“Andrew married your mother,” I said mildly.

“With my grandpa riding shotgun all the way to South Carolina’s the way I heard it.”

Well, yes, there was that aspect of it, I suppose. I tried to talk to Andrew about Carol and Olivia right after I first came home, but he told me it was none of my business and to shut up about them.

“It wasn’t my baby” was all he’d say.

But Mother had said differently that last summer. “Andrew doesn’t believe the child was his, but I only had to take one look at her, Deborah. Olivia was him all over again. Same eyes, same smile. Your daddy’s tried to find her, but Carol’s never come back again, at least not that we’ve ever heard. Amanda and Rodney Hatcher aren’t the friendliest people you’ll ever meet. He’s Old Testament righteousness and she’s under his thumb with no more backbone than a squashed beetle, so there’s no learning from either of them where Carol and Olivia are.”

The very next day, out of curiosity, I’d driven over to that eastern part of the county. The land’s a little flatter there, more coastal plains than sandhills. The soil’s easy to tend but everything leaches through so quickly that it needs a constant supply of fertilizer and water. I found the Hatcher farm and drove slowly past it two or three times. It was a depressing sight. The crop rows were cleaner than a preacher’s jokes. Not a weed, not a blade of unwanted grass. The outbuildings were modest, but in good repair. The house itself sat in a grove of oak trees a couple of hundred feet back off the road, and if it hadn’t been for the barns that surrounded it, I would have thought it was the sharecropper shack of a tightfisted land owner. The paint was peeling, the tin roof was rusty, a few of the windowpanes had been replaced with cardboard, and there was no indoor plumbing if that outhouse behind the barn was any indication.

A cheerless, loveless place.

The only spot of color was a rusty washtub full of red petunias that bloomed by the front steps, and as I drove past the third time, an old white woman came out and poured water on them from her dishpan.

Everything for the land, nothing for the woman who helped tend it. Probably nothing for the daughter, either. I could understand why Carol had shrugged off the reins and tore loose. It all happened before I was born, but I knew the rough outlines.

Andrew, nine brothers up from me and going through his own wild teen years, had gotten a Widdington girl pregnant.

Or so she claimed.

Andrew swore he wasn’t the only one having sex with her at the time, but her father had literally pointed a shotgun at him and asked him what he meant to do about the situation. There had been a hasty drive to Dillon, South Carolina, where underage kids could get married without a waiting period or blood test, and he’d moved into this shabby old house with her parents, prepared to “do the right thing,” even though he roiled with anger at getting trapped. That’s when he started drinking heavily.