“You don’t get home often enough.”

It is August and high summer has fattened all the trees on Old Henderson Road, dried the road to powder and gray loose loam, coating the myrtle and dogwood trees with a flat white alkali stain. Temple sits on her porch while her oldest girl rinses her hairpins in a tub of bleach and spring water. Off in the yard, the dogs raise a dust cloud. I wipe sweat off my mouth and drink tea like I never left home.

Temple slides her palms on the worn porch step, flat and smooth under her hands, back and forth. We watch a long green trailer turn the corner, shear the leaves on the myrtle, just miss the leaning porch, the poplar, the young dogwood.

“That would have done it,” Temple laughs softly, open-mouthed and happy. “I could have put in the new plumbing this year ’stead of next. Anything that big’s got to be insured.”

I nod, scratch chigger bites on my ankles, unable to relax to pissing in the weeds, hoping that trailer comes back and pays for more than the plumbing. She married late, Cousin Temple did, married late and well—a steady boy, one of those Roberts from Asheville, a lean, freckled, still boy, as steady as she was and as quiet, a good son who loved his mother and never ran around like the other boys all the other cousins married early.

Temple rolls a little hair between two fingers and turns her red-tan face up into the sun slanting past the porch beams. This house, yard, dirt road, myrtle trees, kudzu holding the screens on the windows—none of it would stand up to a northern winter, a Yankee tax assessor, or an estate sale. But it puts Temple outside them, a property owner, something none of the rest of the family can imagine becoming. Temple has been an outsider all her life, though living on her own since her mama left her with her own mother when Temple was barely seven—a quiet red-faced seven as she is now a quiet red-faced woman whose hair shows gray where it lies close to her skull.

“You were a bean when you were a girl,” Temple tells me, “a string bean, and your sister was a butter bean. Your mama was a stretch of stringy pork, and together you didn’t make a decent Sunday dinner.”

When Temple laughs, her head goes back. Her long red hair shakes out, and all the gray she has so skillfully tried to hide flakes loose and flashes at me silver and white. “Temple,” I tell her, “you’re finally getting old.”

“Bullshit,” she flares. “And apple butter. I’m just more woman than the men in this town can handle. And I’ve more left to me than most people get to start out.” Then she smiles, oh she smiles! The skin around her mouth that’s aged so dry and tight flushes and fills like the grin on a mewling baby. But her teeth slip loose, and her hand flies up to hide the wolf grin.

“Goddamn,” she sighs. Her daughter doesn’t look up. Temple’s hand caresses her porch, strokes the soft, worn wood like the lover she barely remembers. “It an’t Robert, you know, but it is, I’d swear. All I have of him anyway. Nights, I seem to hear him breathing, but it’s the walls. They sweat so, they smell just the way he did. And I got to where I don’t care if I’m crazy. I talk to this house like it was him.”

Somehow it is. There was an army insurance policy, a thousand-dollar burial, and a four-thousand-dollar mortgage, plus two more for the plumbing which never worked anyway. In the North, it would have bought nothing: in Asheville only a little more: but out here off Old Henderson Road in 1959 it was an estate for three orphans and a redheaded woman suddenly going gray.

“Lupus,” she says. “It was lupus.” An old story I have heard many times these twenty-five years. Temple scratches herself, and spits, angry now as she was angry then. “Damn doctors, damn hospitals, never said what else. Lupus, you know, kills slow, takes a long time—years. But Robert, Lord, Robert sank into that bed. He died so fast. Weeks seemed like no time. He just melted away.”

Maryat stirs her hairpins. Claire brings a pitcher of tea to the door. I wipe my mouth again, saying nothing, watching the sweat shine on Temple’s cheeks. When I was a child and slept in her bed, I would lie awake and watch the line—eyelids to cheekbones to mouth. Never touched it, never once reached out to touch her cheekbone, though I dreamed of pulling her into my neck, sucking her throat, and licking her eyes. Now I curl my fingers around my hipbones, hug myself, and don’t quite reach out to her trembling hands.

“You never saw the store, did you?” Little flecks of broken wood grain pull up under Temple’s fingernails. “Your mama wouldn’t bring you girls around. Hell, your mama thought you girls were meant to be special, wasn’t gonna carry you around to no honky-tonk roadhouse.” She reaches for me, touching my sun-warmed thigh.

“But it wasn’t like that, not really. The store was across from the high school and clean as a dried peach pit. Scrubbed hollow, hell, I scrubbed me raw. We had pinball machines, and a candy counter, Coke coolers, chip racks, and billiards. No liquor ’cept for Robert’s beer in the back cooler.

“But we lost it, of course. We lost everything.”

