After a while, the hubbub died down.

And then Michael seemed to withdraw. He had his mother’s place down at the end of Coopers Road, and he stayed there most of the time. Everyone thought he would get a job, but he didn’t. Not for a long time. He seemed to want nothing but his own company. It stayed that way for four or five years, and then he started work at the machine plant west of Picayune. And then a while later, he met Nancy, really met her, and that was when it all changed.

Me and Nancy were already friends with the Wades by that time. It was 1950, if I remember rightly. Matthias was seventeen, Catherine was fifteen, Eugene was twelve, and Della was seven. I remember their mom as well. Her name was Lillian, and she was the most beautiful woman in America, perhaps the world. Seemed to me that some people had been personally blessed by God. Here she was, as beautiful as any magazine picture I had ever seen, and she was married to one of the richest and most powerful men in America, and she had four children, all of them kind and sweet and funny and smart.

I mean, Matthias was the eldest, but despite his age, despite his family, he never played boss. He never played that card. It was as if he had set himself to doing all he could to make us happy.

It was—at least to me—a magical time.

We played pinochle for nickels and dimes, and we played it with serious faces, like we were betting on the outcome of a capital trial or a gunfight.

I would make wisecracks, and Michael would do a John Wayne voice and say, “Well, missy, that’s an awful big mouth for such a little girl.”

Other times, Matthias was so darn serious, quoting lines of poetry that he’d learned in order to impress us, to impress Nancy most of all, considering himself some type of philosophical outlaw, a Frenchman perhaps, a European of indistinct origin. A sudden teenage growth spurt had stretched him unexpectedly. He seemed to forever be apologizing for his height, not with words, but with awkwardness and hesitancy, as if he imagined himself clumsy and awkward when he was in fact not. His body language was a collection of confusing signs, as if physical movement was something new to him, and he was still furiously working to get a grip on what was going on. Forever agitated, all elbows and knees and mumbled apologies. There was little he could not break or spill or damage. I imagined there would be an abundance of glue in his house, and someone—patient as a fisherman—was forever following in his wake with a sharp eye and a steady hand for delicate repair work. Matthias carried this awkwardness through his childhood and into his teens, carried it well it seemed, for awkwardness appeared to be the only thing about him still undamaged. People tried to avoid him, but could not. They gravitated toward him, magnetized into some strange, intractable orbit, perhaps no greater motivation than the simple curiosity of seeing what he could now bring to ruination by personality and presence alone.

I saw something else in him. In his eyes were a thousand secrets and always that tight-lipped tension that suggested some desperate unfulfilled urge to tell the truth and be damned. He wanted Nancy to love him as desperately as he loved her, and yet he knew she never would. His compassion was in his silence, in the strength it took not to tell. That’s how I knew he was a good person. It would have been cruel to tell the truth, and so he did not.

But more than anything, Matthias’s mind was full of magic, too, and he shared it equally.

Until Michael became one of us, and then everything changed a hundred times and then a hundred times more.

It was so right, but it was so wrong.

How do I know that?

Because of what happened, that’s how.

But in that moment, standing there near the turn in the road, we knew nothing but excitement for the day ahead.

I remember what Nancy said as we started walking.

“I hope the summer lasts forever . . .”

That’s what she said.

She was smiling, her eyes so bright and clear, and she asked me if I had to choose just one, would I fall in love with Matthias or Eugene.

I was not like Nancy. I couldn’t talk about such things without feeling embarrassed.

“Oh, come on,” she said. “I reckon you think about Eugene just as much as he thinks about you.”

“Nancy, stop it! Really, I mean it. Stop teasing me.” I felt my cheeks flush with color.

“Or maybe you want me to think that you love Eugene, when really you love Matthias.”

“I don’t love either of them, okay? Really. Now stop it.”

She touched my arm. “I’m just playing, Maryanne. You know I am.”

“Well, I don’t like it,” I said, but I lied. I did like it. I wanted to think about Eugene. I wanted to think about Matthias. Sometimes I made believe I was a princess and they were gallant knights, and one day they would fight a duel over me and I would marry the victor. At the same time, I knew it was just a silly dream and that neither of them loved me the way that Nancy loved Michael.

“So come on . . . let’s hurry. Michael is going to meet us on Five Mile Road,” Nancy said, and she grabbed my hand.

“Is everyone going to be there?” I asked. “Della and Catherine too?”

“Catherine will come only if her dad says she has to, and Della is going to be with us all summer.”

“Catherine can be so bossy sometimes.”

Nancy stopped dead in her tracks. “Last week, you know what she said to Matthias?”

“What?”

“She said that I was childish.”

“She did not.”

“She absolutely did,” Nancy said. “She said I was childish and immature.”

“I think she’s jealous.”

“Of what?”

“Of how pretty you are and that Michael loves you and doesn’t love her.”

“Oh, don’t be silly, Maryanne.”

“I’m serious, Nancy. I think she’s jealous.”

“Well, if she is, then she deserves to go crazy with jealousy and end up in a madhouse.”

“Nancy, you can’t say that! That’s an awful thing to say about someone.”

“I don’t care, Maryanne. I am not childish and immature.”

“Of course you’re not, Nancy. But you can’t go wishing bad things on people. You know what my ma says about that.”

Nancy twirled again. “Let’s not talk about Catherine. Let’s talk about something else.”

And then we did—about Michael, as always, about Matthias and Eugene, about how Della was going to be beautiful like her mother, about what records Matthias would bring and whether he would have ham in the picnic basket or maybe cheese from Switzerland and fresh bread and lemonade.

Nancy was always ahead of me, running a few steps, turning around, walking backward as we talked. One time she stumbled, nearly fell, and for some reason we couldn’t stop laughing.

And then Michael appeared in the distance, and he raised his hand, and from that moment until we reached him, it was as if I were no longer there.

I became a ghost perhaps, which now—looking back—seems both ironic and prophetic.

Perhaps we all haunted the edges of Nancy’s universe that summer. Perhaps Michael and Nancy were stars, and we were merely satellites in orbit.

She was there, and then she was gone. And though the memory of her face would fade, the memory of that day in August would haunt me for the rest of my life.

12

Gaines’s first order of business on Thursday morning was to go see Lester Cobb.

Lester looked like the kind of feller who’d eat his dinner straight off of the floor. He transmitted a dense wave of stupidity, as if all who were drawn into it would find themselves making foolish utterances and inadvertent quips. Surely this could not have been the truth, but such was the profundity and abundance of Lester’s ignorance that it seemed such a way. He perpetually wore a suspicious expression, as if wary of being gypped or deceived. He ran the pet store in Whytesburg, a pet store that seemed to be closed more than open, and certainly more trouble than it was worth. Gaines would get a report and send Hagen or one of the uniforms down there. Some howling and caterwauling beast was forever in back disturbing neighbors and passersby, and Lester Cobb would be dragged from his home to feed the thing or let it loose. Gaines had had words with him on three or four occasions, said he would get the Animal Welfare people in to close him down, and Cobb would stand there, his tics and twitches in full force, a nervous habit that saw him constantly finger-tipping imaginary lint from the cuffs of his jacket, and say, “Yes, sir, Sheriff Gaines. Yes, sir, indeedy.” And that would be that. Cobb would feed his animals and lie low for a month or two. Gaines would see him in town, off down the street wearing that unique and extraordinary expression, as if ever alert for underhanded overtures and con tricks from strangers.