(“It’s just,” she says, “that he seemed to miss you the most of all of us. He used to yell a lot, I remember that, but he never said anything. Once after you’d gone” — another glance to see if she should continue — “I went into his bedroom to borrow something, a catcher’s mitt or something, and I found him crying. He was so angry that I’d seen him, he hit me. I know he was crying about you, or something somebody’d said about you, but he would never talk about it. Daddy tried a couple of times to talk to both of us, to see how we were taking it, because I guess neither of us really showed what we were feeling. I remember him saying it wasn’t our fault, it had nothing to do with us — you said that too, didn’t you?” — she looks at me with surprise, as if she is just now considering that it might be true. “We asked him why, then, and he said he didn’t know, but he knew it wasn’t Elliott or me. I’ve talked to Daddy about it sometimes, but Elliott wouldn’t. He’d listen to Daddy and then he’d walk out of the room, but he wouldn’t say anything. Just that one time crying.

(“I know a couple of years ago, I guess when he was about seventeen, he went to Daddy and said something like he knew Daddy knew why you’d gone and where you were, and man to man, what had happened, what was it all about. He was really tense, white, you know? I saw him going into Daddy’s den to talk, and I knew it was something important. I was only fifteen, and I eavesdropped, I know that’s wrong but I wanted to know what was going on and Elliott never told me anything. I almost got caught, though; Daddy told him he honestly didn’t know why you’d left, he’d never found out, and I guess Elliott didn’t believe him, because he didn’t say a word, he just stormed out of the den again and he never said another thing about it. He just decided to go to university, study business and get rich and be secure.”

(Neither of us speaks for a few moments, and then she smiles at me, a funny twisted kind of smile that means I’m not to take personally what she is saying, that she is just talking of a reality, not what might have been if I had been different.