A silver teddy bear?

I could almost hear Mother’s voice. “Just like yours, Deborah. You were only three, though. That’s probably why you don’t remember.”

“Olivia?”

Her smile was half-defiant. “Or should I call you Aunt Deborah?”

I couldn’t believe it. But here were those blue, blue eyes that I had noticed that first day in court.

Cornflower blue.

Knott blue. Like every one of my daddy’s children.

Like all his grandchildren, too, it would seem. And on some visceral, subliminal level, my subconscious had picked up on Tally’s eyes—on Braz’s as well—and sent me a dream of blue quarters.

“I had just turned five,” Tally was saying. “You weren’t quite three. My mom had dumped me on my Hatcher grandparents that summer, and you and your mom came out to the farm. She gave me a bag of chocolate candy and a silver charm bracelet just like yours. I forget what all was on mine besides the teddy bear. It came loose and I kept it in a little box by itself or it’d be gone now, too.”

“She told me about that visit right before she died,” I said. “What happened to the rest of the bracelet?”

She gave a rueful shrug. “Who knows? Mom probably hocked it to buy another bottle of gin, okay?”

“She was an alcoholic?”

“Oh for God’s sake, Deborah. You think our mothers were anything alike? That I ran away from her because I hated algebra or was having a bad hair day?”

“How old were you when you ran?”

“Fourteen.”

“I was eighteen.”

“You ran away? With all that you had? Why?”

It was my turn to shrug. “Bad hair day?”

She gave a small, disbelieving snort. “How long did you stay gone?”

“A few years. Long enough to learn that bad hair’s not the end of the world.”

“Get pregnant?”

“No, I managed to sidestep that.”

“Must’ve been the difference between fifteen and eighteen,” she said. “Or maybe you weren’t looking for love in all the wrong places.”

“Oh, I did a little of that, too.”

When Mother died, everything else seemed to fishtail out of my control as well. I fought with Daddy and most of my brothers, left college at the end of my first semester, ran off with a redneck car jockey, damn near stabbed him through his sorry heart, and didn’t come home again for several years till I finally got my act together. But hard as it might have been in patches, it was hardship of my own choosing and probably an eiderdown featherbed compared to the life led by Tallahassee Ames, aka Olivia Knott.

“Was Braz’s dad with the carnival?”

“He was a roughie even greener than me. It was my second summer of washing dishes and working one of the grab joints and I knew how hard carnies work, okay? He thought it was going to be blue skies and cutting up jackpots. He made two jumps with us, then he was out of there. But not before I’d played possum belly queen for him. I never even knew his last name, and he was gone before I missed my first period. Sounds like my own daddy, doesn’t it?”