At the dinner table, Mrs. White’s face was turned always toward her son. She passed plates of rice and meat to him, watching his mouth as he spoke, enthralled by the motion of his lips, in a dream of welcoming. The sisters talked about their work, the hospital, their neighbors, breaking into giggles when they looked at their brother. “You all grew up so,” he said, and they giggled at that too. They stared furtively at Annie; she tried to say something; they nodded in agreement before she’d finished, hurrying her words out of existence.

Would she stay on for the night? Mrs. White asked.

No, no, she had to push on, she said. Mrs. White began to thank her. There was an almost extravagant emphasis on Annie’s bountifulness which she experienced as some unconscious irony on the old woman’s part, a kind of pushing her away, back into her own place.

White walked out to the car with her, telling her how to get out of Houston.

“You going to drive all night now?”

“You let me sleep most of today. I think I can make it.”

“New York,” he said.

“New York,” she echoed. “Then, I’m going to Europe.”

“Everybody’s moving on now. Except me. I’ve been moving on for years, all my life it seems.”

She opened the door. A paper bag in which she’d brought him sandwiches lay on the floor near the brake pedal.

“Let me get that,” he said, leaning forward to pluck out the bag.

“We marched through Texas,” he said.

They shook hands. She waited a moment to watch Mason White run back up to the porch where his mother and sisters waited, their arms entwined, their brown faces so still against the gray shingle, like a photograph pasted in an album.

She drove most of that night, singing or talking to herself, until the morning sun’s first rays struck her across the eyes, and she pulled over to the side of the road and slept till midday. Later, at twilight, she just missed a dead cow, its head rising stiffly from the ditch along the highway, and an hour later, she followed a drunken driver in an old Ford, careening from one side of the road to the other, passing him at last in a desperate burst of speed. That night, utterly spent, she paid two dollars for a bed in a log cabin, too tired to care about the stained mattress ticking, the brutal bed springs, the dripping of a tap in a stained basin hanging from the wall.

She was wearing the sweater Theda had given her, and a raincoat on top of that, on the February morning she drove up the Pulaski skyway and saw, in the distance, the towers of New York City.

Chapter 19