From his wheelchair on the other side of Haywood, Herman said, “I’m just a plain ol’ everyday electrician, but that sounds like the kind of thing Annie Sue’d love to mess with. You need to talk with her.”

“Yeah? The one who was singing down there? She knows electrical gimmicks?”

“When she was twelve,” I laughed, “she wired her mother’s electric stove so that every time Nadine turned on one of the back burners, the doorbell rang.”

“And remember the time she wired the toilet seat in y’all’s bathroom, Herman?” Haywood chuckled as he related another family legend for the newcomers’ amusement. “It played ‘Remember Me’ every time he lifted the seat so’s to remind him to put it back down when he was finished.”

Val laughed out loud and Arnold nodded. “Sounds like someone we could use, all right.”

For his parents’ sake, the teenager seemed to be making an effort to be friendly today, and he said, “Tell them about the corn maze, Dad.”

“Oh, yeah.” Tally’s husband borrowed a match from Daddy and lit a cigarette. “We thought we could put four or five acres into a really elaborate corn maze.”

“You mean that fancy-colored corn?” asked Robert, who was working on a ham biscuit. “They’s a pretty good market for Indian maize over in Cary and Apex.”

“That’s another possibility,” said Arnold, “but I was talking m-a-z-e, not m-a-i-z-e. I want to grow tall field corn and have paths all through it for people to get lost in. Pumpkins, too. Charge five bucks apiece to go through the maze, two bucks for the haunted house, and maybe sell the pumpkins for a couple of bucks each.”

“How much land you got over there?” Seth asked, interested.

“Eighty-three acres.”

“Woods? Creek?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Well, if you had you a tractor and a flatbed, you could give hayrides, too. Littie kids love them.”

“Yeah, you’re definitely gonna need to buy a tractor, but we could lend you plows and disks to get you started,” Zach said.

When they started talking the merits of one tractor over another and just how much horsepower Arnold would need and where he might find a good used one, I gathered up the plates of those who’d finished eating.

Dwight stood up, too, and said, “Here, let me get that door for you.”

He held the screen door wide, then followed me on down the hallway. As we passed the parlor, I glanced inside. Tally was leaning back against the faded couch cushions and looking a little more herself while April and Ruth made light conversation. A.K. still looked uneasy and Andrew looked dazed, but I had a feeling it was going to work out. It was probably way too late for any true father/daughter relationship, but just connecting ought to help the healing on both sides.

Dwight and I went straight through the house to the back porch to dump the empty plates in the trash barrel and fix a couple for ourselves now that the line had thinned out. We passed Minnie, Isabel, and Zach’s wife Barbara in the hallway, on their way out to the porch with their own plates. Nadine, Doris, and Maidie were at the kitchen table in deep conversation with a couple of carnival women I recognized by sight though not by name.