respect.”

“Oh, they’re learning.” Dede smiled slow and flicked ashes in the direction of the muscular dystrophy can. She kept her eyes on little Michael. “They’re learning, I promise you.” Dede knew why her sister came in, knew that Amanda wanted her to put up one of her little posters. Under her arm Amanda carried a set of the cardboard prints that featured Jesus with the crown of thorns biting into his brow and one finger uplifted to point skyward right in front of his nose. Dede actually had one of those up for a while. It made her giggle at the idea of a Son of God who would pick his nose—the kind of savior she could appreciate. But the joke was no longer so satisfying. Amanda seemed more and more to have lost her focus, to come into the store to buy a can of evaporated milk instead of to lecture Dede on the prospects of hellfire and damnation. Some days Dede missed the old Amanda, the one that pulled over the rack of adult magazines after some of the boys had deliberately pulled down the brown paper sheathes that were supposed to spare the Christian eye.

Nolan went over to talk to Tacey’s mama, Althea, but the woman was full of outrage. She tossed a box of Tacey’s clothes at him and told him to “keep her away from here till she’s ready to apologize.” Since then Tacey had been taking care of Nadine in exchange for room and board, moving into Nadine’s old bedroom upstairs now that Nadine was using the sewing room on the first floor. Tacey had a partial scholarship to Spelman for the fall, and had a stack of unfinished manuscripts in a box under her bed. “You wait,” she told Nolan. “Someday you’ll tell everybody you knew me when.” Nolan did not doubt her.

Tacey was supposed to make sure Nadine had a good breakfast before she left for school, but she had a tendency to stay up late reading or writing in her notebooks, and often napped while Nadine poured sugar on her fruit or slathered butter across her toast. They liked each other well enough, though sometimes Tacey could barely believe the things the old white woman said. There was, for example, Nadine’s assumption that Tacey was sleeping with the garbage men, the mailman, her teachers, and the preacher at her church, Little River Methodist.

“Black girls don’t have to wait like us white girls do,” Nadine remarked one morning not long after Tacey moved in. “My mama told me. It’s in the blood, all that heat from Africa.”

“That right?” Tacey drawled.

Nadine nodded. “Oh, you know. Black girls get to do everything. Me, I never got to do nothing.” Nadine smacked her lips and sighed. “If I’d been born black, I could have been sucking men’s titties since I was twelve.”

“And why would you want to do that?”

Nadine looked surprised. “ ’Cause they taste so good. Men’s titties taste better than women’s do, you know.”

“Really? I didn’t know that.”

“Oh, course you did, with all the men you been with.”

“Mrs. Reitower, I have never been with a man.”

“Oh, you don’t have to humor me. If I could get up out of this chair, I’d go sit naked on the garbage cans in the morning just to see if the boys would let me suck on their shoulders and put my heels up on their hips.” She sighed again, a perfect heartbroken sigh.

Tacey snorted and shook her head. “Mrs. Reitower, you are scary.”

“Oh, you should have known me before,” Nadine said. “I was something, yes. I was.”

Nadine liked to listen to the stories Tacey wrote, long romantic tales of black women fighting to become rich and famous and succeeding beyond their dreams. “Like that woman, what’s her name,” Nadine told Nolan. “Tacey makes you think you are just right there.”

Tacey laughed. “That’s me, the black Judith Krantz, Danielle Steel, Rosamunde what’s her name. Lord, Mrs. Reitower, I’m going to have to read you some good black women, give you some better reference points.”

For weeks Tacey read her favorites out loud while Nadine did her ankle lifts and stretching exercises. Sometimes Nadine would stop and say, “Read me that part again.” Soon she took to mixing quotes from Alice Walker and Gloria Naylor with her standbys from the Bible. “Lord, son, the things I never knew,” she kept saying. Nolan smiled. He liked to lie on his bed and listen to his mama and Tacey read together. In his dreams it was their chorus that lulled him along, their antiphony and Dede’s laugh.

