was so used to deriding the ritual politesse her mother so cherished, she had to remind herself good manners weren't necessarily insincere.
“Where are we going?” her mother asked for the third time, as they pulled off the interstate.
“We're going home, Momma.”
“As soon as we get there, I want you to march up to your room and change out of those horrible dungarees. You look as if you're reporting for work on a road crew.”
“They're called jeans.”
“I know what they are. And they're not appropriate attire for a young lady.”
“It's the eighties, Momma.”
“I don't want your father to see you in that outfit.”
Faye said nothing. She had decided to wait till they were settled in to address this subject.
But when they arrived home, Sybil wanted to see her roses. She seemed utterly lucid. “What's happened to the clock?” she said as soon as they walked in.
“Jimmy's taken it to be fixed.”
“It hasn't worked in twenty-seven years,” she said. “Why should he fix it right now?”
Her denuded dining room, meanwhile, was concealed behind pocket doors. Faye walked with her up to the master bedroom, which she hadn't entered in years. Everything was more or less as she remembered it from her childhood—the hand-painted wallpaper from Switzerland that offered up a series of fantastical Chinese vistas; the king-size bed with its upholstered headboard, the feather mattress and box spring ordered specially from the same firm that supplied Claridge's, which Hunt claimed had the most comfortable mattresses in the world; the white vanity where her mother had attempted to teach her the rudiments of makeup. On the other side of the room was her father's dressing table, with monogrammed leather stud boxes, a sterling cigarette lighter, an ivory comb, a tortoise-shell cigarette case, a souvenir ashtray from Augusta National, seven golf trophies and a small gallery of framed family photos. The silver was all bright and polished, as it had been during his lifetime. She wondered if the pearl-handled revolver was still in the top drawer.
“It's so nice to have you home,” Sybil said.
“It's nice to be here.”
“Have you been making friends at school?”
“More friends than I know what to do with.”
“You can never have too many friends, Faye.”
“Why don't you rest, Momma. I'll call you for dinner.”
Sybil reached out and took her hand.
“I know your brother wants to put me in a home,” she said.
To Faye, it seemed remarkable that her mother could have returned so rapidly to the present. “Don't worry. Nobody's going to put you in a home as long as I'm here.”
“You know the Yankees, when they invaded, put your great-great-grandmother Eliza out of her home.”
“I know, Momma.”
“For five years she and your great-great-granddaddy Isaac had to live over a dry-goods store on Broadway while the Yankee officers slept in her bed and spit tobacco juice on her rugs. She died of a broken heart in those rooms over the dry-goods store.”
No matter how many times Faye had heard this story, she'd never been certain what a dry-goods store was, or its significance in the story. Would it have been worse if it had been, say, a hardware store?
Sybil didn't mention her husband again until the following evening when Martha called her to dinner in the breakfast room.
“We can't sit down till Hunt comes home,” she said. She was perched in her favorite armchair in the sunroom, looking out across the lawn, beyond which the orange Mediterranean roof tiles of a gated community called Tuscan Acres rose over the privet hedge.
Faye sat down across from her and took her hand, which was almost translucent, and freckled with age spots in spite of the white gloves she wore so often. “Daddy's not with us anymore, Momma. He passed away three years ago.”
It was as if this was the first time she'd heard the news; tears welled in her eyes and her face contorted with grief.
Faye squeezed her hand as hard as she dared. “Don't you remember, Momma?”
She shook her head, the tears now rolling down her cheeks.
Faye had not been present when her mother learned of her husband's death, and she was witnessing now what she'd missed then. Her grief seemed utterly fresh and unbounded. She appeared to be almost literally melting, slumping lower and lower as the tears poured down her face, a woman devastated by loss. It was almost unbearable to watch.
“What will I do without him?” she finally managed to say.
“You've been doing without him for a while now, Momma.”
This scene repeated itself twice more over the course