Temple pauses, pulls at her tea and frowns. “Hard to remember all that, hard times and craziness. I was crazy, you know, oh yes. We lost the store, the car, even the baby’s bed—all those weeks with Robert lying still, breathing like a train going up a hill. All that slow, crazy time, and me crazy. Me just out of my head. I was howling at Granny, screaming at the girls, tearing at myself. Hated myself, like I’d done it, like I’d brought it on him. Nobody in his family had it, but Granny said we’d had a cousin with it, so maybe it had come through me.

“It was important then, how it had come on us. Later I didn’t care, but then it was like that was the only thing that mattered.”

Dust drifts down in the sunlight. Another truck turns the corner and shakes the porch. It’s a short cut, this road and Temple’s lot. Truckers come through and wave. Temple ignores them, slaps her porch, watches the dirty paint flake down. The dogs in the yard, tied off to a tree, howl and kick and lie down again, panting in the heat.

“I got mustard grass, you know, and yellow nettles. Grow ’em cause it makes people mad, ’cause an’t nobody can tell me anything. It keeps people away, makes sure no one touches what’s mine.”

They still have fireflies in Greenville, and green tree frogs, katydids, and rock-sucking worms. The muscadines still hang in sheets off the trees behind Old Henderson Road. Once every few years, Temple takes up with some traveling man, someone she can’t see staying around. She wants nobody permanent now, not after Robert and the girls, that first baby, everybody she ever loved.

“Temple’s nothing but trouble,” the cousins claim. They complain of her life, her girls. “Hard-assed, cold-hearted woman.” Everybody agrees. “Thinks more of that ratty-walled house than her family, thinks more of herself than a woman should.”

Off Old Henderson Road, the porches tilt. The paint chips off. Temple’s bathroom is still out back of the pines. She has the cousins come over to prop the windows, wire back the roof where the slats are sliding down. Where the paint has gone the wood stays bare and rain-marked. She won’t paint again, says it will just flake off in the heat.

Kids come over from West Greenville, drive their pickups right up on the grass, hide behind the dead vines that shield the shed out back; stare in where Temple stores broken chairs, empty boxes, an extra bed. They giggle a lot, smoke dope, and occasionally fall through the rotten boards.

“You gonna pay for that, you white-eyed son of a bitch!”

Temple threatens to pen that shed for chickens, set traps, loose the dogs. All she really does is talk to the uncles real loud on the phone.

“Come up here and shoot me a few of these bastards!”

Sometimes she doesn’t bother to dial. Sometimes she doesn’t bother to roll over or get up, lies in bed for a day, her face set and angry so the girls know to stay away. Gets up thinner but quiet. Goes back to work as the crossing guard at Greenville South-East, the only work she’s had since Robert died.

“You ever read that Flannery O’Connor? I got the book from Macon a few years back. Heard she’d had the lupus, thought it might be in there, but God knows it an’t. You read that crazy woman? Made me think people’re worse than I thought, and I thought bad enough. But the worst was some of it made me laugh and then made me ’shamed. Thinking, what kind of woman laughs at such troubles? Babies drowning themselves for Jesus, preachers and old ladies that get their whole families shot dead ’cause they forgot the right highway.”

Flat, flat, her hand, her face, the sunlight on the porch. Temple’s memory of a boy dead now twenty-five years. “I’d hate to think it was the lupus.”

“Get her to think of something else,” Mama asked me. “People say she’s going crazy out on that old porch all the time.”

Nobody really knows Temple. The women smile about her, say, “Lord God, but she loved that man.” Everybody says it’s a pity, how she sits, how she doesn’t get on with her life, take another husband, have another child, plant zinnias or baby’s breath and go on. Go on.

I sit on Temple’s porch and drink coffee, drink tea when the morning heats up, talk to her of New York and California, of cities she’s never seen. I watch how she laughs, her red hair swinging from side to side, bringing the gray and white to the surface, bringing out the shadows and wrinkles under her eyes.

“How can you live in a city? All those pictures like to make my heart hurt. I could smell it—hot concrete, tar, and piss. No green for miles. No color a’tall. Lord, where’s the life in it?”

I tell her about the color of night, the lights on the bridges, the hot shine in the women’s eyes, the cold glare of metal moving fast. I tell her about the cold winter light shining on flat stacks of slate, hanging over the New Jersey highways, the cars growling rock music out their vents—how tight the people wear their clothes, how tall the buildings, how sweet the dawn after you do not sleep for days.

