We must have seemed so ungrateful. But what could we do? Sunny couldn’t possibly have thought my mother would be better off staying at Café Divorcée with nothing to show for it but gray roots and a gin blossom.

We walked out to the parking lot. Scott had already started back toward Belle Meade. My mother and I climbed into the Cavalier and followed him.

seven

Ours was not an especially unusual arrangement. In recent years, the wealthier Yeatman families had taken to sponsoring financial aid boys and rehabilitating their families’ circumstances. De’Ante Gillette, a football star who ended up going to Furman on a full athletic scholarship, had lived with Graham Burke’s family since the eighth grade. After De’Ante started at Yeatman, his mother transitioned from selling Avon to managing the cosmetics department at one of Graham’s father’s department stores. Jarrett Hutcherson had his own bedroom at Haynes Reynolds’s house and stayed there at least three nights a week.

When I pointed out that most of these boys were ringers who’d dramatically improved the fortunes of the football team, Arch assured me that countless lavish acts of generosity were dispensed without anyone ever noticing, simply because the beneficiaries were not minorities or star athletes. Sometimes, he said, they were even from the same zip code as the Haltoms and the Creighs.

“You have no idea how many people driving around Belle Meade in new Beemers don’t have two nickels to rub together,” Arch said.

So I was afforded the illusion that my good fortune resulted solely from beneficence.

In her new position, my mother’s main tasks were running errands, managing Mrs. Haltom’s appointments and checkbook, making phone calls, and writing thank-you notes, letters of invitation, and the occasional bit of personal correspondence. My mother had lovely handwriting. She wrote perfect cursive on evenly spaced lines so precise that they would have seemed machinelike if not for their softness and femininity. I could practice for a thousand hours and still be incapable of producing a single line of cursive like my mother’s.

“If only you knew calligraphy,” Mrs. Haltom sighed.

Among my mother’s new amenities was the use of the Haltoms’ Jaguar. Sometimes I rode along. It was easy to see why they’d named the car after a cat—the engine positively purred.

One afternoon, we were driving home on Highway 100, a long stretch of road running parallel to the Harpeth River.

“Watch this,” my mother said.