“I don’t want any breakfast, thank you. I don’t like to eat in the morning. I just came down to get some coffee.” I got up to leave but he wasn’t letting me go that easily. He reached out and took my arm. “You keep quiet about that trip, Sister. I mean it. You just lay low about that for a while and I’ll get Travis Jeans to try to get this custody suit worked out. You got to help me, Sister. You got to quit acting so crazy.”

“Okay. I’m going to. I won’t tell anyone. Let go of me, Daddy. I have to go upstairs and see about the babies.” I made my escape and went into the kitchen and got some coffee and took it upstairs and stayed up there until I heard him leave for work.

It was late that afternoon before he started in on me again. I guess he’d been thinking about it all day, out on some road job, bossing around the tractor drivers in the dust and heat, half his mind on his work and the other half on me. I heard him drive up in the side yard. Heard him whistle. Every day when he came home from work he would get out of his car and begin to whistle a little four-note tune he had learned from his daddy in Aberdeen. I suppose someday when that sound is lost to the world, I will think of it and weep. One long note, then a short trill to a lower range, then a longer note, then a short sliding stop. My brother Dudley tries to do it, but he hasn’t got the force that gave it grace. One long deep thrilling rising note, then a short high slide, then a longer note, then a short one.

I went into the bathroom and combed my hair and put on lipstick. Then I went into my room and took off the dress I was wearing and put on an aqua sundress and some sandals. Then I went out onto the porch to wait for him. It was late in the afternoon, almost dusk. Our cousin Martha Jane was already in a porch chair with a drink and her needlepoint. Uncle Will was coming across the street carrying his lantern. It was a trick lantern that played “How Dry I Am” when you turned the wick. Sometimes he brought the lantern over. Other times he staggered across the street pretending it was a desert. “Water, water,” he would be calling. “With plenty of whiskey in it.”