Sometimes Tacey brought Nadine little fried pies when she came home from school, and Nadine sneaked away to eat them in the bathroom with the door closed so that Nolan wouldn’t see. Tacey knew she shouldn’t do it, but the hunger in Nadine’s eye was hard to bear.

“You stay out of the sugar dish,” she scolded Nadine.

“Oh, I love you better than sugar, Tacey,” Nadine promised.

“Sure you do, honey, and if you could fry me in butter you’d love me even more.”

“What I need is a holster for it,” Dede told Cissy. “Need a holster for my weapon. Someone messes with me, I’ll cut them bad.”

The cutter was in her hand when Billy Tucker came in the door that Thursday morning in September. Dede was kneeling on the floor, her knees cushioned by cutoff carton tops. She had been opening boxes and stamping prices all morning. First of the month, Thursdays around ten-thirty or eleven, after the late-morning rush was when she restocked. Candy and cigarettes she did weekly from boxes she had already opened and put in the cooler. Bread came in twice a week, along with milk and beer. Tampax, specialty perishables, chips and crackers, and paper products were the secondary sellers, which came in on the monthly schedule—Thursday morning and first of the month, the days when the cutter was never out of Dede’s hand.

“Billy!” Dede was surprised to see him but not displeased. Although they had broken up, she still liked the way he looked. “What you doing down here?”

Billy wore a work shirt with “Chevron” emblazoned above his name on the pocket. He smiled and produced a little silver .38. “I’m gonna to kill you ass,” he said, and extended the gun straight out in front of him, the trigger line-sighted directly between Dede’s eyes.

“Lord, Billy!” Dede’s hand tightened on the box cutter, but she was more than six feet away from him and her weapon was no good at all. She watched his fingers move to cock the gun, the little metal piece under his thumb pulling back and clicking into place. Dede shifted her gaze to Billy’s face. “I didn’t even know you were mad,” she said.

His eyes flooded with tears, and his lips pulled back in a grimace. “Course you didn‘t, bitch. You an’t looked twice at me all these last few months. You say we gonna be friends. You say we always gonna be special, and then you call me but the once. And it’s ’cause you want to buy some grass! What am I supposed to think, huh?” He shook the gun. “What am I supposed to think?” Dede started to come up off her knees, and he waved the gun wildly.

“Don’t you move. You stay right there. You look at me now, bitch. You look at me.”

“I’m looking,” Dede said. “I’m looking at you, Billy. You say what you mean. I’ll listen to anything you say.” She pressed the blade of the cutter down through the cardboard she was kneeling on right into the linoleum floor, keeping her eyes fixed on Billy’s and her expression as gentle as possible. She had to think of something fast, but for the first time in Dede’s life, nothing came to mind.

Thank God David hadn’t wanted to quit school. Sidney had never finished school, and if he hadn’t been such a good husband and such a hardworking man, the Lord knew what kind of life they would have had. It was from him that David got his green thumb, that ancestral ability to suck a little dirt and know exactly what nutrients the soil required. A decade after the accident that killed him, Sidney’s garden was still thriving, even though Althea had done no more than turn on the sprinkler every now and then.

It was a pity there was so little of Sidney in Tacey. The girl was her mama all over again, but smarter, Althea admitted. Tacey was the smartest of them all, and so headstrong she drove Althea to distraction.

“Mother-daughter stuff,” Althea told Nolan. “It’s old and complicated and predictable as spring. Why, I didn’t speak to my mama for fifteen years, from the time I left school to the week Tacey’s daddy died. It don’t mean we don’t love each other. I love my girl, I just can’t stand her right now. Which don’t mean I want to see her in trouble or wouldn’t kill the man who would do her wrong.” The look she gave Nolan was level and sharp.

Nolan nodded, unsure whether he was being’ threatened or reassured. “Tacey’s in no trouble, ma’am,” he said. “She’s been saving my life, if you want to know the truth. She’s helping me with my mama, and I promise you she has not missed a day of school.”

