“He can be as unhappy as he pleases,” he said. “We can stay as long as we want to—we’re adults now. And I’m not his employee. We talked about this.”

His mother chuckled. “It’s all right. I’ll talk to him.” And then: “You’re a fine boy, you know that? A fine married man now. I can’t believe it.”

After he hung up he felt like crying, and he sat in the booth and stared at the floor, until the man behind the counter asked if he needed anything. He shook his head and stood up to go.

He was a poor excuse for a man.

He remembered a story his mother had told him, a few weeks before the wedding, about a great-uncle of hers who had tried to desert from Hood’s army after the Battle of Chickamauga. He’d made it all the way home, she said, but at the door his wife had pulled a shotgun on him and told him to go back until they’d won the war, or else she would kill him. He’d rejoined the army and, “obediently,” as his mother put it, died of dysentery soon after the surrender.

Effie was waiting for him on a bench in the square, holding an ice-cream cone. Sunlight dappled her face. She was immeasurably precious to him.

“How’s the Angel of Darkness?” she asked, meaning his mother. It always made him laugh.

That evening, Alma stood on the sidewalk in front of Clara’s, in her brown dress with the white polka dots, and the sight of her there in the gloaming burned away every line of reason he’d articulated to himself that day, along with any trace of shame. Clara had come to fetch them, and she and Max were waiting. She glanced in his direction, then away.

They started toward the town center, down the residential streets on the other side of Madison. The streetlights were out, and the evening was soft and warm. Alma trailed behind. He wished he could fall back and ask how she was, but she would only look at him like he was an idiot. So he listened to Effie telling Max and Clara about her mother, how anxious she could be, how she wished she’d take up drinking, if only to calm herself. The streetlights worked past Ocean Street, and as they neared the town center they saw lighted windows here and there, and people on the sidewalks, as if they’d crossed an enchanted barrier into the living world.