“Put some in. There, that’s enough.” She added ice from the ice chest, then closed the lid, and put her feet on the top. Her skirt slid up her legs. I could see her lace-edged petticoat. I giggled.

“Hand me a cigarette,” I said. “I smoked all mine. I’m out.” Irise handed me the package of Pall Malls and I lit one and sat back against the cushions of the backseat and inhaled. Charles William lit up and added his smoke to mine. The smoke curled around the ceiling of the car. The plains of Alabama rolled by. “Let’s don’t drink too much before we get there,” Irise said. “Then we won’t have any fun tonight.”

“One more drink before Union Grove,” Charles William decreed. “Then one at Clanton. Then we’ll quit until we get to Montgomery.”

Derry’s house sat at the end of an old boulevard. From the driveway all you could see was a long bluish green roof and banks of azalea bushes. Charles William helped us from the car and we walked down a stone path toward a wooden overhang that led to an indoor garden. “It’s Japanese,” Irise said. “Oh, Rhoda, isn’t it a dream?” I wasn’t sure. I had never seen anything so subtle. I couldn’t take it in. I stopped to admire a lantern built into a stone wall.

“Come in. Come in.” A tall woman with curly black hair came flying out the door and began to embrace us. “I’m so glad you’re here. So glad you could come.”

“Look at the roof, Dee,” Charles William said. “It’s made of copper. Have you ever seen one?”

“It’s blue.”

“Copper turns blue. It oxidizes. It will last forever.”

“Come see the inside,” Derry said. “Did you notice the azaleas? Charles has been planting them. Forty azaleas and twelve Japanese magnolias. We call him the mad tree planter.” She smiled widely and I decided she was beautiful. And something more. Some kind of power I had never seen in a woman. I would not have wanted to cross her or make her mad.

We went past an indoor garden into a room with a vaulted ceiling. A creek ran beside the garden and ended in a pond. In the center of the pond was a charred cross with flowers growing around it. There were walls of glass and skylights in vaulted ceilings. The floors were polished stone. There were Indian rugs and comfortable chairs and tables covered with books and pieces of sculpture. Stacks of papers and legal folders were everywhere, piled under tables, stacked up beside a fireplace, underneath a baby grand piano. Derry led us into the kitchen. She began to lay out cheese and crackers.

“Tell me about yourself,” she said to me. “Charles William said you were a writer. That you wrote for a newspaper once.”