“I know.” Althea pursed her lips and looked around. “I checked.” She had also checked on Nolan while she was at it. From what she heard, he did not seem the type to mess with her child. People said he was in love with some girl worked at the mini-market, said he was Christian and reliable and no worse than she should expect. But people might say anything. Althea had wanted to look the boy in the eye.

“I heard she wasn’t working here anymore, that she was working at your house.” Tacey had originally taken the job at Biscuit World to earn money for college, and while Althea knew her girl was bright enough to get a scholarship, she also knew no scholarship would pay for everything. Tacey had explained her carefully plotted scheme—the cash savings account that Althea promised to match. It was one of the things they had fought about, money and what Althea did and did not understand. Sometimes Tacey treated her mama as if she were dumb as dirt and nowhere near as trustworthy.

“She earns as much working for me.” Nolan was thinking about Tacey’s brothers. Big, Tacey had sworn. Her brothers were big as football players and seriously fast. Nolan didn’t want Althea to misunderstand his arrangement with Tacey. “A little more, actually,” he added. “And she gets along good with my mama—which I got to tell you is pretty much a miracle. Mama’s been—welt, different, since she had her last stroke.”

Nolan felt the blush that crept over his face but could do nothing about it. “Different” was such an inadequate word to describe Nadine. Nothing short of a novel would have done her justice these days. Alternately maddening and endearing, Nadine was totally absorbed in Althea’s daughter even as she continued to appall them both by saying impossibly rude things as sweetly as she professed her love.

“Strokes are awful.” Althea ignored the blush. Boy was ashamed of his mama, that was only to be expected. “My granddad had a terrible time after his stroke. Your mama crippled much?”

“Pretty much. She broke her hip. She’s had a bad time since my daddy died.”

Nolan was relaxing. From Tacey he had the impression that Althea was terror incarnate, but this plainspoken woman reminded him of Dede’s mama, Delia. She had the same watchful reserve, and she obviously cared deeply about her daughter.

“Tacey is wonderful with Mama. It’s like I said, she’s just saving my life.”

“Yes, well.” Althea hugged her pocketbook to her midriff. “I just wanted to be sure she was all right. The way she took off, I wasn’t sure where she would wind up. Tacey has a temper, you know. Like me, I suppose.” She smiled.

“Yes ma’am. She sure has a sense of herself. She knows what she wants.”

“Oh, she does. She does.” Althea smiled again. “Don’t you tell her I came around to talk to you. Better she should just go on the way she is, come home when she feels like it. Probably when she can show me up some way, boast of how well she’s done. She gets that big scholarship check, she’ll come around to show it to me.”

“Yes ma’am.”

“Damn,” Nolan sighed happily. For a change he might even get in a nap. At the corner of Starrett and Terrill, he paused briefly. He always stopped in at the convenience store on Thursdays, said a few words to Dede, and then picked up some club soda and the little giveaway papers. Nadine and Tacey liked to read the ads. They swore they were going to start hitting the flea markets as soon as Nadine got stronger. That wasn’t likely, but Nadine loved the lists of what people were offering for sale.

“A full layette set,” she’d read. “No more babies coming to that house.” Pool tables, “like-new” exercise equipment, and elaborate stereo systems prompted her to speculate on the kind of people who were moving into Cayro. “People who buy stuff they an’t ever gonna use. People from Atlanta or Nashville, that’s who we’re getting. A few more years and no one will recognize this town.”

Nolan wiped his neck and rocked his head from side to side, listening to the muscles pop. His mama was right, he thought. Things were changing so fast. Some days he felt as if he were constantly losing ground. He should go home and do his exercises, take a hot bath and lie down for a while. Get some rest. He could drop by the store later, when he wasn’t so tired. And if he got in a good long nap, he could try the sheet music Delia’s friend Rosemary had sent from California, a Tone Kwas duet for clarinets. If he had time, he could try each of the parts. He glanced over at the lot and saw only one truck outside the store, a Chevron emblem on the door.

