“Don’t whom me!” said Lucille. “Take this baby. Mama, get up, stand on this towel; hold on to the back of this chair. Here I am, in the middle of a hot flash, trying to get my forty-five-year-old sister her first paying job, thawing out my little girl’s breast milk in the microwave, and changing the diaper on my mama, all at the same time. There is no God in this world, Emily, if there was he’d be down here screwing the lid on this sippy cup.”

In Emily’s lap Ned squirmed and whimpered and beat his arms up and down. Emily held him by his little shoulders. The back of his head smelled like vanilla wafers. “Look,” she whispered. But out the window the grassy meadow with its graceful paths was gone, and all Emily could think about was the plastic model of the human brain from the Alzheimer’s seminar, with its anxious gray color, its worried-looking furrows, and a high-gloss finish making it look wet and slimy.

December 10, 1999. In the early dusk, yellow-striped sawhorses were put across both ends of Broad and Jackson streets, closing off six blocks to automobile traffic. At six thirty a couple of Jersey cows, a little donkey, and some sheep and goats were unloaded from a horse trailer and tethered with a bale of hay in the middle of the vacant lot where the picture show used to be, and a rooster was tied by one leg to the palmetto-frond roof of the little two-by-four stable for the live Nativity. At first dark the little twinkling lights on the Bradford pear trees were turned on, and the newly reinstalled 1890 streetlamps were lit for the first time, to a cheering ovation. On the corner of Jackson and Broad, the Greasy String Band started up with “Old Joe Clark,” and in front of the bookstore the handbell choir chimed out “Oh Come All Ye Faithful.” Smells of cooking spread out from the parking lot of Toscoga Seed, where the Griffin brothers were barbecuing beef ribs, and there was the creak of harness and the cloppety-clop of horse hooves on the brick street as the carriage rides started up. The Victorian strollers, magnificent in Emily’s costumes, mingled with the crowd, mincing along in their bustled skirts and their button-up shoes.

The Victorian downtown Christmas celebration was perfect except for the two unfinished dresses, and Lucille had even managed to fix that with a couple of old prom dresses from Goodwill, a box of safety pins, and some big scarves.

Emily had to stay at home. “You can’t leave her,” Lucille had said, “even for a minute. She’ll wander off and get lost. And you’ll have to keep Ned, too, because Cindy is a Victorian stroller.”