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evening as she and her brother figured out what to do or talk about. Their parents worked sixteen hours and were hardly there. So they invented escapades, or investigated surrounding territory. Often they sat by the stream, leaning on a lightning-blasted sweet bay tree whose top had been burned off, leaving it with two huge branches below that spread like arms. Even when Frank was with his friends Mike and Stuff, he let her tag along. The four of them were tight, the way family ought to be. She remembered how unwelcome drop-in visits to her grandparents’ house were, unless Lenore needed them for chores. Salem was uninspiring since he was mute about everything excepthis meals. His single enthusiasm, besides food, was playing cards or chess with some other old men. Their parents were so beat by the time they came home from work, any affection they showed was like a razor—sharp, short, and thin. Lenore was the wicked witch. Frank and Cee, like some forgotten Hansel and Gretel, locked hands as they navigated the silence and tried to imagine a future.
    Standing at the window, wrapped in the scratchy towel, Cee felt her heart breaking. If Frank were there he would once more touch the top of her head with four fingers, or stroke her nape with his thumb. Don’t cry, said the fingers; the welts will disappear. Don’t cry; Mama is tired; she didn’t mean it. Don’t cry, don’t cry girl; I’m right here. But he wasn’t there or anywhere near. In the photograph he’d sent home, a smiling warrior in a uniform, holding a rifle, he looked as though he belonged to something else, something beyond and unlike Georgia. Months after he was discharged, he sent a two-cent postcard to say where he was living. Cee wrote back:
    “Hello brother how are you I am fine. I just got me a ok job in a restaurant but looking for a better one. Write back when you can Yours truly Your sister.”
    Now she stood, alone; her body, already throwing off whatever good the tub soak had done, beginning to sweat. She toweled the damp under her breasts, then wiped perspiration from her forehead. She raised the windowway above the tear in the screen. The swallows were back, bringing with them a light breeze and an odor of sage growing at the edge of the yard. Cee watched, thinking, So this is what they mean in those sad, sweet songs. “When I lost my baby, I almost lost my mind …” Except those songs were about lost love. What she felt was bigger than that. She was broken. Not broken up but broken down, down into her separate parts.
    Cooled, finally, she unhooked the dress Principal had bought her their second day in Atlanta—not, she learned, from generosity but because he was ashamed of her countrified clothes. He couldn’t take her to dinner or a party or to meet his family, he said, in the ugly dress she wore. Yet, after he bought the new one, he had excuse after excuse about why they spent most of the time just driving around, even eating, in the Ford, but never met any of his friends or family.
    “Where is your aunt? Shouldn’t we go see her?”
    “Naw. She don’t like me and I don’t like her either.”
    “But if it hadn’t been for her we would never have met each other.”
    “Yeah. Right.”
    Nevertheless, though nobody saw it, the rayon-silky touch of the dress still pleased her, as did its riot of blue dahlias on a white background. She had never seen a flower-printed dress before. Once dressed, she dragged the tub through the kitchen and out the back door. Slowly,carefully she rationed the bathwater onto the wilted grass, a half bucketful here, a little more there, taking care to let her feet but not her dress get wet.
    Gnats buzzed over a bowl of black grapes on the kitchen table. Cee waved them away, rinsed the fruit and sat down to munch them while she thought about her situation: tomorrow was Monday; she had four dollars; rent due at week’s end was twice that. Next Friday she was to be paid eighteen dollars, a bit over three