“Billy Tucker. Oh, hell.” Nolan almost went on by, but then he remembered how busy Dede could get in the afternoons. He rocked his head again. “All right,” he said to Billy Tucker’s truck as he pulled into the lot. He could see Billy’s green shirt just inside the door as he climbed out of his car and walked toward the store.

On the third step he saw the gun. Nolan stopped. Billy Tucker was standing in Dede’s convenience store with a gun in his hand.

“Oh, Lord,” Nolan whispered.

He looked around quickly, up the road and back down toward Delia’s place. There was no one around, no cars in sight. Nolan looked back to the store. He saw Billy take a step forward. The gun in his hand was angled down. Nolan went forward another two steps and saw Dede on the floor, her face turned up and expressionless, her gaze intent on Billy’s face.

There was a shout and Nolan flinched. Billy was yelling. The gun in his hand wavered and shook. Billy’s head rocked and swung. There were mumbled unintelligible sounds coming through the glass facade of the store. Cursing. Nolan listened to Billy cursing in a deadened monotone. He’s gone crazy, Nolan thought. Billy Tucker has gone crazy and he’s going to kill Dede.

“I said stay down, bitch!” The words were muffled and peculiar through the glass doors, almost rubbery and echoing as if coming from the other end of a tunnel.

Nolan moved forward carefully, quietly. A bird was singing in a tree at the edge of the lot. Dede’s face was still upturned and empty. Billy had lowered the gun a little, and was holding it now in front of his belly, the sight still centered on Dede.

“You don’t give a shit about me,” he screamed. “You just always thinking about your silly-ass self.”

Nolan put his hand on the right double door. A wave of dizziness swung over him. He looked down and saw his shadow, small and hunched, just visible in the patch of sunlight that shone through the glass-paneled door. He had no idea what he was going to do. I’m going to get killed, he thought.

Nolan opened the door.

Billy was completely focused on Dede. He was waiting for her face to show something, her eyes to widen or tear up or her mouth to twist. Something. He wanted to see his mark on her before he killed her. He wanted to know that she was afraid, that she knew who was doing this to her. In her next life, she’d take more care, he had thought, but that didn’t make sense. God wouldn’t let her out of hell once he sent her there.

Billy had been doing methedrine for three weeks. He had slept no more than two hours any night in weeks. He knew his boss was going to lay him off. He knew his daddy thought he was a damn fool. Margaret Grimsley had told him he was sick in the head, and ugly besides. His mama had suggested that he talk to their preacher, and this morning when he had stood in the bathroom looking at his face in the mirror, the solution to everything had become crystal-clear. He would shoot her. He would. And afterward he would shoot himself. Then he would sleep. Then he would sleep forever. I want to sleep, Billy thought. God, I want to sleep. He felt the air move behind him, the door opening.

“You need to take the time when you have the time, ’cause things happen sometimes so suddenly you won’t have time to think. Like your mama and me.” Mr. Reitower had leaned over the flour-dusted counter and given his son a slow inclination of his head. “I knew what she was like. I knew she had a temper. I knew that being married to her wouldn’t be no bed of lilies, no easy thing at all, but I took the time to look close at her. I knew her. You understand what I’m saying?” He had nodded hard once as if everything he meant were plain. “That woman would take all of me and I was ready. It sure is something wonderful to know that—to know the woman you love as well as you know yourself. And the thing is, to know a woman deep, you got to know yourself. You got to know what you need. I needed someone just like your mama.” He smiled wide. “Someone to kick my ass and keep me moving. Which she has, Lord knows. She has.”

Nolan nodded back at his daddy, unsure of himself a little. Did he know himself deep? Did he know what he needed? It was a hard thing to be sure about when what he wanted had always seemed so far from possible. Was Dede the right woman for him? She would never be a bed of lilies, that was sure. And she would be hard, she would be demanding. She would surely be a woman who would kick his ass and keep him moving. Was that what he needed? Never mind what he wanted, was that what he needed?

