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her sunglasses, the ones with the little rhinestones circling the lenses, and handed them to him. “Tucker’s in trouble. Or Edda Lou’s claiming he got
her
in trouble. But we’ll see about that.”
    “Christ almighty.” For a brief moment his own problems faded away. “Tuck got Edda Lou knocked up?”
    Josie opened the passenger door of her car so Dwayne could pour himself in. “She made a big scene over at the Chat ’N Chew, so everybody in town’s going to be watching to see if her belly bloats.”
    “Christ almighty.”
    “I’ll say this.” Josie started the car, and was sympathetic enough to flick off the radio. “Whether she’s knocked up or not, he’d better think twice before moving that whiny slut into the house.”
    Dwayne would have agreed wholeheartedly, but he was too busy holding his head.
    Tucker knew better than to go back to the house. Della would be on him in a New York minute. Heneeded some time alone, and once he drove through Sweetwater’s gates, he wouldn’t get any.
    On impulse he swerved to the side of the road, leaving a streak of rubber on the sweaty macadam. With home still the best part of a mile away, he left his car on the grassy verge and walked into the trees.
    The paralyzing heat lessened by a few stingy degrees once he was under the shelter of green leaves and dripping moss. Still, he wasn’t looking to cool his skin, but his mind.
    For one moment back at the diner, for one hot, hazy-red moment, he’d wanted to grab Edda Lou by the throat and squeeze every last accusing breath out of her.
    He didn’t care for the impulse, or for the fact that he’d taken an instant’s sheer pleasure from the image. Half of what she’d said had been lies. But that meant half of what she’d said had been the truth.
    He shoved a low-hanging branch aside, ducked, and made his way through the heavy summer growth to the water. A heron, startled at the intrusion, folded up her long, graceful legs and glided off deeper into the bayou. Tucker kept an eye out for snakes as he settled down on
    Taking his time, he pulled out a cigarette, pinched a miserly bit from the tip, then lighted it.
    He’d always liked the water—not so much the pound and thrust of the ocean, but the still darkness of shady ponds, the murmur of streams, the steady pulse of the river. Even as a boy he’d been drawn to it, using the excuse of fishing to sit and think, or sit and doze, listening to the plop of frogs and the monotonous drone of cicadas.
    He’d had only childish problems to face then. Whether he was going to get skinned for that D in geography, how to finesse a new bike for Christmas. And later, whether he should ask Arnette or Carolanne to the Valentine’s Day dance.
    As you got older, problems swelled. He remembered grieving for his father when the old man went and got himself killed in that Cessna traveling down to Jackson. But that had been nothing, nothing at allcompared to the sharp, stunning misery he’d felt when he found his mother crumpled in her garden, already too close to death for any doctor to fix her seizured heart.
    He’d come here often then, to ease himself past the misery. And eventually, like all things, it had faded. Except at the odd moments when he’d glance out a window, half expecting to see her—face shaded by that big straw hat with the chiffon scarf trailing—clipping overblown roses.
    Madeline Longstreet would not have approved of Edda Lou. She would, naturally, have found her coarse, cheap, and cunning. And, Tucker thought as he slowly drew in and expelled smoke, would have expressed her disapproval by that excruciating politeness any true southern lady could hone to a razor-edged weapon.
    His mother had been a true southern lady.
    Edda Lou, on the other hand, was a fine piece of work. Physically speaking. Big-breasted, wide-hipped, with skin she kept dewy by slathering on Vaseline Intensive Care Lotion every morning and night of her life. She had an eager, hardworking