It was a happy time, all things considered. Effie drank. She’d pour a full pint glass, half gin, half seltzer water, with a squeeze of lime, what she called her “fizzy drinks,” and she’d have four or five of these a night, and sometimes Henry would wake alone in the wee hours and find her sitting by herself in the den, muttering to herself. He couldn’t go near the subject with her, not even on the mornings when she woke chagrined and self-loathing. So he let it go, because he liked to drink too, and Effie was in her best moods when she’d had a couple. “I believe it’s fizzy-drink-o’clock,” she’d say gaily at six or seven in the evening, and at that hour the house often took on a celebratory atmosphere. They were frequent hosts. Dinner parties, barbecues. Friends would stop by to shoot the breeze and stay for supper and cocktails. J. P. and his wife, Nell; Maynard Givens and his wife, Helen, and their children; Bernice DuPont, who was now Bernice Clarke, and her husband, Jaime, whom everyone tolerated. (Hoke had enlisted in the navy and was stationed on an aircraft carrier in the South China Sea.) Sometimes, late on a Friday or Saturday night, Effie’s voice would begin to slur and something sharp and dangerous would enter her mood, and politely their friends would comment on the hour and take their leave. If the children were up, Henry put them to bed. (Kate was getting wise, and would linger, asking if everything was okay.) In those moods, Effie could start talking about anything—gardening, say—and the subject would veer into dark terrain. “Mrs. Jackson,” she once said, meaning their seventh-grade science teacher, who had once given her a C on a project involving bean sprouts, “that bitch—I never felt good about myself after that. She ruined my fucking life.”

Carswall had a stroke and died in 1975. By then Signal Creek had become a suburb of Macon, and a state highway ran through the town center. For years developers had tried to get Carswall to sell the land, but he’d refused, and as soon as he was dead, Effie hired a real estate agent and started taking offers. Within a few months she’d sold or rented out all the land, and within a few years the thousand acres of fields and woods had been transformed into subdivisions and strip malls, and Henry and Effie had become, by any measure of the word, rich.

In the year before Effie died, when she was in and out of the hospital, Kate told Henry that she and Joyce and Anne had always been certain that, as soon as the last of them had grown up and moved away, he and Effie would separate. It was a surprise, she said—a happy surprise—that they were still together.

Henry was shocked. “I never dreamed of leaving your mother.”