She put her foot down on his asking any questions, getting up on the table, or leaving, now that he’d come. Under his cap bill, Ran MacLain set his gaze—he was twenty-three, his seasoned gaze—on Loch and Easter on the table. He could not be prevented from considering them all. He moved under the tree. He held his gun under his arm. He let two dogs run loose, and almost imperceptibly, he chewed gum. Only Miss Moody did not move away from him.

And pressing closer to the table, Nina almost walked into Easter’s arm flung out over the edge. The arm was turned at the elbow so that the hand opened upward. It held there the same as it had held when the night came in and stood in the tent, when it had come to Easter and not to Nina. It was the one hand, and it seemed the one moment.

“Don’t touch her.”

Nina fainted. She woke up to the cut-onion odor of Elberta’s under-arm. She was up on the table with Easter, foot to head. There was so much she loved at home, but there was only time to remember the front yard. The silver, sweet-smelling paths strewed themselves behind the lawn mower, the four-o’clocks blazed. Then Elberta raised her up, she got down from the table, and was back with the others.

“Keep away. Keep away, I told you you better keep away. Leave me alone,” Loch Morrison was saying with short breaths. “I dove for her, didn’t I?”

They hated him, Nina most of all. Almost, they hated Easter.

They looked at Easter’s mouth and at the eyes where they were contemplating without sense the back side of the light Though she had bullied and repulsed them earlier, they began to speculate in another kind of allurement: was there danger that Easter, turned in on herself, might call out to them after all, from the other, worse, side of it? Her secret voice, if soundless then possibly visible, might work out of her terrible mouth like a vine, preening and sprung with flowers. Or a snake would come out.

The Boy Scout crushed in her body and blood came out of her mouth. For them all, it was like being spoken to.

“Nina, you! Come stand right here in my skirt,” Miss Lizzie called. Nina went and stood under the big bosom that started down, at the neck of her dress, like a big cloven white hide.

Jinny Love was catching her mother’s eye. Of course she had stolen brief rests, but now her white arms lifted the white towel and whipped it bravely. She looked at them until she caught their eye—as if in the end the party was for her.

Marvin had gone back to the car and brought two more melons, which he stood holding.

“Marvin. We aren’t ready for our watermelon. I told you.”

“Oh, Ran. How could you? Oh, Ran.”

That was Miss Moody in still a third manifestation.