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