“I don’t know. Right away she shut herself in, reading up on babies, picking names, trying to be the best mother she could after Mr. Jason was born by smothering him with love. She saw the father only once I’m sure about, when Mr. Jason was about to turn six. It was afternoon and I was in the dining room and she was upstairs. The telephone rang. When I picked it up, she said through the extension, ‘That’s all right, Etta, I have it,’ sounding real nervous. I didn’t know who was calling. But a few minutes later she was dressed and hurrying out the door. Two hours later she came back looking tired. She sat down in the kitchen and said, ‘He wants to marry me.’

“She didn’t need to say who. ‘Can you?’ I asked.

“She shook her head. ‘Not now,’ she answered, and for a long time after there was only the birthday presents.”

I rubbed my temple. “I don’t understand.”

Etta blinked as though she had forgotten that, her glance moving from piece to piece of the Cantwells’ hand-me-down tables and chairs. “He made her do that. Just before that same birthday she gave me ten dollars and asked if I’d stop on my way across town to get a toy gun for Mr. Jason, one of those that shot caps. She said she hated them but the father said if he couldn’t have her or a son he’d at least be part of his birthday. She told me it was something that had to be. I wish it hadn’t. Mr. Jason always liked guns too much.”

I shrugged. “It wouldn’t have mattered. Take them away and a kid just makes one with his finger and pretends.”

“Well, it wasn’t always guns,” she allowed. “But every year until his fifteenth birthday, she’d hand me money—his money, she said—and tell me what present he wanted to give.”

“And after that?”

“It just stopped. She never said anything about it.”

“Did she ever say who it was?”

“No,” she said firmly. “She never would have done that.”

I took a deep breath and asked, “But you know it was Mooring, don’t you?”

Etta’s face was cold. She looked down at her skirt, smoothed it, and nodded curtly.

“How?”

Her voice turned scornful. “Because he called once or twice, just before she started going out, even came by once on his way home—to drop something, he said, when I could see he didn’t need to and just wanted to stare at her. He looked awkward, out of place.” Grudgingly she added, “She seemed to like him and I guess I could see why in the state she was in. He was good-looking enough.”

“But that’s not all of it.”