“Lisa thinks he looks like Gary Cooper.”

Peyton’s mother winked at him. “Gary Cooper should be so lucky.” She looked at his father with such a lonely expression that Peyton tried to distract her.

“Tell me about Katydid.”

She attempted a smile but appeared too exhausted to manage it. “That was my nickname when I worked here. Ida called me Katydid one day in the cafeteria and it stuck.”

Peyton couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “You worked with Nurse Drill Sergeant?”

“Sure did.”

“How long were you a nurse?”

“Four or five years, I guess, counting my student nursing.”

“How come I never knew that before?”

She squeezed his hand. “Because that part of my life was over by the time you came along, and a boy has more important things to do than pry into his mama’s sordid past.”

As an image of the library kiss drifted back into his mind, Peyton suddenly had all sorts of questions that had never occurred to him before. “Where’d you meet Daddy?”

She didn’t take her eyes off his father, lying unconscious and still.

“Mama?” He reached over and touched her arm, knowing that he really should tell her what Uncle Julian was up to. But she looked so forlorn right now that he couldn’t bring himself to do it. “Why don’t you tell me the happy part?”

She turned to face him, absently running a finger over the pearls around her neck. “Okay, honey. I’ll tell you the happy part.” They settled back into their chairs as she began. “I met your father when we were teenagers—on the beach in St. Augustine, when he was just beginning his famous bike ride to Key West.”

“You gotta be kidding me!”

She laughed and held up her right hand. “The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.”

“Wait a minute—what were you doing in St. Augustine?”

“You’ve always heard me talk about Aunt Gert, right?”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Well, honey, Aunt Gert raised me from the time I was about nine years old. Daddy died from a heart attack when I was eight. And remember, I was the baby of ten children.”

“I can’t even imagine a house with that many kids.”

She opened her purse, pulled out a couple of lemon drops, and gave one to Peyton. “People in the country had big families back then so all the kids could help work the farm. Still do, I guess. You were just never around mine because my brothers and sisters all scattered. Most of us didn’t grow up together.”

Peyton bit down on the tart candy and squinted at its sour punch. “Was that because your daddy died?”

She crunched on the candy, apparently unfazed by the sharp burst of lemon. “Back then, if the man of the house passed, it could break up a family. Five of my brothers and sisters had already married and left home, but that still left five more for my mother to try and feed—with no education and no assistance from anybody but her older children, who had their own financial struggles. She knew I loved Aunt Gert and asked her to take me in. My two sisters who were still at home went to live with another aunt and uncle who didn’t have any children, and the boys stayed with Mama to help on the farm. By the time you were born, she had died of the flu. The boys sold the farm and moved as far away from it as they could get. I guess they’d had their fill of the mules and the plows.”