She laughed, stabbing out her cigarette, and asked what for.

“I used to think she was snotty. She was always popular and well-to-do. She wasn’t always kind to people when we were in grammar school.”

“I know her well,” Alma said.

“I never hated her or anything,” he said, worrying he’d been disloyal. “She’s always been pretty. I was probably just intimidated.” He explained that Effie was a town girl, and more than that, her father had been the mayor for many years. “The mayor, wow,” Alma said, though she didn’t sound very impressed. It was a small town, he said, but still. The Tarletons were a big deal. He explained how Effie’s father owned a farm-supply store and café, how it had always been a gathering spot for the town, and how he’d recently acquired a license to sell John Deere tractors and opened a new showroom, and now people came from all over middle Georgia. She asked if Henry lived in the country, since he’d said Effie was a town girl, and he said yes, he lived about three miles from the high school, on about a thousand acres of land, where his uncle Carswall grew cotton and grain and peanuts. “You live with your uncle?” she asked, and he said, “Well, he’s my stepfather,” and when she looked confused, he realized that what was a given back home might seem strange elsewhere.

“My daddy died when I was four years old,” he said. “He was a brakeman on the Southern Railway, and he was in a head-on collision outside of Hazlehurst, Georgia.”

“Wow.” Now she did seem interested.

“It was a mixed-up train order—one going north and another going south on the same track. It was in all the newspapers, apparently. I was too young to know what was going on. I remember Mama pacing the house and crying, and I remember crying because she was crying. But I don’t remember very much of him. The clearest thing is the day he shaved his mustache off, and I wouldn’t let him near me because he didn’t look familiar.”

She smiled. She was resting her head on her hand, her eyes fixed on him.

“We moved in with my uncle Carswall not long after Daddy died. He’s Daddy’s eldest brother. He and Mama married, and then they had my sister, Emily.”

“How scandalous,” Alma said, and Henry laughed.

“I guess I never thought of it that way.”

“How is that possible?”

“Right,” he said. “I mean, I’m not naïve. In fact, I can tell you they were married less than a year after Daddy died, and Emily came along only four months after that.”

“Aha.”