“We can’t stay,” Miss Rose began. “We didn’t bring our things.” But Momma and Daddy persisted and Momma lent Rose a nightgown and Daddy lent Mr. Percy a razor and they called down and got another room and we all had dinner in a Chinese restaurant and then Malcolm and I went to bed and did it until we fell asleep. Outside in the living room, Daddy and Miss Rose were at the genealogy again. They were back to the seventeenth century when the Mannings came across the North Sea to Scotland from Norway and when the Martins and Barretts were building their empire in the south of England. Mr. Percy had gone to sleep in a chair and Mother was in the bedroom creaming her face.

Oh, the dear lost years when we were twenty. We woke up about three and did it a couple of times and then we didn’t do it any more until dawn.

After breakfast we drove the sixty miles to Martinsville and took a tour of the antebellum homes the Martins’ ancestors had built. Then Rose and Percy had an impromptu cocktail party. The town’s doctors and lawyers and the mayor and the newspaper editor and several widowed cousins and a bachelor uncle came over and talked to Mother and Daddy about genealogy and Malcolm and I got drunk on Drambuie and walked around town in the dark and then sneaked back in and went upstairs and did it while the guests sat on the porch smoking and drinking bourbon and talking about the dances they used to have and how Miss Rose was the most popular girl in Georgia.

“Swear you’ll go home with me tomorrow,” I said. I was holding on to his back. “Swear you’ll go. I can’t leave you. How can I keep on leaving you?”

“I don’t know,” he said.

“We have to find an apartment. You have to go back to Atlanta with me and find us a place to live.”

The next morning Malcolm and Mother and Daddy and I drove back to Atlanta and rented a garage apartment and then the four of us got on a Southern Airlines prop plane and flew back home to Dunleith. As soon as we got home, I took Malcolm up to my bedroom and lay down with him on my very own little cherry four-poster bed. “We will sleep in this bed forever,” I said. “We will always sleep in this bed.”

“It’s not very big,” he said. “It’s too high off the floor.”

“We’ll take it with us to Atlanta and put it in our apartment. I want us to always sleep in this bed.”

“It won’t fit in that bedroom. We need to get a springs and mattress and put them on the floor.”

Chapter

18