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shaking Caro, shaking her daughter’s shoulders hard, her clenched fingers digging wet ridges into her daughter’s silk blazer, when Shelby pulled her off; but Diane, as if watching from a distance, kept on yelling, “You shut up! Stop it! Raymond’s dead? Raymond ’s dead?”
    “Mama, it’s true, Mama! They were in a car accident!”
    “I don’t believe you!”
    “It’s true, Mama.”
    “What do you mean?” Caroline had never had the sense God gave an angleworm.
    “Diane, honey,” Shelby said. “Come on. We’ll phone. Someone get Mrs. Nye a drink, please.”
    The instructor had scurried over with a paper cup full of water, which Shelby regarded with disdain. “I mean, get Mrs. Nye a drink, please. A drink.”
    Diane was sitting there, holding a glass of red wine, staring down at those ridiculous rubber duck feet, while someone took off on a golf cart to get Big Ray, when Caro said in a baby voice, “Mama, my brother loved Georgia so. At least they’re together.” And Diane, who did not care at that moment whether God forgave her, said, “Caroline. They never should have been together in the first place. If Georgia hadn’t talked my boy into moving to that frozen hellhole, he’d be here with us now. He’d be . . . warm and safe, and where he belonged . . . he’d have had the life he was supposed to have. All this”—Diane gestured, the wine sloshing over the rim of the glass, red splashes staining the concrete of the pool deck—“was his life. My baby.
    They took it all away.”

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C H A P T E R three
    It was a produce counter, but instead of lettuce and apples there were pills, all shapes, sizes, and smells, her child’s garden of pharma-cology.
    Lorraine knelt on the floor in Georgia’s bedroom, her elbows on the card table they’d set up to display all the translucent orange bottles with their childproof white chef’s-hat tops. There were shy pink pills to suppress Georgia’s normal, young-woman’s hormone functions. Businesslike-scored white tablets—Lorraine thought of them as little nurses—to soothe the nausea. Pale blue footballs for anxiety. And then the big pills, the gulls and eagles that sent the neurological system soaring, capsules with serious beads of shiny amber and red. Those for sleep were lawyerly mauve and blue, sleek and seductive as miniature guns. Those for mood were more cheerful and squat, dental hygienists in kelly green.
    Lorraine sighed.
    Even the big-gun pills didn’t deliver her anymore. Her liver must have the density of a submarine. In college, Lorraine had inhaled enough dope to stagger a hippo and then unnerved her friends by asking, “Now what?” She had wanted to get noddy and giggly, but nothing ever pushed her over the edge.
    And yet, not long after Georgia’s first surgery, Lorraine had begun hopefully abusing her daughter’s medications, just a little. It had been 29

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    almost a reflex, a logical if asinine response to an emotional pain so fierce it seemed to cry out for medical intervention—two Percocet for you, sweetie, and one for me.
    The pills had indeed been kindly. After no more than fifteen minutes came a heady wave, leaving Lorraine floating on what felt, unex-amined, like well-being. Soon, she was doing it twice a day. The hos-pice nurses and the University of Minnesota doctors, bless their hearts, threw drugs at Georgia. They didn’t pay any attention to numbers and dosage this far down into the valley. It was a free-for-all, a Mardi Gras of pills. And yet, after a few months, the pills no longer lifted Lorraine up onto the lap of the awaited surge. But she still used them. They had the power to move truths into the next room.
    On the morning after Georgia died, Lorraine had solemnly assured one of the nurses (one who happened to have once been a student of Lorraine’s, and would never have suspected kindly, grammatical