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curly hair, and John Winship never failed to listen gravely to her exemplary homework and her small, conventional indignities. She had no uncomfortable confusions of purpose, and no curiosity. Rusky shook her head darkly at Priss Comfort’s fruity bourbon aura, but she said often, “I don’t know what we do ‘thout Miss Priss.”
    DeeDee called her Aunt Priss, but to Mike she was only, and always, Priss.
    “I’m not your aunt,” she had once said to DeeDee. “I’m not your father or mother’s sister. Be precise, DeeDee. Call things what they are.”
    But DeeDee was not precise and could not remember.
    “That’s all right,” Priss said to Mike later. “I ask the difficult, but not the impossible.”

5
    W HEN M IKE WAS FOURTEEN , B AYARD E VERETT S EWELL moved with his widowed mother into the old Parsons house three doors up, and her precariously spinning world settled into place around him like a kaleidoscope. Everything that had before seemed lonely, murky, or hostile seemed all at once crystalline and beautiful, sweet-fitting, anchored. Bay Sewell was wonderful; he was life and breath and noise and laughter; he was almost too good to be true. But he was true; he was real and solid, and from almost the precise instant that they met, in the Parsons house driveway where Mike had gone to gawk at the men unloading the scant Sewell furniture, he was
there
.
    Bayard Sewell was dark-haired, blue-eyed, open-faced, and handsome; forthright, funny, and easygoing; bright, articulate, and even-tempered. He was as graceful as a cat; he could have been a consummate high school athlete, but he worked after school and on weekends to augment the slender earnings of his mother, who did custom baking and tailoring when her rheumatoid arthritis permitted it. Within the year he held every honor and office at Lytton High that did not demand after-school time, and he had the third highest gradeaverage in the school’s history. Within three years it was apparent that Bayard Sewell was what the educators of America meant when they spoke of “prime college material.”
    He had few prospects for college, but he did not complain, and matter-of-factly made plans to go to night school for his degree after he graduated from Lytton High and got a full-time job. By the time he was a senior, his mother’s condition had progressed to the point that she no longer accepted work of any sort, and their genteel poverty was on the point of sliding over into the dirt-poor category. Work after high school was simply a given. His mother’s pension would keep only one.
    “Don’t you hate working all the time?” Mike asked him once, early on.
    “Nope,” he said. “I only hate two things.”
    “What are they?”
    “Small towns,” he said. “And being poor.”
    He was just Mike’s age, and from that first moment in the driveway, they spoke a strange, identical language of the heart and were inseparable. He did not think her looks queer or her opinions outrageous or her actions objectionable. He thought her beautiful, brave, brilliant, and funny, and in the sun of his approval Mike stepped from her chrysalis and moved quite near those things. He also seemed to feel that she was in need of his immediate protection, and trounced with neat efficiency one meaty town boy who made fun of her. No one did again. Courted, defended, and cherished, Mike lost her sense of being a cuckoo’s chick in an alien nest and her veins hummed with peace. This must be what DeeDee has always felt like, she marveled to herself. This is what my mother must have felt like. How awful to die and lose this.
    And she felt anew the long-buried lance of guilt forthe death of Claudia and a shamed yearning to make up to her father for his immeasurable loss at her hands. Out of her new happiness she sought for something to give him. As it happened, what she brought him was Bayard Sewell.
    Bayard did not have many spare hours, but those he did he spent in her company. Usually they