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six months of Daddy’s illness, forks and spoons jumbled up together, the butter knives scattered to the four winds. And furthermore, it is perfectly clear that Gladiola has been giving her trashy family the entire run of this house.
    Sarah has seen the signs everywhere—unfiltered cigarette butts in the flower beds, a beer can stuck in a planter on the portico, a lipstick smudge on the drinking glass in the downstairs bathroom—why, even the furniture has been rearranged! Gladiola herself would never think of doing such a thing. But her daughters, both of them hussies,
would
. They’ve got ideas, Gladiola’s girls. Sarah has watched them grow up.
    Right now Roxanne, the younger one, could not possibly be a day over seventeen but could pass for thirty, she looks so cheap and jaded with that spiky black hair and all those holes in her ears. Gladiola’s older daughter, Missy, is down in Atlanta getting certified to be a massage therapist, or so she says. A massage therapist, ha! Sarah can just imagine. Of course Missy has already had one baby out of wedlock, that fat little girl out there digging in the mint bed right now with a spoon. Probably a silver soup spoon, Sarah would not be one bit surprised.
    Little Bonnie comes to work with Gladiola every day, and eats everything in the house. This is a pure fact. Sarahhad no idea until she came back to bury Daddy and stayed on to clean out this house.
Somebody
had to! Oh, a lot has been going on here that Sarah didn’t know anything about. These Rolettes have practically taken over.
    But of course it is all Hubert’s fault. Hubert is Sarah’s brother, the district attorney, a rumpled, distracted man. All Hubert cares about is his job, and all his northern egghead wife, Mickey, cares about is taking classes at the community college, where she earns degree after degree, or claims to. So Hubert was perfectly happy to hire as many Rolettes as it took and close his eyes to the havoc they wrought, just as long as everybody stayed out of his hair. Hubert! Hubert has no standards.
    Sarah practically slams the knives into the silver chest, thinking of Hubert, Hubert who talked
so mean
to her the last time she came home and tried to make some reasonable suggestions about what to do with Daddy. Hubert wears wrinkled suits and horn-rimmed glasses way down on the end of his nose. He looked at her over the rims. “Hell, Sarah,” he said, “Dad’s fine. Just leave him alone. He
likes
to pile newspapers all over the house, he
likes
to have Gladiola’s granddaughter around, it keeps him company. He likes to stay up and watch the talk shows and then sleep until noon, so what’s the harm in it?”
    “People ought to get up in the mornings,” Sarah said. “A regular schedule never hurt anybody.” Sarah herself has not slept past seven a.m. in twenty years. She eats one half-cupof bran cereal with banana for breakfast every morning of her life.
    Gladiola, on the other hand, fed her father Pop-Tarts and instant grits. This is a fact. Pop-Tarts and grits! Lord knows what kind of shape his bowels were in by the time of his death; Sarah did not discuss this with Hubert.
    But she did bring up the hat. “I just don’t think we ought to let him go around looking like that,” she said.
    Hubert laughed. “Hell, he’s eighty-five years old. I think he ought to wear whatever damn kind of a hat he wants to.”
    So Hubert had destroyed her influence with Daddy, Hubert having his way as usual, Hubert who was possibly even more spoiled than Ashley, God rest her soul, however.
    Suddenly Sarah feels awful.
    She sits down abruptly on a Chippendale chair at the dining room table. She’s so hot! Maybe it’s a hot flash, maybe she’s getting the change of life. “Is there any ice tea?” she asks Gladiola, who tuns to get it.
    Thank God! There
ought
to be iced tea in any decent household in the summertime of course, anybody knows that. Mama was nuts on the subject. And among the three children,