The moment before Nolan stepped through that door behind Billy Tucker, that conversation with his daddy replayed in his mind. The tone of his daddy’s cheerful fatalistic assessment, the certainty and the rueful self-knowledge it implied—all that replayed and altered. Nolan knew then for the first time what his life was worth, what he would give it up to save. Maybe Dede Windsor would never love him the way he had always loved her, but loving her was the best of him. It shaped him and made sense of his life. Loving her validated the decisions he had made about his music, his mama, and Cayro. She was the measure and the purpose and the standard he had set himself. Dede was his deep knowledge. Dede was his treasure. If Billy Tucker killed him, it would be worth his life to save her.

“Confidence,” Emmet said later. “You didn’t hesitate, did you, son?”

“No sir.” Nolan was shaking and trying not to let it show too much. He had started shaking once it was all over, once Billy was on the floor, mouth spurting blood and hands clamped to his wounded face, another wound slowly seeping down the front of his jeans where Dede’s box cutter had slashed him as he fought them.

“Well, that’s how you do it,” Emmet wrote in his little notebook, his head bobbing as he spoke. “You got to move fast, no hesitation. Take ’em down fast and mean, and don’t let nothing slow you in the process. I’d say you did it exactly right. Though coming in here in the first place was crazy. That gun was loaded and Billy sure looked ready to use it. Coming in here was the craziest thing you could have done, but if you were going to do it, well, you did it the right way.” He slapped his little book against the flat of his hand.

“You understand what I am saying?”

Nolan nodded, thinking of his daddy and how he had asked the same thing. You understand what I am saying? Yes, he surely had. Nolan looked out at his car where Dede was sitting, smoking non-stop and doing her own version of the shake dance. God, he thought. What if I had not come in here? What if I had gone home? He shuddered once and saw Emmet smile.

“It’s all right, son. No reason to be ashamed. I’d shake too. First time I faced a gun, I lost my lunch. You go home, son. Everything here is going to be fine. We’ll take good care of little Billy. He an’t going to be waving no guns around here no time soon. He looks like he learned something here today, just about passed out in the ambulance. You know, that boy looked like he hadn’t slept this year.”

“You all right now?” he asked her.

“No.” Dede lit another Marlboro from the one that had almost burned down. “I just nearly died, you know.”

“Yeah.” Nolan nodded.

Dede took a drink from the Coke and grimaced. She only drank diet Coke, she’d have to tell him that. She looked at Nolan again. He was just sitting there looking at her. No moon eyes, no sweat, just grown-up and steady and calm.

“Didn’t you think he would kill you?” she asked.

“I was too busy thinking he was going to kill you.” Nolan looked up the street. “I called home. Nadine said to bring you up to the house. Said there is beer if you want some.”

“Beer.” Dede watched Nolan’s face. His mouth, she thought. It used to be soft, lips always wet and bubbly, skin damp. Eyes. She looked up into his eyes. Dark amber and deep as night, they looked back at her. His mouth was set, closed and steady. God, she thought. Goddamn.

“I want more than beer.”

“I could get that for you.”

“Could you?”

“I could get you any damn thing you need.”

“I bet you could.” Dede looked at Nolan’s hands where they rested on the steering wheel. Big and strong, with long fingers, they rested easily on the frayed rubber covering on the steering wheel. She remembered the way he had held Billy, the way he had spoken into Billy’s ear. “I could kill you,” he had said. “Don’t make me.”

“I’m glad you didn’t kill Billy,” she whispered.

“He’ll be all right.” Nolan opened his fingers and pressed his palms on the wheel. “He was just crazy for the moment. He’ll be all right in time.”

“Yeah, probably. Or not. At least he an’t dead.”

“No.” Nolan let his breath out and Dede could hear his shoulders letting go. He settled in his seat and shook his head. “No,” he said again. “He an’t dead and neither are we.” He looked into Dede’s face and smiled. Dede smiled back at him.

