She cast her icy gaze about the room and said, “Heaven spare us from all this jabbering. There’s not one woman here who hasn’t served her own maid supper a hundred times, waited on her hand and foot, and eaten from the same set of utensils. The refreshment service brings much-needed money to this club. So put an end to all this hysteria and move on to something that actually matters. I’m starving.”

The tinkle of a china cup boomed like a thunderclap in the silence that followed Pithy’s radical statement of the obvious. But sixty seconds later, the assembled ladies voted in a landslide to continue the refreshment service, regardless of who might show up. On the outcome of such quotidian skirmishes hinges the march of Progress. Pithy Nolan did more for racial equality that day than a hundred CORE workers marching the streets of Natchez could have managed in a month.

Now, forty years later, she lies in her upstairs bedroom, chained to the oxygen tank that gives only partial relief from her advanced emphysema. Facing imminent death, Pithy finally quit smoking her beloved cigarettes last year. According to Dad, it was Flora who finally cut her off, enduring repeated firings during the process. Pithy eventually rehired her, of course, being unable to subsist without Flora’s ministrations.

I remind myself not to look shocked when Flora opens the bedroom door. Pithy has a regal bearing, even in her sickbed, but she looks much thinner than when I last saw her, and her eyes are frighteningly hollow.

“It’s not you I want to see,” she says in a weak voice. “It’s your father. But come closer. Let’s see if you’ve aged as much as I have.”

Tensing my stomach against the sickroom smells, I move to Pithy’s bedside. Flora motions me to the chair she sits in throughout the day. Half a crocheted comforter lies draped over the table beside it, a gleaming blue needle left in the yarn. Near Pithy’s bed, a heavy funk of old urine, flatulence, and medicinal creams simmers beneath a welcome breath of fresh eucalyptus. Then I see crushed leaves scattered on her bedside tables.

“Don’t stand on ceremony!” she says. “Take a seat. You’ve always been a gentleman, even if you don’t know when to stop writing.”

“Pithy, I—”

“Water under the bridge. Tell me where my doctor is. I’ll tell you every secret I know for ten milligrams of cortisone.”

I can’t help but smile. Dad has probably injected Pithy’s arthritic joints with ten times the legal limit of steroids over the years. Today her skin—which in the oil portrait downstairs glows like fresh cream—looks as thin and fragile as rice paper. Her brilliant blue eyes are clouded, and they look wet, as though someone just administered eyedrops.