They tell me at Franklin’s birth Rose decided to change her ways, and wanted to take her children with her, up North. Jonnie Mae inquired after my mother’s sanity, coolly explaining that she would have to be moldering in her grave before she would allow that hussy to leave her house with those children. Rose left again. This time it was two years before she returned. With me, a six-week-old infant.

Rose was twenty-four. Finally a little older, a little smarter if not wiser, and I’m sure a little more afraid of life and the consequences of her past actions. There were three children about her feet now, calling her Mamma. She decided to bend to convention and her mother’s will and remain at home and work and take care of her children. I’m sure she meant well; I’m sure in her heart of hearts she had made up her mind to do right. But she had not reckoned on her sisters.

All three had been “good”; all three had married; all three were childless. They were the ones the family had sacrificed to educate. They had come home to tend home, to build nests around their mother’s nest, to nurture the family as was the duty they had been taught, as she had been taught. Yet in their eyes Rose had turned her back on the family, flaunted her sins, and smeared their name in midnight gutters and liquor-scented backseats. Did she really believe they would welcome her with honey and sunshine and a roasted calf?

Rose became a pariah in her own home. They treated her as they would a servant girl, humiliating her, excluding her, back-biting, accusing. She lasted about a year and a half, which in and of itself amazes me. She left finally, in stormy fury, rising from the Sunday dinner table surrounded by the entire family, disgusted, hurt, and angered beyond words. She just walked out the door, l suspect, never looking back. She wound up on the West Coast and returned only twice—at the death of my grandfather when I was twelve, a visit that I remember only as swift and veiled—it rained that day—and at the death of her mother.

Anne never meddled in my relationship, or lack of relationship, with Rose. Once or twice, in the beginning, she suggested I at least call, but when she saw my reaction she never mentioned it again. I had no reason, but she never called me either. I cannot say I felt abandoned—I was in more than capable hands, surrounded and protected with love and care and instruction from all quarters. We did exchange obligatory Christmas and birthday cards when I was young, eight or nine, but as I got older even that stopped, and any feeling I might have had for her simply evaporated. There was neither hatred nor sorrow nor pity, merely indifference, icy and void.