I tried for a note of mystified empathy. “Why’d that happen, I wonder.”

Her mouth made a scornful O. “What’s your name?”

“Adam. Adam Shaw.”

“Well, Adam, talk about something else.” She smiled out of some vagrant mood, running both hands along the ruined line of her hips. “I’m out of cigarettes,” she said, a pretty girl again, prettily annoyed at her own foolishness.

I offered her one. She placed it carefully between her lips, bending her head toward mine for a light. When I lit it, her head stayed close. “You’re a nice man, Adam Shaw.”

“You’re an easy woman to be nice to.”

“But not a lady.”

“Of course you are.”

She shook her head. “Not enough of one.”

It was as though we were continuing a conversation she had begun with someone else. I took a chance. “I think I know what the problem was.”

“What?” She clasped my hand. “What was it?”

“Lydia Cantwell.”

Blood splotched her cheeks. “But why?”

“I’m not sure, Joanne.”

“Just the goddamned way she walked? That she could have babies?”

She was almost screeching. I shook my head in feigned bewilderment. “I don’t know. It was Lydia, though, wasn’t it?”

Her cigarette burned forgotten in the hand she waved at her cold, sparkling kitchen. “Hell, it was always her—for the twenty-eight years Dalton’s been with her goddamned company. Poor Dalton, he’s been waiting and waiting all these years, hanging on with me for appearance’s sake until Lydia Cantwell made up her mind.”

“How did you find out?”

“He made it too damned obvious,” she said scornfully. “It was only later he got sophisticated. The second year he was there they put him on one of her charity things. He was so excited: her the biggest stockholder, he said, and him almost an office boy. He started coming home each night full of Mrs. Cantwell this and Mrs. Cantwell that: how pretty she was, how poised. I only half listened; I’d lost the baby and wasn’t all there. All I knew was he was working harder. Then one night at dinner he called her Lydia. I started listening closer. The next night it was Mrs. Cantwell. Then, just like that, he stopped. Never said her name again. That was when I knew.”

“Knew what?”

She smiled bitterly. “Why it was so boring for him to touch me. And why he spent nights listening to those speech records so he could talk better.”

“Was he seeing her back then?”

“I don’t know how you could think about someone so much and not be with them. And he volunteered for every symphony thing she did.”

“Then why did you stay with him?”

“He was the boy I loved,” she said simply. “The smartest boy in Clio, Alabama, and he was mine. We were going to do everything together.” Her hand tightened. “Am I boring to you, Adam?”