My children had bad colds they had caught playing in the snow so I was busy with that and didn’t get to see Charles William and Irise before they left to go back to Atlanta. They called at ten that morning and made me promise to come and visit. “Come on up to the city,” Charles William said. “This time I’ll fix you up with an architect. I think our mistake was in getting you an engineer. We need to move in the direction of the arts.”

“Is May Garth still going with that lawyer?”

“No, it’s a musician now. He plays drums for a black band. She’s dancing to a different drummer.”

“Thanks for taking me to Montgomery. It was really nice.”

“Have you heard from Jim?”

“No, why should I?”

“Oh, Dee,” Charles William began to laugh and I could not resist it.

“Okay, well, hell no, he hasn’t called me. I was rude to him when he was late that night.”

“I bet he’ll call you.”

“He doesn’t even know my number. He doesn’t know my parents’ name.”

“You call him. Call Derry and find out his number.”

“I’m not calling a man. Of course I’m not. Besides, it scares me, all that stuff they’re doing.”

“Well, I love you. We have to go now. Irise is standing by the door. She wants to get back and see if the parakeet died. May Garth was supposed to be feeding it but Irise doesn’t trust her.”

“I love you too. Write to me.”

“I will. Goodbye. Call him, Dee. Life is as interesting as you let it be.” He hung up and I stood by the phone thinking about the things Charles William was always saying to me. “There is no security,” was his latest mantra. I went into the children’s room to see how they were doing but Fannin had them on the floor building a fort with Lincoln Logs so I wandered upstairs and went into the bathroom and took off my clothes and weighed myself. I had gained three pounds. I reached up in the medicine cabinet and surveyed the different bottles of diet pills Doctor Freer had given to Mother and me. There were black ones for all day, black-and-white ones for half a day, and some pink tablets that Mother thought “were quite enough. The others make me talk too much,” she said. “I talked Sara Redding’s arm off at bridge the other day after I took one of those black ones.” I took down the bottle of black-and-white pills, then I put it back and took a black one. Might as well go on and get the three pounds off in a hurry, I said to myself. Fat is so insidious. And I’m a divorcée now.