“There’s a whole assortment of movies in that cabinet. Take your choice,” Lily told him. “I’m going to make a pitcher of sweet tea. Y’all want some?”

“Nope.” Holly flipped back and forth between the three channels on the television, finally settling on a rerun of Friends.

“I’ll take a glass,” Braden said.

It got him a hateful look from his sister, but he just shot one right back at her. “You ain’t the boss of me. If I want tea, I’ll drink it,” he said. “Why couldn’t we bring our televisions from home? Holly always hogs the remote.”

“We’re going to be a family from now on, not three people who live in the same house,” she answered. “We’re going to share everything.”

“Hello, house.” Mack’s big deep voice echoed as he came in through the back door. “I brought two friends with me.”

Lily got misty-eyed again when she saw Polly Dillard coming in ahead of Mack. Polly had been Vera’s lifelong friend. She had more gray streaks in her dark hair and a few more wrinkles than the last time Lily had seen her. Polly set a chocolate sheet cake on the cabinet and opened up her arms. Lily walked right into them. Hugging her was so much like hugging her mother that Lily had to fight back tears.

Mack carried in a covered dish and a bag of chips and placed them beside the cake.

“Thanks so much, Mack, for helping me get this stuff into the house.” Polly stepped away from Lily and said, “Girl, I could just take a switch to you for not coming home more often. I’ve missed you. I made seven-layer dip and your favorite cake.” She pointed at the cabinet. “You look more like Vera every day, except for that blonde hair, but then your grandmother had lovely blonde hair. Still don’t seem right that Vera is gone. Or that she left me behind. We made a pact when we were twenty-one and got drunk off our asses that we would do everything together. We even got married the same summer, and we were supposed to die on the same day. I guess she went on so she could get the place ready for me. Lord knows I’ll need all the help I can get.”

Polly always did use a hundred words where five would do the trick, but Lily was so glad to see her that she didn’t mind the way she went on, especially about Lily’s mother. It was comforting to hear the same things that she’d been told more than once.

Lily couldn’t imagine her straitlaced mother drunk. She had only drunk an occasional glass of wine, and that was at a wedding or a New Year’s party.