Lovey was at the back door, Lovey worried and waiting. It was Deborah she had been pleased at the notion of fretting, not Lovey. The girl began to run, and running, opened her arms. Seeing her coming, Lovey’s relief became anger. “There you are! Where have you been? No shoes! Child! Child!”

By then Selma had found and enfolded her. They both chuckled and cooed in the warm security of their love for each other. Conspirators, they ceased all sound as they left the breezeway and entered the wide hall. They tiptoed past the dining room where Deborah and Leon, Nell and Felix were having breakfast—the air rich with the smell of biscuits and fried ham and gravy and coffee—and into the office-stairwell room. As they ascended, arms about each other’s waist, they lost the smell of the breakfast food. Two of the house servants had brought in large baskets of fresh cut roses, white and pink and yellow and red, that would be arranged later by Nell, who was considered to have a special way with flowers.

“It smells like a summer funeral,” Selma observed.

“Don’t say! Don’t you!” Lovey said fiercely as they came to the top of the stairs.

8

While Selma bathed in the hat-shaped tub that was moved from bedroom to bedroom depending on who required it and had been an hour ago set in hers and filled with heated water, Lovey went down to the kitchen and brought up a tray with coffeepot and cups and a plate of thin-sliced pound cake. In her other hand she carried a kettle of boiling water, which she added to Selma’s tub after she had set down the tray. When Selma screamed and stood in the bathtub, Lovey gave her a towel for her face, and using another towel for her back, helped dry the girl, giving her neck and head the brisk rubbing which Selma always protested but which always relaxed her.

Selma looked about the room. There was her wedding dress, spread as carefully as an altar cloth over the counterpane of the made-up bed she supposed she would never sleep in again. “Where is my trunk?” she asked.

“Skeeter come and got it while ago,” Lovey said. “Put it on the wagon for Plumboy to carry to Oaks. It be there, or nearly, by now.” Selma frowned but did not speak. “Something else you want to take? Ain’t the end of the earth. I expect things to be going back and forth every day, if not every hour.”

Selma shook her head. “It seems funny, my things over there.”

“Better get used to it.” Lovey handed her underclothes, and then poured a cup of coffee, adding a lot of cream the way Selma liked it.

Selma sat on a stool and accepted the cup Lovey offered her. “Drink coffee with me, Lovey,” she said.