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him to bite as they drove through the night together. Their own moveable feast.
    Kate tried to keep her voice steady. “Yes, Bessie, you always did.”
    “There now!” Bessie snapped at Miss Emily. “You see what you made me do? Oh, Kate, honey, I’m so sorry.”
    Miss Emily patted her hand, Bessie bent to cradle Kate’s honeybrown head against her soft white apron front, and across the table, Rob helplessly proffered paper napkins, his handkerchief, anything to staunch her tears.
    “No, please,” Kate said. “Don’t apologize, Bessie. It’s okay,” she gulped. “It hurts to think about Jake, talk about him, to know he’s gone forever, but it would hurt even more if we cut him out, pretended he never lived, that there’s nothing left of him.”
    Unconsciously, her hand touched her abdomen and, above her head, Miss Emily’s eyes met Bessie’s in wordless confirmation.
    Suddenly both women were talking at once, urging food on Kate, fussing at Rob for pigging the biscuits, pushing grief aside with talk of the man so mysteriously dead in Kate’s packhouse pit until Kate was able to join in again.
    Discussing Mary Pat’s unemotional reaction to their discovery reminded Kate: “Why is Gordon Tyrrell here with Mary Pat? I thought he intended to stay in Mexico.”
    “Didn’t Lacy tell you?” asked Miss Emily. “Why, he opened Gilead before Christmas.”
    “Lacy doesn’t talk to me any more than he can help,” Kate said dryly. “After all this time, he still considers me a damn yankee. I thought I was making progress, but since Jake died . . .” She shrugged thin shoulders.
    “Stubborn as a mule and touchy as a hornet,” said Bessie, “but you’d think Mary Pat hung the moon the way he treats her.”
    “Then it’s only because she’s blood kin,” Kate said bitterly.
    “I didn’t know the Gilberts and Lacy were related,” said Rob.
    “Just by marriage,” said his mother. Absently, her fingers twined in and out of the chain that held her reading glasses around her neck as she sorted through the generations. “Let’s see now . . . Patricia Gilbert and Jake Honeycutt were first cousins because Franklin Gilbert and Jake’s mother Jane were brother and sister; so Mary Pat and Jake are first cousins once removed, but she’s certainly no kin to Lacy.”
    “That wouldn’t stop him,” said Kate. “You know Lacy—blood kin to Jake’s like blood kin to him.”
    Bessie patted Kate’s shoulder as she poured the younger woman another glass of iced tea. “Never mind, honey, he’ll come round; you wait and see.”
    Kate smiled gratefully and changed the subject to less emotional ground. “I still haven’t heard why Gordon’s back at Gilead. Los Angeles or Mexico or even Vail I could understand, but here? I had the impression that Elaine and Gordon thought this part of the country too dull. Of course, I never knew them very well.”
    “How could you?” Miss Emily asked tartly. “They were like a pair of hummingbirds the way they darted in and out. Here for breakfast and gone by dinner.”
    “Well, he’s settled in to stay now,” said Bessie.
    Like many large black families of the new South, Bessie’s embraced a wide economic spectrum. She was proud of her sons who owned their own small businesses or farms, tending with sophisticated machinery lands which had once required the labor of slaves and sharecroppers; of the granddaughter who taught at Duke; of the nephew who was a chemist out at the Research Triangle. High achievers all and worthy of commendation, but of more personal gratification were the apples that hadn’t rolled very far from the tree: the cousins, nieces and nephews who still hired out as domestics or day labor in the county and who could bring her all the local gossip.
    Bessie may have stayed at home while Miss Emily went out to work, but her grapevine was just as extensive and she spoke with scornful authority when she asked, “Where else he gonna live like a king on