Maybe she was looking down on Ann just a little bit because the woman held herself above everyone. She’d seen the type before—women who’d married money and cut themselves off from their pasts.

But she took no joy from the insight. Life had humbled Carlotta too many times for her to cast stones. “Where’s your husband?”

“He passed out,” she said.

“And the children?”

“Sleeping in the adjoining room.”

“And you left?”

“I took his bottle of gin. I planned to pour it all out in the sand, but I may have had too much along the way.”

“You were upset when you left earlier.”

Ann looked up with bloodshot eyes. “You saw us?”

“I see everything from the stage.”

“It’s not his fault.” The words tumbled out as if she’d rehearsed them in her mind a thousand times before.

“Of course it is. He raised his hand to you, didn’t he?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t use to be like this. The war changed him.”

“It changed many men, but they don’t beat their wives.” Carlotta stared into the blue-green eyes, recognizing so much of herself.

Ann closed her eyes. “He saw so many terrible things. He has nightmares. He drinks to forget.”

“That is not an excuse, Beth Ann.”

Beth Ann looked up, shocked to hear a name she’d likely not heard since she left western North Carolina. “Don’t call me that.”

Carlotta raised her glass to her lips. “We’ve both done a good job of reinventing ourselves, haven’t we?”

Her shoulders slumped slightly. “It was the only way to get out. You understand that, Carol.”

“We both found a way out. So did Edna. And now here we are. The three of us pretending that we never met each other.”

Beth Ann’s hand trembled slightly as she raised the misty water glass to her lips. She drank carefully, testing her stomach, and then set the glass down on a small side table. “We’ve all done well. Found better than what we would have gotten back home.”

Home was poverty, a family deeply ingrained in the community and wedded to a way of life that should have ended in the last century. Both women had grown up hearing that they were too prone to trouble. Spare the rod. Apples don’t fall far from the tree. Finally, one day Carol and Beth Ann had proved everyone right and run away.

“Why do you vacation here?” Carlotta said.

“Why are you singing here?” Beth Ann challenged.

“To see her.”