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humiliated them as well.
    All of it meant little to Vivienne. She was three when her father died and four when her mother, who’d moved to Port Aransas with the mudlogger, died too. Turned out all that time she’d been quietly dying of ovarian cancer. “Quiet” was Barbara Grimble’s word. The older she grew, the less Vivienne believed that the dying had felt quiet to her mother. On days when she had painful cramps, she thought of her mother. Could she have saved her somehow? Deep inside her, streaming beneath everything, was a second life, the one she might have lived had her mother survived.
    There was no custody battle, no need for divorce proceedings, so the divinations of what would have been, the various evils May would have committed against God and Katherine, became speculative myth. Despite the passage of twenty-seven years, it was a subject Katherine and her friends at Gracedale Catholic Church returned to often, and every once in a while Vivienne heard her mother mentioned in passing remarks, usually jokes about the mudlogger himself, a silent figure in the whole tragedy, who’d gotten himself killed in a fire offshore.
    That her parents’ legacy was this immense unresolved drama full of dead people made Vivienne feel that her life should be the resolution, so that by conceiving her their union hadn’t been such a waste. They’d loved each other enough at one point to marry and make a life—her own life—so she couldn’t only be the product of loss and collapse. The resolution would be a happy, comfortable married life for herself, with years of love to counteract all the fighting. Vivienne deliberately hadn’t mentioned this part of the fantasy to Preston.
    Katherine, always determined to convince Vivienne she was unworthy of love, continued to be an obstacle on this point. She kept a slow drip of hurt over Vivienne’s head, so slow Vivienne sometimes didn’t feel it or, if she did, generously wondered whether Katherine even knew what she was doing. It was part of their private dialogue. Vivienne learned from Katherine that her happiness depended on extricating from her personality any remnants of her mother, that career was secondary to the more important task of getting married—but only after college, and to a reputable man—and that ambitious women were to be avoided: They were usually lesbians. In sinister tones, she reminded Vivienne of what she was set to inherit if things turned out well and what she was set to lose if they didn’t, and in the next sentence she’d toss her hands up convivially and exclaim that she just didn’t know what else to say . Her favorite platitude was that God was like a river—go with his flow and all would be well and right; wrestle against him and drown. Barbara Grimble was probably rolling over in her grave at the injustice this metaphor did to all good Christians everywhere, coming as it did from Katherine Cally’s lips, and pretending as it did that faith should be easy. It was Barbara’s idea that Vivienne carry a baby picture of herself in the plastic window of her wallet, to remind herself she was lovable. Vivienne laughed off the idea but slid one in front of her driver’s license anyway. In the picture she is a toddler, blond as the sun, standing in the muddy Galveston sand in a red toddler bikini, probably a stone’s throw from the fatal seawall.
    Despite all the reasons she held dear for why she was insufficient, Vivienne was certain of her beauty. Like her insecurities, she held her looks close to her heart and guarded them intensely. To her mind, they were the way out from Katherine and the way into a protected life. If she married well enough, she wouldn’t need to worry about the inheritance, she wouldn’t need Katherine. It seemed to her that Katherine’s threats might be empty. Maybe there weren’t so many millions anyway—the company was sold