“You dated Janie before she married Jed, didn’t you?”

He set his Pepsi down between us, pushed his gray poplin hat on the back on his head, and fumbled in the pocket of his windbreaker for a cigarette. “So?”

“So was Janie cheating, too? Is that why she and Trish quit being friends?”

Will put the cigarette between his lips and cupped his big hands around a Zippo so old and battered that its square corners were rounded off. It was Mother’s originally, a souvenir she’d brought home from the Seymour Johnson Airfield after World War II.

The lighter is burly and masculine-looking, made of stainless steel and engraved with the insignia of the Army Air Forces Technical Training School where she’d worked. It always looked so incongruous in her lovely smooth hands with those long pink fingernails, yet she was never without it. When she died and her things were divided, there were the usual two- and three-way battles, and some of those battles went all the way to skinned knuckles and bloody noses; but that beat-up Zippo was the only item all the boys fought over-not just her sons but her stepsons, too. Even the ones that didn’t smoke. Yet I was the only one who knew who’d given her the lighter and why she kept it. None of them had ever thought to ask.

Or maybe they had and she just hadn’t answered them.

Like Will wasn’t answering?

I waited till his cigarette was going good. “Was she?”

He narrowed his eyes at me as a mild spring breeze blew the cigarette smoke back in his face. “How come you asking something like that after all these years?”

“Gayle wants me to help her find out why Janie was killed,” I said.

“Should you ought to be doing that while you’re running for judge?” he asked.

Before I could answer, we were interrupted by calls for the auction to resume. He poured the rest of his Pepsi on the ground, crushed the can in his hands, then swung himself back upright on the flatbed and picked up the mike again.

Maybe it was my imagination, but it seemed to take him longer than usual to work back into his patter and get that first laugh. I smiled my way back to my car, shaking hands as I went, but faces and hands were blurred by the sudden memory I had of Will kissing Janie.

For the life of me I couldn’t remember whether it was before she married Jed or after.

Back in Dobbs, I showered, changed clothes, and collected Aunt Zell for a Democratic rally down in Black Creek.

Aunt Zell’s my mother without the wild streak-one of those good people that help hold the world together. They pick up the pieces, clean up the messes, and try to make sure nobody goes to bed hungry. If that makes her sound trivial, try running the world without women like her in it.

All her babies died before they walked, but that doesn’t mean she took me to raise when I moved in on her and Uncle Ash during college. Still, I think I’m a comfort to her. Anyhow, I try to remember to be.

Not a large turnout in Black Creek, but when you’re running for a local office, wherever one or two be gathered in your name, that’s where you go. The Women’s Missionary Union from Harrison Hobart’s church was well represented and gave me a warm welcome. I’d like to think it was because they approved of me personally, but I had a feeling it was because Aunt Zell was with me. She’s been active in the WMU all her adult life, even holding district office. Everybody respects her, and some of that respect rubs off on me, a distinct asset for a single woman in a society that still gets a bit uneasy when a halfway attractive woman doesn’t marry and settle into monogamy by the time she’s twenty-five; thirty if she was ever divorced.

I’m thirty-four and no man’s ring is on my finger at the moment.

On Sunday, Aunt Zell and I visited all three of the churches I’d grown up in. The morning began with Sunday school at Fresh Hope, then a quick fifteen-mile drive to Bethel Baptist for morning preaching by Barry Blackman, an old high school boyfriend long married now and the father of three. For dinner afterwards, Aunt Zell and I had been invited to the Bryant-Avery family reunion there in the neighborhood.

The spring day was gloriously warm and sunny. Azaleas and dogwoods were almost finished, just scattered blossoms here and there; but wisteria still draped soft purple ribbons up and down the tall trunks of longleaf pines, and wild cherries had already made me re-memorize Housman’s “Loveliest of Trees.”

Aunt Zell and I drove through a lush green landscape perfumed with wild crabapples and Carolina jasmine. Pears were fully leafed, but I could still see some of the limb structure of the huge oaks when we turned into the yard at Kate and Rob Bryant’s house.

At least a hundred Bryants and Averys had gathered under the trees behind the old white wooden farmhouse to spread a picnic dinner on one long table made of planks and sawhorses and draped in white sheets.

Rob’s a Raleigh attorney. His brother is Dwight Avery Bryant, head of the detective unit at the Colleton County sheriff’s department, and their mother, Emily Wallace Bryant, is principal at nearby Zach Taylor High School. She’s a catbird: bright orange hair, bossy, talks ninety miles a minute, asks the most astonishingly personal questions, and is a yellow dog Democrat of the first water.

As our nominal hostess, Miss Emily perched her infant step-grandson on her hip-at nine months old, Kate’s son Jake was currently the youngest member of the clan-and welcomed everybody, “especially Bo Poole, who, as y’all know, is running for sheriff again; and Deborah Knott, who’s going to make us a mighty fine judge if all y’all get out and vote as you should on Tuesday. Now neither one of them’s a Bryant or an Avery, but they are Democrats and that makes them kin in my book!”

Barry Blackman asked the blessing, then the younger mothers in their flowery spring dresses moved in on the table to fix plates for. their children.

I love family reunions, even when they’re somebody else’s family. I love listening to the old-timers reminisce about people dead fifty or a hundred years. I love watching flirty teenagers discover a cute third cousin whose voice has changed since the last time they saw him. And I particularly love it when the eight- to ten-year-olds stand in front of the family tree chart and find themselves down on the crowded bottom row, as if all those births and deaths and marriages took place all those long years ago just so the multiple branches could lead inexorably to their own names.

Every family had brought a hamper of favorite food, and every square inch of the communal table was filled with heaping platters: fried chicken and pork chops, chicken pastry, and country ham; hot rolls and biscuits; corn, butterbeans, and tender new garden peas; a dozen different cakes and desserts, including pecan pie and chocolate seven-layer cake. Two wooden tubs sat at the end of the long table. One held sweet iced tea, the other homemade lemonade.

I wanted some of everything.

“Now you’ve got to win,” Dwight Bryant teased when I went back for a helping of fresh strawberry shortcake smothered in heavy cream. “You keep on eating like that and a judge’s loose gray robe’s going to be the only thing’ll fit you.”

“Not that anybody’s counting or anything,” I said, “but didn’t I see four of Aunt Zell’s angel rolls on your plate? They may taste like air, but I’ve watched her make them. A whole pound of butter, my friend.”

“Yeah, but I’ve had help,” he said, smiling at a sandy-haired little kid who grinned back and snitched another roll from Dwight’s plate.

“That’s not Cal, is it?” I asked as the child darted off to watch the horseshoe pitching that had begun down by the barn. “Lord, Dwight! He was barely walking the last time I saw him.”

“Yeah. Every time Jonna lets me have him for the weekend, I notice how he’s grown up just a little bit more.”