“Nolan?” His name sounded funny in her voice, but right. It sounded right to speak his name. “Nolan, do you ever get drunk?”

He hesitated. “Mostly not,” he said, “but I could right now.”

“So could I,” Dede said. “I could get happily stinking drunk.”

“You want to?”

“Yes.”

The way she said it sent a little tingly shock through Nolan, a vibration that centered somewhere just beneath his heart. Dede was looking straight at him, her glance level and dark. She was really seeing him, he could tell. She was seeing him as she never had. In that moment, it didn’t matter to her that he was younger, that he was the boy from up the street she had joked about from the first day she had met him. Finally, she was seeing him clear.

Nolan did not smile. He just returned her look, his face wide open and alight.

“Yes,” he told Dede. “Yes. Let’s.”

In the weeks after Billy Tucker tried to kill Dede, she and Nolan reminded Tacey of those puppies, sleepy-eyed but always watching, and jumping up happily when the other approached. There was no doubt they were in season, tuned to each other and vibrating to the same measure. They were like dogs and children in summer, their tongues always hanging loose and their hair smelling sweet and slightly acrid at the same time, like sugar and piss and love. Sometimes Tacey would take a breath of them and laugh despite herself, but once in a while, coming in on them while they were pressed to each other, she would feel as if something hit her in the heart, stopping her utterly and making her whole life feel useless and uncertain. No one affected her like that, no one speeded her heart or altered her breathing. No one in her life had ever even made her think of changing anything. Watching two who in one moment had been remade rendered everything she had ever known questionable. Tacey pulled out some of her stories and read them through. With the smell of all that lust in the house, the stories seemed thin and bloodless. Tacey rocked on her mattress and tried to imagine what it felt like, the reeling passion that had overtaken Nolan. She felt cramped, uncertain and fearful that there were things she had not yet prepared herself to face.

Worse was that Tacey was not at all sure what to make of Dede—the cranky white girl who was all Nolan’s heart. Dede was no romantic heroine that Tacey had ever read about. Skinny, barefaced, and almost always sweaty and dressed in jeans and a thin white T-shirt, Dede was shameless, caustic, and seemingly as surprised by what was going on as Tacey herself. To Nadine’s delight, Dede did not sneak out of the house or pretend that nothing had happened; she gloried in the affair, spilling out of Nolan’s bedroom while Tacey was fixing Nadine’s breakfast, with her hair all tangled and her sneakers in her hand. Dede smelled moist and ripe. There was sleep in her eyes and a satisfied glaze on her features. She giggled at Nolan’s mama and shrugged when Tacey frowned, pulled on her faded denim jacket and hopped out the front door with only one shoe on.

“Shameless trash,” Tacey called her, and Nadine bobbed her head happily.

“Oh yes,” the old woman agreed. “She sure is.”

Tacey took to addressing Dede as “wildlife” and drawling the word rudely. Coming home from school in the afternoon, she would pick up Nolan’s damp shorts from the bathroom floor, purse her lips, and sniff loudly. “Uh-huh, smells like a little wildlife around here.” Nadine would giggle and Nolan would blush. Unlike Dede, Nolan was not sure that he should acknowledge what was going on. He kept thinking they should be more discreet, but when Dede was close enough for him to smell, his thoughts blurred and a happy buzz took over his brain. He would lean into her and lose hold of any conviction. They were in love. Love would make everything all right.

