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Trevor shouted. “You tell him I said—”
    “Come home and tell him yourself,” Eadie said, and hung up.
             
    A T A TIME when many women she knew were striking off on their own, leaving the scattered wreckage of twenty-year marriages behind them, Eadie Boone struggled daily with the undeniable certainty that she was still in love with her own damn husband. It took courage to admit this, and a steady belief in the infallibility of her own judgment, especially in light of the fact Trevor had left her for another woman.
    He had left her but he had never stopped loving her. Eadie knew this. He had convinced himself that it was over between them, but deep down inside he was still as hooked as he had been that day she rode by on the Georgia Homecoming float, desirable and aloof. In those days, she was an art major attending the University of Georgia on a scholarship. Trevor, a second-year law student, had looked up at her as she passed above the crowd and gallantly announced to his drunken fraternity brothers, “Boys, there goes the girl I will marry.” She had thought him somewhat mild at first, and incapable of sustained combat, and it was not until their first argument in the dining room of the Chi Phi house, when she had thrown a dessert plate at him, and he ran his finger through the sticky mess on his face, licked it, and calmly announced, “Blackberry, my favorite,” that she knew she would marry him.
    She was eighteen and he was twenty-four. They were from the same small town, but had grown up without conscious knowledge of the other. She had grown up in a single-wide trailer on the wrong side of town and no one had expected much of Eadie Sue Wilkens except early motherhood and disgrace. Trevor was descended from landowners and pine barren speculators and had been raised by his widowed mother in a huge old mansion on Lee Street. They married that same year, against the wishes of his mother, who could not forgive Eadie for being a trailer trash girl and, even worse, an artist. Eadie sculpted women out of clay, headless things with huge breasts and private parts. Eadie’s sculptures started out small, during the first few years after she married Trevor and came to live in his mama’s big house, but over the years they got bigger and bigger until Eadie had to start selling off the furniture to make room for them. Mrs. Boone had died, from shame some said, soon after watching Trevor slip an heirloom platinum diamond wedding ring on Eadie Wilkens’s finger, and after graduating from law school Trevor had returned to Ithaca to his mother’s big house and his grandfather’s law firm. Even in those early years, there was something about Eadie’s dedication to her art that drove Trevor crazy. Every time he came home to find another big-breasted woman in his house, he’d get mad as hell and shout at Eadie and she’d shout back and then, next day, she’d start on a bigger one. After awhile Eadie and her big women chased Trevor out of the house and he got himself a girlfriend, a cocktail waitress out at Bad Bob’s saloon, and an apartment over on the other side of town. But even with Trevor gone, Eadie found ways to make trouble. She started sleeping with a bouncer out at Bad Bob’s and eventually fell in with a bunch of artistic types from Atlanta who would come down on weekends and sleep in Trevor’s big house and drink his whiskey and talk about Kafka until four o’clock in the morning. After that, she used a big chunk of his money to open up a house on Fourth Street for women and their kids who needed a place to hide out from their bad husbands. After awhile, Trevor got tired of trying to live without his wife, and he moved back home to Eadie and her big women.
    And now here he was, years later, caught up in the throes of some embarrassing midlife passion, and here Eadie was again, trying to save him from himself. She would not give up on him. At least not yet, although she could look down the