Later that night, back home, I took the picture out and placed it on the desk in front of me, reliving the shame I’d felt when Mrs. Haltom ordered me to empty my pockets. I put the picture into a shoebox filled with baseball cards and swore I’d never look at it again.

five

The week before Thanksgiving, my mother announced that Nancy had phoned and invited both of us to the annual “leftovers party” the Haltoms held on the Friday after the holiday.

“That’s nice,” my mother said. “Don’t you think?”

Every time Sunny or my mother picked me up from the Haltoms’ or the Creighs’, I ran out the door, anxious to leave before anyone could see my aunt with her bottle-blond bouffant in her mustard-yellow ’73 Cutlass Supreme or my mother behind the wheel of her old Chevy Cavalier.

“You have to work, right?” I asked.

“I have the night off,” she said.

“But you have plans,” I said. “Don’t you?”

She glanced over at me with a purse-lipped smile.

“If you’re going to spend so much time with these people,” my mother said, “I ought to get to know them a little bit.”

I held my breath as we rolled through the Haltoms’ gate. Cars were parked along the driveway. In front of the house stood two valets in red windbreakers. To my relief, my mother parked her Cavalier behind the last car down the hill and out of the reach of the floodlight mounted atop the garage.

As we approached the house, I led my mother to the kitchen door, where I always entered with Jamie when we arrived after school. But before we reached it, I heard Jim Haltom’s voice.

“Charlie!” he cried, his voice sharp, almost angry.

We rounded the corner to find him standing on the porch, Arch behind him, holding the door open.

“Y’all come on in the front,” he said, a tad out of breath. “Please.”

Later, Arch explained to me why Mr. Haltom had made such a fuss. To people of Mr. Haltom’s generation, Arch said, the kitchen door was for servants.

The party turned out to be a larger gathering than I’d expected. There were at least twenty people milling around in the entrance hall underneath the big chandelier, even more in the drawing room.

“Would you like a drink, Bonnie?” Mr. Haltom said. “There are cocktails and wine. And we’ve just opened some nice champagne.”

“Champagne sounds lovely,” my mother said.

I never quite got used to watching my mother transform herself back into the debutante-in-waiting she’d once been. Then again, I, too, had become adept at dissembling. Perhaps it was an inherited trait.

“Hello, Miss Boykin,” Arch said.