“Okay. Let me catch my breath and get a drink of water and I will. God, if I did that. If I did it once. See, if you can ever do it once, you can do it again.” I went out into the hall and drank from a water fountain. I thought about the swimming pool I had helped build in Franklin, Kentucky. I had written column after column in the paper about how much it would help the town and how much fun we’d have and had vowed to teach swimming to little kids if they built it. A promise I had kept. Well, that was all behind me now. I would never see Franklin again. Never see the newspaper office or the swimming pool or our white frame house or the roof where I slept beneath the stars on summer nights or my room that I had decorated to look like a newspaper office or Sue Beck Bailey or Betty Clinton or Stanley Walther, status genius, age fourteen, or my brother’s baby goats or Mr. Mobly, the mayor of Main Street, or the Sweet Shop or the park where Joe Davis had taken me swimming on the third of May or the train station where they shipped me off to a girls’ school in my senior year in high school and where I had wept uncontrollably when the train delivered me home for Christmas. I stopped with my hand on the water fountain and tried to suck up my guts. Suck up your guts, Sister, my daddy always said to me. Act like a man.

“Rhoda, what are you doing? I thought you were going to swim the five hundred again.”

“I can’t right now, Lilly. Let’s just swim laps, okay? I’m really feeling bad. I’m tired. I’m really tired. I don’t know why. Let’s swim some laps and then we can go eat a waffle. I’m tired and starving.”

“Try it one more time. You broke your record. Please try it. I want you to.” She stood in the door to the pool area with her soft wet hair and her long skinny legs and her amazing kindness and praise and I went back in and swam the five hundred again. But this time the time was fifty-four, so I supposed the other had been an accident or a mistake after all.

Back in Franklin, Kentucky, the movers were hauling my bed and desk and books and clothes out of my room. The next morning they would be on their way to Alabama with my parents and my little brothers in two cars behind them. My mother had the baby, Johnny, who was four, and my father had my brother Alford, who was seven. They drove down to Aberdeen first to see my grandmother and have tea and biscuits on her blue-and-white china and talk about me.