But farmhands working in the fields heard it. Neighbors on their porches heard it. Children in their graves heard it. “You can’t imagine the humiliation,” Rosalie says. Joe Hall had to loose the dogs to keep her from coming right into the cabin, which she informed them now belonged to her, both the cabin and the house on Exeter, too, and they had no legal right to keep her out of either one.

—

Rosalie is seated on her bed, her shoulders against the wall and her head pushed forward by the knot of her hair and the stoop of her spine. Her skirt, crinoline removed, spreads limply over the covers like a brown puddle. Asia sits cross-legged at the foot, facing her, and Johnny is stretched out next to her, his head on his arm. Both are lying on some part of her skirt, holding her by her wings like a pinned butterfly as she talks.

Edwin has taken a seat on the floor, which is cold, and either because of that or because he feels coiled so tight with tension, there is a tremor in his legs. He has wanted to know what’s going on, but now that he will, he wishes he wouldn’t.

He pulls his knees up to his chest, wrapping them in his arms until they are still. The light in the room is golden—The weary sun hath made a golden set—and Rosalie’s eyes shine with unshed tears; the bottom of her nose glistens. Edwin wishes he were older, the days about to come now safely in the past. The weary sun hath made a golden set, And by the bright track of his fiery car Gives token of a goodly day tomorrow. The someone who told that woman that Mother was at the farm? That someone was Edwin.

“I don’t see why we should feel humiliated,” Asia says. “It’s not as if we did anything wrong.”

—

When the shock has abated slightly, the children try to remember if they were ever actually told that their parents were married. They were certainly never told otherwise.

There seem now to be only three possibilities:

1. It’s all a lie and Father was never married to the woman calling herself Adelaide Booth.

This is the option Asia will choose. For the rest of her life, she will insist that Father and Mother married first and ran off to America after.

2. Father seduced and deceived Mother.

This is Johnny’s pick. He will decide that Father tricked Mother with a false wedding, that Mother was as stunned as the rest of them to learn she was unmarried. It’s a sentiment shared by their neighbors and friends. Mother has always struck everyone as every inch a lady. Father, on the other hand . . .

Johnny’s attachment to his mother will deepen. His feelings about his father will, from this time forward, carry an undercurrent of blame and anger.