Dede’s spoor was all through the house. Beer cans appeared in the trash along with wet cigarette papers and used condoms. Makeup was stacked in the upstairs bathroom. There was a set of combs, a new toothbrush, three kinds of colored hair gel, and a little box of shells for the pistol Craig Petrie sent over after he heard about the incident at the store. The girl was at the house constantly—at lunch or after work, early evening or late, showing up at midnight to sleep over after her late shift and getting up at four in the morning to drink coffee with Nolan before he drove over to Biscuit World and she could climb back into his bed until Tacey got up. The house smelled of heat and sweat and sodden clothing. Nolan altered daily, his face swelling with sensual satisfaction and his belly and thighs shrinking away as he forgot to eat or sleep or keep to any regular schedule. Some days he forgot to play his clarinet, and twice he arrived late for Nadine’s medical exams. “Sorry,” he said, his ears tipped with scarlet and his cheeks flushed only a shade lighter. He seemed in a constant state of shock, his lips chewed and swollen, his eyes watery and his pupils large. “Sorry,” he began every sentence, though there was no sorrow in him. He was swimming in an ocean of his own making, riding a tide of yearning and delight, bubbling happy promises to his mama, and blushing hotly at every glance from Tacey’s dark eyes.

“Sorry, I’ll get to it. Sorry, I forgot. Sorry, I was busy.” Nolan was never home except when Dede was with him. If he was not at work or asleep, he was at Delia’s eating vegetables Dede had chosen, or helping her sort stock at the convenience store, or in the tiny silver Airstream mobile home that Dede had rented over at the trailer park where the two of them were always stopping off for an hour or two. Everywhere he went, Nolan trailed the scent of carnal desire.

“Damn, Mama,” Nolan whispered to Nadine one evening. “I never understood.” His eyes flooded with tears until Nadine patted his head and agreed.

“It’s the life force,” she told him. “It’s why we are here.”

Tacey glared at them. It was not why she was there. It was not enough reason for all the extra work that was falling on her, so much laundry it had to be done twice a week or the whole house reeked. Tacey did not dare stay late to talk to teachers or friends, or even to wander home slowly making up stories in her head. There was no guarantee Nadine would not be alone and covered in sugary grease when she arrived.

“I understand,” Tacey complained to Nolan one afternoon. “You are living out one of the world’s great love stories, but could you please buy the groceries before falling back into bed with the queen of heaven?” Nolan flushed and promised, and promptly forgot his promise as soon as Dede called to ask him to drive her over to Goober’s for a plate of fried vegetables.

One afternoon Tacey came home to find a beaming Nadine sitting on the floor sucking a stick of beef jerky. “Dede gave it to me,” Nadine told her. Tacey hauled the woman back up into the wheelchair. Nadine smacked her lips and grinned at Tacey’s angry face.

“I suppose Nolan said that was all right,” Tacey snarled.

“He said it was better than fried pies.” Nadine had the grace to look shamefaced.

“Did he?” Tacey kept her face expressionless. “Did he?”

Nadine’s eyes flooded with tears and she extended her hand, holding out the beef jerky to Tacey. “Don’t be mad,” she pleaded, and leaned her head forward into Tacey’s stomach.

“Oh, don’t cry.” Tacey patted Nadine’s crown. “I’m not mad. I’m not mad.” She hugged the old lady tight, smelling the salty beef and the sweet apple smell of Nadine’s shampoo. I’m jealous, she thought. I’m jealous of something I don’t even want. This must be how people go crazy. For the first time in months, she thought of the way her mama had looked when Tacey had been throwing all her stuff in her bags. Behind the anger there had been a kind of awful patience. At the time, it had just made Tacey even more angry, but her mama had been in love at least twice that Tacey knew about—with her daddy for sure, and with the silly man who was living there now. I wonder what Mama would say if I told her about all this, Tacey thought.

Nadine sniffed and put both her arms around Tacey’s hips. “He never thinks about us anymore,” she mumbled into Tacey’s dress.

“Oh, he thinks about you,” Tacey told her, and smoothed down Nadine’s tangled hair. “Mama love is permanent. It’s just different from that other stuff.”

Nadine looked up at Tacey with a serious expression. “Oh, it is,” she agreed. “It surely is.” Solemnly she put the frayed end of the stick of jerky between her lips. Unable to help herself, Tacey grinned at the sight. After a moment Nadine grinned back at her, as mischievous and sincere as a little girl.