“To hell with some goddamn mythical Lizzie. I don’t know why Daddy bought this goddamn monstrosity anyway. We’re completely redoing it. It’s going to take months to fix it so anyone can live here. Well, anyway, hello. I saw you yesterday. I’m Rhoda.”

“Excuse me for not wearing shoes. I never wear them in the summer.”

“He always goes barefooted,” Irise said. “Because he is flat-footed.”

“We’re dying to see the house,” Charles William added. “I came over about a week ago but they were still tearing out walls. Is that Tchaikovsky? I love classical music. The only other thing I listen to is jazz.”

“I love jazz. The boy I love taught me all about it. He plays a saxophone. But I’ll probably never see him again. He’s in southern Illinois dying of cancer.”

“Oh, Rhoda, that’s the saddest thing I’ve ever heard.” Irise moved near to me and I really looked at her. She was very small, smaller than she had seemed from my upstairs window, and she was very old-fashioned looking, like a girl out of an old picture of a perfect life. She had soft brown hair and wide eyes that could fix on you and hold. She was wearing a thin white cotton dress trimmed in lace. She put her hand upon my arm and moved nearer. I caught a whiff of roses, some divine soft smell.

“I don’t know. He may be all right. I had to move away and leave him anyway. Well, I don’t care. What’s that perfume? What a great perfume.”

“It’s Joy. Charles William got it for me. He brought it back from Cuba.”

“A woman in a bar was wearing it,” he said. He laughed out loud. “I said, what is that perfume? Joy, she answered. The most expensive perfume in the world. Then she got her husband and brought him over. They were these fabulous tacky Yankee people. He’d made a million dollars before he was forty and he was trying to retire but he didn’t know how. Hunter McCormick and I had gone to Cuba for two weeks, this was last summer, we saw all these blue movies. You wouldn’t believe what we saw, Dee. So then I got Hunter and we started helping these people have fun. They rented a fifty-foot sailboat for the weekend and took us out on it. They kept trying to give us money and all they talked about was money. Every time we’d admire something, they’d tell us how much it cost.” He laughed again and hugged Irise to his side.

“Oh, my God,” I said. “How tacky. Well, look, come on in and see what Momma’s doing. She’s got this whole place full of carpenters. They woke me up at seven o’clock this morning. I may have to go to Cuba.”