The silence answers me. I wipe my fingertips on the porch, smell myrtle and crushed onion through the dust of passing trucks, watch Claire cross the yard, how she swings her arms and throws back her head, her white face with the black eyebrows etched as high and fierce as crows across the highway. I have not been this still in years, have not heard my own heart when I was not shadowed by full dark and bourbon, not looked into a face that mirrored mine as Temple’s does—bone to bone, ancient grief to daily rage.

“How do you do it?” I ask her. “How do you live this far from the rest of the world?”

“What do I need the world for?” Temple laughs at me. “Besides, I got sugar, just like Granny. Came on two years ago, and ’pressure, they say, though I an’t checking. What good is it to know you gonna die sooner than later? It makes me think the world’s too damn close on me anyway.

“Claire, honey, pour me another glass of tea.”

Claire, the wire child, thin as the poplar on the corner, pale as the birch peeling in the backyard, brings the jug in two hands and smiles at me. The little reddish-brown nodules on her shoulders could be freckles but are not. The flush under Temple’s skin deepens, and her hands start to shake on the glass. She is seeing what I am watching—Claire’s smile and those deadly little warts.

“You know, a lot of famous people died of the lupus. But then people have it for years and never die, or at least don’t die of just that.” She sighs, rolls the ragged ends of her hair between fingers suddenly flushed pink.

“You know what I did?” She looks away, away from me, away from her daughter, away from the dogs who paw restlessly at the bare patches near the trees. “I let them take his body. Told them to go ahead, do anything they had to. When it came down to it, I said, just tell me what it was. The girls, of course, I was thinking of the girls. And they took him, did their stuff to him, things I can’t even imagine. I don’t think, in the end, we buried more than the frame of him.”

Temple’s hands shake, her tea spills over the splintered boards of the porch. Leaning forward makes her face go a deeper red. “Doctors, like lawyers you know, they don’t hurry.

“I thought it would be a while, weeks maybe, even months. But Lord, years! I never thought they’d take years, and then tell me nothing. Just the lupus, ’cause of the spots and the strangling. Lupus like with Claire or that cousin I don’t know that I really believe ever existed. But hell, they didn’t really know what killed him. Lupus kills slow, and Robert died fast.

“Sometimes, sometimes, I dream sometimes, oh God!” Temple rocks her head back and forth, casts a glance at her daughters and looks quickly away, speaking in a whisper that does not carry to where they sit. “I dream sometimes I lead the children out in front of a big old semi, a row of hearses following easy as you please, all their daddies nodding at me as they’re mowed down!”

She shakes her head, shakes her shoulders, her whole torso following, the pink in her cheeks going brighter than sunburn.

“But, sometimes, too, I dream I am alone, walking through Greenville as it burns, the sparks coming down on my neck but nothing burning me. No one sees me. They come out and throw water and yell. I just walk through and grin. Imagine the kind of woman I am to take pleasure in that kind of thing!”

Imagine the kind of woman she is, Temple on her porch with the paint flaking down. Temple with her hands still on her knees, ridged and knobby, the veins blue-purple and high. Her face a permanent red-tan flush. Her daughters going in and out, slowly, carefully, the deadly warts on the pale skin of their necks and calves burning her eyes.

Imagine what kind of a woman sits still, safe in her own mind, slow as myrtle leaves turning. Sugar thickening the blood in her veins, pressure pinking her skin. Wanting nothing more than new plumbing and her daughters’ slow movement forward, alive. Some man to come along now and then, never quite as real as the man who lives behind her eyes.

Temple writes me once a year, a letter that lists who’s died, who’s been born, a letter that ends with a reminder of who she is. She is my favorite cousin, after me the most remarkable, the one who lived with us the year I was seven, the year Mama almost died, the year she first had cancer and I fell in love with the very idea of redheaded women.

“Do you hear from Temple?” Mama always asks me. “She say anything about the girls? Heard from Dot that Maryat was planning on getting married and Claire wasn’t doing very well at all.”

Every year I do not go home, it hurts me. I think of Temple, the year I was seven and she was eighteen; the year I was eleven and she lost her lover; the year she lost her teeth and her baby girl; the years I realized she would never be mine.

“Do you hear from Temple?” my mama, my cousins, my aunts always ask. I am the one she writes to, and if I have not heard from her then no one has. Sometimes I do not answer, I fall into Temple’s white-eyed memories, the silence of her flushed cheeks, her thin face and hot eyes. The wolf in my neck bares his teeth, stretches, lays one paw on the other, dreaming of fire and sparks raining down, myrtle leaves blackening in the heat.

I fight the wolf, fight him with my love for Temple. I hug to myself the warmth and stillness of her porch, the certainty that she does not fear the wolf as I do, the wolf in her, the wolf who hides his teeth but watches, watches out of her eyes.