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with a ferocious little embrace. This, despite her appearing more delicate. She didn’t look older but somehow gave the impression of being more fragile, and yet I could see she hadn’t given up in the way that some older ladies do. Her clothes and hair were tidy and there was a toughness in her manner that was hard to describe. She was in a battle against decline, much like her house.
    She excused herself to locate a bottle of wine she’d made from her rose blooms the previous year. I don’t know what impressedme more, the fact that she was able to grow roses in Collier County or that she’d managed to make wine out of the faded blooms before they turned moldy. There was no telling what an old-timer like Mrs. Bailey White had stashed away in that mind of hers.
    We were interrupted by a shrill sound, and for a second I thought a bird got itself caught in the chimney and couldn’t find its way out.
    â€œShe’s awake from her nap,” Plain Jane announced, and I realized she was talking about the baby. “My turn,” she said, clapping her hands together, and then practically ran up the stairs. Plain Jane looked thinner than I remembered, at least from behind. They were all getting older, I thought, a bit startled. Since I was past thirty I wasn’t anyone’s idea of a spring chicken but I wasn’t in the same league. Plain Jane, as I said, was more or less sixty; Jackie had crossed the most dreaded boundary of all—forty. Mama would have lumped them all into the category “ladies of a certain age,” which is a courteous way of referring to a woman past her “prime,” a term which I’d always found annoying on account of it making you sound like a side of beef.
    I didn’t know about up north—I could ask Jackie someday, at a delicate moment—but here in the South, women were said to peak by twenty. By the time you were in your late twenties, it was said that the bloom was off the rose. While I was busy brooding over the unfair burdens placed on womankind, Plain Jane, beaming, appeared at the top of the steep staircase with a sleepy infant cuddled in her arms.
    Eudora Welty Dreamsville Harmon—Dream, for short—lifted up her head when she spied a stranger—me. She was wearing a starched pink dress with matching pink hair clips and little white leather lace-up shoes. But what impressed me mostwere her eyes, large and soft and intense like a doe’s, exactly like her mama’s. She couldn’t stop staring at me the whole time Plain Jane walked carefully down the stairs, until the moment I put out my arms to take her. Then she began to wail, and buried her face in Plain Jane’s neck.
    â€œThat’s okay, she doesn’t know me at all,” I said cheerfully, although I was—truth be told—a little sad. I hadn’t seen Dream since she was four months old, and I knew she would have no memory of me. Still, the fact that she was so comfortable with the others made me feel like a fifth wheel. The baby was partly named after me—the Eudora Welty part—and Dream was a nod to Jackie being Miss Dreamsville. But I hadn’t been around to watch her grow.
    Mrs. Bailey White appeared with what I presumed to be the rose wine and ushered us into her parlor, which was dripping in lace and velvet and featured a horsehair sofa that no one wanted to sit on. With great care, she set up a neat little row of crystal glasses, nicer than anything I’d ever drunk from, that’s for sure. When Dream turned her head and smiled right at Mrs. Bailey White, we all cooed with delight—even Jackie, who had never struck me as the cooing type. Considering that neither Mrs. Bailey White nor Plain Jane had children, and Jackie wasn’t exactly June Cleaver on Leave It to Beaver , it was a pleasure to see they’d all got the mothering bug and were not just doing a perfunctory job.
    Jackie offered a toast. “To