Edith was blinking harder. "Someone was blackmailing you with this, weren't they?"

"That's right."

Edith smiled softly, but there was no pleasure in it. Just a kind of acknowledgment of shared experience. "Yes, well, I know about that, too. When they say getting in trouble, they really mean it, don't they? It looks like you get everybody in trouble."

Jodi looked at me, embarrassed, as if she suddenly regretted being here and speaking with this woman and witnessing her pain. Edith said, "You've grown into quite a beautiful woman. I'm very proud of you."

Jodi said, "How did Leon Williams die?"

Edith drew breath and closed her eyes. "My father murdered him."

"Because he was black?"

Edith wet her lips and thought for a moment, and I found myself wishing that I were not present. I had no right to what was happening, and no place in it, and the sense of alienness made me feel large and intrusive, but Jodi still gripped my hand, and seemed to be holding on all the tighter. Edith said, "I think he shot Leon because he couldn't bring himself to shoot me."

Jodi said, "Jesus Christ."

Edith leaned back against the gazebo rail and told Jodi how Jodi came to be. Jodi hadn't asked that Edith tell her these things, but it seemed important to Edith, as if she needed to explain herself to Edith as much as to Jodi. She described an impoverished home dominated by rage and a brutal father who beat wife and children alike. She sketched herself as a shy, fearful girl who loved school, not so much for learning but simply because school allowed brief escape from the numbing despair of her home, and that after school she would buy yet more moments of peace by walking along the levees and the bayous, there to read or write in her journal, there to smell the air and enjoy the feeling of safety that being anyplace other than home allowed her. The Edith Boudreaux she described did not seem in any way like the person in the gazebo, but then, of course, she wasn't. She described a day on the bayou, her feet in the water, when Leon Williams had come upon her, an absolutely beautiful young man with a bright, friendly smile, who asked what she was reading (Little Men, she still remembered) and made her laugh (he asked how tall they were) and who, like Edith, dreamed of better things (he wanted to own an Esso station). When Edith spoke of Leon, her eyes closed and she smiled. She said that they had run into each other again the following week, very much by accident, and that Leon had again made her laugh and how, after that, the meetings were planned and no longer left to chance. As Edith went through it you could see the old emotions play across her face, and after a while it was like she wasn't with us anymore. She was with Leon, sitting in the warm shade, and she told us that it was she who had first kissed him, how she had thought about it for weeks and wanted him to do it but that all he did was talk until she finally realized that he wasn't going to cross that line, her being white and him not, and that she finally said, oh, to hell with it, and she took the bull by the horns, so to speak, and kissed him, and when she said it you knew that she was seeing his face as plain and clear before her as if it were happening now. She said the meetings became more frequent and frenzied and then she missed her period and then another, and she knew she was pregnant, thirteen and white and pregnant by Leon Williams, he of the African-American persuasion (no matter how watered-down that might be). She had been terrified to tell her mother and then she grew even more terrified not to, until finally she had, and then, of course, her parents demanded to know the identity of the father. Edith stopped abruptly, as if she realized that she wasn't Edith Johnson anymore, but was now Edith Boudreaux. She grew very quiet, and her face darkened. She said, "My father wanted me to name the boy. He kept after me for weeks, and I wouldn't tell them, and then one night he was drunk and he was beating me, and my mother was screaming you're going to make her lose that baby, and I didn't want to tell him but I was so scared that I would lose you…" She shook her head and crossed her arms again and began to blink back tears.

I said, "It's okay, Edith. You were a child. You were scared."

She nodded, but she didn't look at us, and the tears came harder. "He went out after Leon and he shot him. Just like that." A whisper.

Jodi said, "My God."

Edith wiped at her eyes, smearing the tears and her mascara and the mucus running from her nose. She gave a weak smile. "I must look like such a fool. I'm sorry."

Jodi said, "No."

Edith was getting control of herself. "Would you come back to my house? I could make coffee. There's so much more I'd like to tell you."

Jodi looked uncomfortable. "I really don't think I can." She looked at me like she wanted me to say something, like maybe we had someplace to go and I should check my watch and get her away from there.

Edith's eyes grew panicky. "You have three sisters, did you know that? I could show you their pictures." Pleading.

Jodi said, "I'm sorry. I have to get back to Los Angeles."

Edith shook her head and her face seemed to close and grow fearful. She said, "I didn't want to tell. I have cursed myself every day for it, but I just wasn't strong enough to save him." She put her face in her hands. "I want you to know that I would have kept you if I could. I want you to know that I've wondered about you, and prayed for you. God forgive me, I wasn't strong enough to save either one of you. Please forgive me for that. Please please please forgive me." Her shoulders heaved and she turned away and put her hands on the rail and wept.

The old man on the bench opened his eyes and sat up and looked at us. He said, "What in hell's going on over there?"

I leaned toward him. "Shut up or I'll kick your ass."

The old man untied the little dog and hurried away. I was blinking fast. Dust in the air. Damn dust is something.

Jodi said, "Edith?"

Edith shook her head.

Jodi said, "Edith, I forgive you."

Edith shook her head again, and her body trembled.

Jodi looked at me, and I said, "Whatever you want."

Jodi pursed her lips and blew a stream of air and stared at the rough board deck of the gazebo. She said, "Edith, I need to know one more thing. Did you love my father?"

Edith answered in a voice so small that we could barely hear her. Maybe we imagined it, hearing only what we wanted to hear. She said, "Oh, God, yes. I loved him so. God, how I loved him."

Jodi went to Edith and put her hands on her shoulders, and said, "Maybe we could stay for a little while, after all."

The two of them stood like that, Edith crying, Jodi patting her shoulder, together in the heat of the day.

CHAPTER 21

W e drove to Edith Boudreaux's house, parked in the drive, then went inside so that she could share her life with her long-lost daughter.

It was a nice house, furnished in Early American and smelling faintly of Pine-Sol. Everything was clean the way a home can be clean only after the children are older and have moved out. A grandfather clock stood in the entry, and a Yamaha piano was against the wall just inside the door. A cluster of family photographs sprouted on top of the Yamaha. Edith and Jodi moved together ahead of me, and there seemed a careful distance between them, each overly polite, each watchful and uncertain. Jodi said, "You have a lovely home."

"Thank you."

"Have you lived here for very long?"

"Oh, yes. Almost fifteen years, now." You see? Like that.

I sat in a wing chair at the end of the couch as they moved around the room examining the artifacts of Edith's life, as if we had stumbled upon a long-sealed chamber beneath the great pyramid. This is my husband, Jo-el. This is when we were married. These are our daughters. Pictures of the three grown daughters were spotted around the living room and hanging on the walls. Red-letter stuff: the graduation, the marriage. That's Sissy, our oldest; she has two boys. That's Joana and Rick, they live in New Orleans. Barb's the baby, she's at LSU. Jodi followed Edith from picture to picture with her hands clasped behind her back, unwilling to touch anything. She didn't seem particularly happy to be there, but maybe it was just me.