Jessie immediately voiced the curiosity the others must be feeling. “Deborah! You’ve met her. What’s she like?”

“Does she have tattoos?” asked Will and Amy’s youngest.

“Didn’t see any,” I said, answering the easiest question first. “She looks like anybody else. Very nice, but very sad right now.”

“Does she look like Ruth or A.K.?” asked Zach’s Emma, who was filling napkin holders from an enormous package.

“Yes,” I said, looking around for Andrew.

Out at the grave site, Duck’s people had set up rows of folding chairs under the tent. The closed casket was already in place with a blanket of red roses covering the polished wood. Duck and several of my brothers, somber in dark suits and white shirts, were down there with more of the children. But no Andrew.

“Which?” said Emma.

“Which what, honey?”

“Which one does she look like?”

“Both of them. Same eyes, only black hair.”

I slipped past before they could bombard me with more questions. Inside the kitchen, Maidie was sugaring a huge vat of hot tea since everybody knows you might as well not bother with sugar at all if you try to add it after the tea is iced. Never tastes the same.

“Stevie? You and Reese can go ahead and set them ice chests out on the porch, too,” she said.

I turned, and there was my nephew back from Chapel Hill in a gray tweed jacket, blue shirt, and tie. As my glance fell on him, he immediately grabbed the ice chest and retreated, which let me know I wasn’t the only one hoping to avoid awkward questions.

Amy and Doris were making coffee in the two big party urns Mother had bought thirty years ago when one of the boys got married here at the homeplace, and Haywood and Isabel arrived with Jane Ann and a box full of plastic cups, plates, forks, and spoons.

Since Haywood immediately demanded more information, I tried to tell them as concisely as I could.

“She’s not Olivia anymore, I guess y’all heard that?”

“Tallahassee,” said Robert’s wife Doris, disapprovingly. “Now you got to say that’s a real peculiar name to call yourself. Like me changing my name to Raleigh or Fuquay-Varina ”

“Actually, wasn’t Varina a woman’s name?” asked Isabel, going off on her own tangent. “Somebody from Civil War days?”

“If you have a problem with that, Doris,” I said, “just call her Tally. That’s what everybody else does.”

“I didn’t say I had a problem with it,” Doris said huffily. “I just said it seemed peculiar. I can say that, can’t I?”

“Doris, honey, you can say anything you want,” said Minnie, who’d stepped inside the kitchen, “but let’s let Deborah tell us what we need to know before they get here, all right?”

Doris thought about flouncing off (Doris does that a lot), but she was too curious, so she subsided and listened as I explained that our niece Tally had been married almost twenty years to someone named Arnold Ames, that they lived in Florida, that they were part owners of the carnival playing the harvest festival, that she owned the old Hatcher place over near Widdington, that she had a second son named Valdosta (Doris frowned at that name), who was about sixteen (the girl cousins perked up their ears), and that they’d probably be accompanied by a lot of their carnival friends.