She lifted her head gracefully. I would have been so grateful for an ungainly jerk. “She handled him like a potato.”

“You mean Jean?” I asked.

Carlotta nodded. “She has no reverence.”

Sam worried the air with a spoon and furrowed his brows. “She has a different philosophy of life.”

Carlotta cast her gaze away from him and out the window. She frowned, breathed deeply. “I know her type. She thinks all a kid needs is a clean neck, hamburgers, and a warm lap to sit in for ten minutes each day. She doesn’t recognize a soul.”

“A soul! Ah!” Sam flourished the spoon again. The handle was stained dark with tea. “Do you think a child is born with a full-fledged soul? Or does it develop, like a personality? Is it affected by environment?”

He was smiling, but Carlotta’s eyes slid over him in disgust. She pulled the shawl tight across her shoulders and shifted the little bundle slightly. “I’m going to walk under the trees with him.”

“Don’t you want some tea?”

The way she glided out the door into the sunlight seemed calculated to perfectly display the depth of gray in the shawl and the blue of her dress. The light leapt off her body as she disappeared.

Sam gave up on the tea. We couldn’t talk. He went in and put on a record. I sat on the kitchen steps to wait for Rennel. He was a long time. He was smug when he returned. Said he’d had a picnic in the backyard with my nieces and nephews. On the way back to town I asked him why we were all nincompoops, but he didn’t know what I was talking about. He asked me why I didn’t smell like my sister-in-law.