It’s a wonder I went back to college at all. Also, Doctor Freer had taken away my diet pills and I suppose I was having what would later be called withdrawal. I spent a lot of hours plotting ways to get him to give them back to me, then I forgot it in the aftermath of the accident. It would be almost a year before I found another source for Dexedrine.

For now, I let Daddy con me and tell me not to worry and buy me a baby blue Chevrolet with leather seats and put six times too much money in a bank account for me and send me down to Tuscaloosa to join the Crimson Tide.

“You be careful down there,” my mother said. “Be careful of your reputation, Rhoda. Try to act like a lady. Let people love you.”

“Let people respect you,” my father said. “You don’t need a bunch of love.”

About my father and the con job he did to get me to quit Vanderbilt. Well, we owed him a lot that year, although we didn’t know it. He had given up his true love for us. So we owed him our lives, didn’t we? Not that he didn’t already know about Abraham and Isaac. He knew children had to sometimes be sacrificed. He was big on young men going off to war and was almost ashamed when my uncle came home unscathed from the South Pacific. That was his code and his culture that had been beat into him in Aberdeen and he had beat it into my brothers. He never hit me again after I was thirteen. I always said I was menstruating and that terrified him. Besides I was fiercer than my brothers. I might have killed him if he hit me. There were furies I went into that no one dared mess with. Lack of pigment, red hair, those old ancestors sacrificing their strawmen, king for a day, oak knives. I was a throwback to that Celtic violence. I was also the shortest person in my family, several inches shorter than my mother. Enough of all that for now.

As I was saying, Daddy had given up his true love in Kentucky, although we didn’t know it yet. A short, large-hipped, slightly tacky lady who had done his books the year he made a million dollars. By the time that first summer in Dunleith was over my brothers and I had figured all this out. So the reason for the new house and the new life and my discomfort was a woman. Doesn’t it always come down to a woman? someone would later write. Not just a woman either, but my brother’s mother-in-law. My sister-in-law Annie’s mother.