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a whole lifetime doing things the way other folks thought they should. I tried to teach that to Sophie, too, whenever I had the chance. But I don’t know that she ever really learned it. Like I say, her mama kept her real close. And she raised Sophie to be a lady, too—so in that case, it certainly did matter what other people thought.

Chapter Six
     
    About the same time that Mr. Oto first saw the great crane in Miss Anne’s garden, Sophie passed the last bungalow at the end of the street and walked beyond, following a curving, unpaved road that meandered off through the palmettos and Australian pines. Still walking somewhat dreamily—as Mr. Oto would have described it—she finally came to a grove of live oak trees near the salt marsh, where she kept a canvas sling chair for just such mornings as that—a morning made for reading and thinking and listening to the scurrying of nameless creatures in the undergrowth. And for gazing across the sawgrass to the great, open dome of sky that she always believed was directly above where the river emptied into the ocean.
    Here, she could always find a certain quietness of soul, something to restore her so that she could tend the crab traps and plant the new azaleas and figure out how she could stand to read A Farewell to Arms . Especially that part in the story where the lovers are parted by such a tragic death.
    Sophie avoided tragic love stories of any kind, and in particular, one such as this—that was also about war. And after all, wasn’t war the very subject everyone was trying to avoid? What with everything going on in Europe? She had tried to object—politely, of course—when Miss Ruth suggested that novel as the next work to read and be discussed by the book discussion group, but Miss Ruth had insisted they read it. It wasn’t lost on Sophie how her eyes glittered when she argued for the book. Titillation, of course—that’s what the old lady was after. Titillation over death. And war. And tragic love.
    Sophie had never liked Miss Ruth, but of course, she had always been polite to her. Sophie’s mama had insisted on that.
    “You be polite to her, Sophie. She’s your elder and, I might add, a very well-respected lady in this town. I won’t have her saying that I haven’t raised you right.”
    “Yes, ma’am,” Sophie always answered, but privately, she thought that maybe Miss Ruth wasn’t as well respected as her mama thought—that maybe everyone really felt about her as Sophie did, that she was an insufferable busybody who snooped around all the time, trying to cause trouble.
    Even when Sophie was a child, she felt that way about Miss Ruth—and with good reason. How well she could remember one particular day when she was only six or seven years old, and Miss Ruth came to see her mama, and they spoke in low whispers in the parlor before her mama called her into the room.
    “Sophie, have you been playing with those colored children down by the bridge again? And after I told you not to go down there?”
    Sophie had felt her face beginning to burn, and she glanced at Miss Ruth, who was sitting very straight and rigid—just like a skinny, old-lady judge or something—and with her eyes glittering in delight to see Sophie pinned and squirming under her scrutiny and that of her mother.
    “Yes’m,” Sophie muttered, somehow seeing the dark, smiling faces of the children she loved playing with, children of a woman who ran a small crab-house restaurant all alone in her little house near the bridge over Alligator Creek. The long, lovely afternoons of swinging in an old tire that hung from the limb of an oleander tree, and the laughing and the running, the tantalizing aromas of deep-fried fish and hush puppies that came from the kitchen of the little house.
    And especially, Sally—her best friend. Sally with the serious face and wearing the red rag wrapped around and around her head that her mama made her wear. Her friend Sally. Queen of the backyard, wearing